Which WordPress theme or builder do you use/recommend?

[marcusquinn]

@marcusquinn Checkout the "Code Profiler" plugin, too. Gives you a better idea what plugins are consuming the most compute time.

[humptydumpty]

I cloned my website from a backup, and I'm testing those plugins/settings. The code profiler plugin is pointing to the same two culprits that have the largest impact, Woocommerce & Jetpack at +0.3s each. In third place we have, you guessed it, Wordfence at 0.1s. Disable Bloat for WordPress & WooCommerce made a huge difference in backend loading times. It doesn't feel sluggish to manage my products anymore. Thanks, Marcus!

P.S. The more I delve into WP optimization, the more I hate the entire platform/ecosystem. Every plugin has a "pro" version, and they're all +$99 a year. If I want to get the best out of everything, I'm looking at hundreds of dollars a month. All these optimization and security plugins just to fix a bloated system is exhausting. Makes me wonder if hiring a developer to build an ecommerce store using some other platform might be better (& cheaper).

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Be mindful of their note on "Composer" loading that skews the first plugin to pull that, and the ones following it then don't need to. Try FestingerVault if you need to try pro versions of anything, I've found it to be very safe and reliable for updates. Stick with WordPress, you won't beat it for learning, optionality, and demand for knowing it.

Tons more tips where those came from. Try "Plugin Toggle" for a quicker way to Activate/Deactivate when testing. Try "Disable All WordPress Updates" for only checking for updates when you want. "Hide Admin Notices" for solving that annoyance. "Antispam Bee" for that, free and good. "Manage Notification Emails" for that.

Overall, I have something like 200 plugins running with <1.5s TTFB times in Query Monitor, and disabling Query Monitor also speeds up Admin. Definitely possible to keep WP running fast, you just have to get to know the plugins that respect the standards, and therefore are speedy, and those that don't, and will tend to show up in Code Profiler.

[marcusquinn]

FWIW I've never used JetPack, don't see the need, when all the others I've found do each thing better.

[robi]

@marcusquinn said in Which WordPress theme or builder do you use/recommend?:

Overall, I have something like 200 plugins running

Is there a bulk plugin manager that saves the list of plugins you use for easy install on a new site all at once?

[marcusquinn]

@robi I use MainWP, but WP Favs is also good.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn woo relies on jetpack for the auto tax calculation. I’m not sure how tax is structured in the UK and EU, but in the US we have thousands of different tax rates (county, city, state, and everything in between). It’s a real pain. The only alternative I know of is to use a 3rd party service like Taxjar.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty I see, yeah, I remember looking into TaxJar, and Avalara. I think I built something for it a long time ago for Woo for all the UK & EU Rates, and didn't think it was that complicated once you got your data organizing head on. Not needed it for a while, but I get the need.

This looks worth a look:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/sales-tax-reports-for-woocommerce

And maybe just search for "woocommerce tax rates csv" if you don't already have setup, they can't change often enough to justify a subscription product? These were just from a quick search. End of the day for me, here.

• https://salestaxusa.com/woocommerce-tax-rates-csv/
• https://csvsalestaxtable.com/woocommerce-csv-tax-rates/
• https://woosalestax.com/
• https://woosalestax.com/faq/ (No, you only need to buy the tables for the states your business is based in and the states where your business has nexuses (Branches or physical locations).)
• https://flexibleinvoices.com/blog/woocommerce-eu-taxes-download-ready-to-import-csv/
• https://artsterminal.com/web/tax-rates-for-woocommerce-csv-free-download/
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qztrHGZ1zhytRawzeqlr9y38IE94wiRo_Fw5ObAHa9c/edit#gid=1398139257

I loath monthly subscriptions, so always take them as a challenge to find once and for all solutions

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn It's not just the rates. Each state has its own limit on how much you can do business there before you need to start collecting sales tax. It's either X number of orders, or X amount in gross sales, or a combo of both! To make matters worse, let's say you reach the limit sometime in July, you now owe sales tax on everything you sold in 2023 in that state. Oh, you didn't collect the sales tax on those orders? Too bad. Now it's coming out of your own pocket! Also, you'd be surprised how often counties change their rates. I didn't even mention the "special" taxes that cities come up with. New football stadium = new tax. Sigh. Sorry for the rant.

Edit: I forgot to mention that once you go over a state's limit, you need to register with that state to remit the collected taxes. That's a ton of paperwork to keep track of. That's why Taxjar/Avalara are in business. Sometimes, I feel like I'm pinocchio back on that pleasure island.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn https://salestaxusa.com/woocommerce-tax-rates-csv/ for the tax rates and https://wordpress.org/plugins/sales-tax-reports-for-woocommerce for figuring out due sales taxes should do the trick! I hope I'm not mistaken, but the EU only has one rate per country? If so, that's freaking awesome!

