I decided I needed to find a new theme for my wordpress website and I searched for an open source theme which was fast. I also wanted a plain looking template which worked with the modern blocks approach to Wordpress that I have been resisting.

This is a screenshot of the original frontpage, which looks a little clumsy. Minimal Grid

To test the loading time of the current site i installed this wp-cli extension called code-profiler

wp code-profiler run --url=https://ilminster.net/

 ➤ 15 plugins and 1 theme
 ➤ Execution time: 0.4013s
 ➤ Peak memory: 64.43 MB
 ➤ File I/O operations: 7,343
 ➤ SQL queries: 51
 ➤ Accuracy: Highest

After testing out a few Wordpress themes, I settled on Go which is fast, free and powerful. It is also a simple design. There is an activate go support page

The features i want over the old theme include:

• a top navigation bar
• more obvious search facility
• featured image integration as a hero banner
• simple menu management for the header and footer
• faster loading
• no css in the html

So I set about updating my localhost version to see how it works.

to install the go theme with wp-cli i entered

wp theme install go

and activated it in the themes page.

It required a bit of change to a few pages as it also uses the new guttenburg blocks editor and I had been resisting changing to that so I disabled the classic editor plugin.

I like the look of it and hope you do to.

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If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon