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This is the second post in a series where we test the most popular WordPress themes and try to get the best possible speed by using WP Rocket. After receiving a lot of suggestions, we have decided to test the X Theme from Themeco this time.

 is one of the most popular multi-purpose WordPress themes, with over 70,000 sales on ThemeForest.

Preparing for the Test

This time, I decided to use same server I used for the Avada test. The live test site can be found here. I have installed one of X-Theme’s pre-defined templates – Agency. According to our guidelines on how to correctly measure a website’s page load time, I have been using Pingdom Tools as the most relevant tool for these kinds of tests.

Many people use cheap and mediocre-quality hosting solutions, which is one of reasons why I decided to use mid-level hosting. Although it works well, there are much better solutions out there. I wanted to see what results we could get on an average set-up, like many of our customers use.

Speed Test Results

Since loading time is a factor in SEO and conversions, that’s what we focus on with WP Rocket. Our main goal is to make websites faster. Here are the results we get with X-Theme:

x-theme-speed

Speed Test Result – No WP Rocket Installed

x-theme-pingdom-no-rocket

With an average speed around 800ms, this is already a great result. So, I dare say that X-Theme is a very well optimized theme by default. The good news here is that we can boost this even more by using WP Rocket.

Our goal here was not to use the best servers/hosting solutions, but to experiment with, as mentioned, a mid-level quality platform. Server quality can affect the speed of your site, dramatically sometimes. In this post, we’ll see what we can do to improve the speed, even on an average server.

X-Theme by default has between 19 and 72 HTTP requests per page, which is great, and the average page size is good too, varying from 350kb to 1.44MB.

Speed Test Result – WP Rocket Installed

x-theme-pingdom

After installing WP Rocket, we get even better loading times. The average loading time is around 450ms. Much better, even perfect, especially on an average hosting plan.

We  used the following options in WP Rocket:

  • HTML Optimization
  • Font Optimization
  • CSS Minification
  • JS Minification
  • DNS Pre-fetching

Luckily, no issues were noticed after activating these options. One big plus for X-Theme on this!

Pros & Cons of using X Theme

Pros

Probably the best thing about X Theme is number of predefined demos. Separated in 4 categories (Integrity, Renew, Icon and Ethos), you can choose totally different layouts for your website. This is ideal for freelancers and agencies, who are able to create varied sites for their clients with only one theme.

x-theme-demos

It’s true that there are a lot of themes that offer this. Based on our tests, X-Theme is very well optimized to gain optimal loading time, so that’s a big difference that gives X Theme an advantage.

The theme features built-in extensions, valuing more than $1000, which sounds like a good deal. Sliders, Page Builder, Gallery, TypeKit integration are  part of what’s included in this package. Plus, X-Theme is WooCommerce, BuddyPress and bbPress ready, so you don’t need to waste your time integrating these functionalities.

Cons

It’s hard to believe you’ll need all these demos, especially if you are blogger, or need only one website for your own purposes. In that case, X-Theme maybe is not the best solution for you, because it would include too many unnecessary things.

Too many options can create trouble or problems for non-experienced users. Also, as with Avada (and other multi-purpose WP Themes), this can lead you to an endless process of trying to complete your website and experimenting with different options.

Conclusion

Although we had great results with the X theme alone, WP Rocket provided an extra boost – using both together is the ideal combination. X-Theme can definitely be optimized to be blazing fast. My overall impression of it is good, especially since we didn’t notice any issues in relation to caching, even with the additional options of WP Rocket, such as JS minification which can be problematic from time to time with some themes.

We would like to hear from you, what theme deserves to be tested in your opinion? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.


Comments (12)

Yep. The X theme in combination with WP Rocket works great on my website as well. :)

#confirmed ;)

"Too many options can create trouble or problems for non-experienced users. Also, as with Avada (and other multi-purpose WP Themes), this can lead you to an endless process of trying to complete your website and experimenting with different options."

Thanks for pointing this out. Almost every review of themes from theme forest include affiliate links and of course nothing but positive reviews and as long as they keep selling, the bloat will get worse and worse.

Good to know that theme i had selected for my Business website works well with WP Rocket.
As far as theme bloat is concerned, X theme works in Stacks; once activated few of the options related to other stacks are cut down.
In theme like Avada & others, all the options are present & can be tried leads to unnecessary change & trials & errors.

And wide options of extensions saves lots of money with X theme.

Just out of curiosity.

I realised that this website and the test site do not have https enabled (SSL). Meaning it could be faster with either SPDY or HTTP2.

I am tempting to try out Cloudfare's Flexible SSL to use their latest HTTP2. But realising that this website does not use https, I am really wondering why. Should we or should we not use SSL if my website does call external js? Will it affect ranking or speed?

Thanks in advance.

x-theme is not the best yet, the 7 IS..., I try them both, if wp-rocket work great on this theme, should be nice

You should try to optimize it with WP-Rocket plus your image optimization... it should bring more awesomeness !

I have used it on some websites and speed isn't an issue. it works perfectly.

Well I'd prefer to just use the drag & drop as intended - I like to keep things as easy / simple as possible. However I'd often get elements positioned differently to how the visual editor displayed them which required all sorts of margin hacks to fix.

It would be great if post could be updated, as per Divi review in the theme performance-testing series, to include optimal WP Rocket Settings for XTheme please.

WP Rocket improved the loading time on my X Theme site http://monroedesign.se/en/ a great deal. Index went from loading in 13 sec to 1.5 sec!

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