[robi]

@marcusquinn said in Which WordPress theme or builder do you use/recommend?:

@robi I use MainWP, but WP Favs is also good.

Cool, do they have an export file that can be shared?

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty I guess here we're more accustomed to tax-inclusive pricing. At least if you hit those thresholds, you're growing! I like those kinds of data challenges, but don't have a US-based business, so appreciate most just prefer to pay for a solution. It'd bother me though, I can't stand these big brands that make a tiny solution and then build a massive marketing machine and subscription model around it to put people of doing themselves.

There's maybe 4 rates per Country here, typically: Excerpt (don't include in reporting), Zero (Include in reporting but 0%), Low (eg 5% in UK), Standard (Around the 20% mark, slight variations by country).

As they say here: "Tax shouldn't be taxing."

Anecdotally, from what I've learned in life, much bureaucracy is created to create "jobs", if life were too simple and easy, there would be far less employment, and most don't cope well without being given some kind of purpose.

[marcusquinn]

@robi Both free to try Yes, you can share your WP Favs lists easily via a token/link. MainWP, via list exports. If you're managing many sites, MainWP is the way to go. If you just have one or two, and wanted to share your stack, probably WP Favs is enough.

[robi]

@marcusquinn cool, thanks for the info. Perhaps you'll be inspired to share your WP Favs.

[marcusquinn]

@robi My installs often have a mix of tried & tested, and to be tested, and lots of projects on, so not really time to make a confident list. Will do when time is more available.

In the meantime, gimme QQs on any specific needs. I'll probably either know the solution, or be interested in seeing it solved.

[jagan]

One question: Are Bricks Builder and Kadence mutually exclusive since they are both themes?

[d19dotca]

@jagan Yes as you can only use one theme at a time.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn @d19dotca tagging you both for the WP wizards that you are! I'm building a new WP/Woo site and intend on using the Kadence theme, but their blocks & Pro addons fall short for my use case. I stumbled upon Greenshift and was wondering if you have any experience with it. I can't find anything "bad" about them which is a good thing but also a bit suspicious lol. The reason why I'm looking at GS is because of their 3D model & 360 product viewers. Thoughts?

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Good question. Sorry, never heard of it. Website looks nice enough (your link doesn't work).

My test for all decisions is; can I repeat this ten times with ten percent of the effort by the tenth time? KandenceWP is the best WordPress theme for speed and seo from my tests.

I'm not a fan of any website animation, at all, and for many reasons, so wrong person to ask on that.

3D does interest me greatly, though, so definitely going to look more into that, and I don't see anything that would suggest why it would cause any issues, since it will only load code that's actually used with Gutenburg.

(Stay away from Elementor in WP, crazy clever people, but I suspect they might eventually migrate to being a standalone platform, as Gutenburg is now becoming all it promised to be — and full-site editing will, too since the 2023 standard theme is perhaps going to become the most popular ever, for good reasons.)

I don't want a theme to do everything, just to do the basics perfectly, which keeps it lighter, focused, and fast to work with.

Then anything else there's usually a specialist plugin for. Kadence has a fair amount of animation options, too, if you really must.

It looks like it is a plugin for the blocks and design patterns, so there's no theme to compare, and that's the whole point of Kadence and Gutenburg, you can use all sorts of blocks, and only what's used loads on the front end:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/greenshift-animation-and-page-builder-blocks/

3D does interest me, so much appreciate your introducing this — thank you! I would like to see more WordPress chat on this forum, as there's so many things it can do better than any separate FOSS apps, now.

I stake my interests and future expectations of time needs on Kadence, if that's enough endorsement. There's quite a few advantages of the Pro, so I wouldn't dismiss it on aesthetics, as it's more about enabling you without stopping you having other toys, if that makes sense.

The cloud and child theme features that also add huge value to Kadence for making many sites with it, and multiple monetisation opportunities from your growing assets and capabilities.

Whatever you do, stick 100% to Gutenburg and ACF for any dynamic data. All modern plugins should work with those. If they don't, they shouldn't be in your stacks until they do. Gutenberg is what is bringing most of the efficiency now, so anything that is working with that should be fast.

For interest, I have 118 plugins installed on my personal site, so perhaps this score qualifies me to speak on speed. I could probably still do better, when time permits

This is running on a £10/month Hetzner shared VPS , with Cloudron's WordPress Developer app (2GB of 8GB allocated to this app, but probably doesn't need half of that), just because I want to prove a point that the hosting isn't as important as the software stack, settings, plugin unloading (Freesoul), and caching (WP Optimize).

Don't overthink it, just dive in, build what your vision tells you the world needs, and fill in the gaps as you go. There's years of comparing and testing in what I end up doing, so I hope to save you some of the same, to get on with the fun stuff!

[plains.digital]

Divi for the win!
(it has flaws, but im Lifetime and heavily invested in various plugins, so it's the only answer.)