Initially Misleading – satisfied enough to invest

  • This is my honest unbiased assessment/review not to be mean or unappreciative to the authors efforts.

    My site is dated. The old highly customizable theme I am using was initially introduced almost a decade ago, but it runs circles around a lot of newer ones on the net. I heavily modified it and have several intensive plugins running in the background (Nextgen, Wordfence, WPtouch pro, WP Customer reviews) I’m not using any cache plugins/modules.

    Wanting to update my site I opted on this theme because it is lightweight out of the box. (bought pro addon license too) Sure it doesn’t bundle the jquery, but nearly most widely plugins plugins will. Long story – short. I configured a new site using this theme (pro addon too) same content as my old (modified front by reducing text, minimized styling,- eliminated a header picture – No short contact form – No wordfence – no wptouch pro and a few others things stripped down (leaner htacces, no google analytics) But my old site/theme still performed better… Go figure.

    Actually I am quite disappointed as I have invested a lot of time and energy into this. I am a stickler for website performance as well as usability. I truly expected (hoped for) better results, but I have updated my rating to Good because overall it really is a good theme.

    Updated 3/31/2018
    Got kinks worked out – Theme authors are very proactive in getting things moving. Had I not been impressed with what they are doing I would not have invested in their ‘full’ package. Updated to Great

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by freedombuilders. Reason: grammer - punctuation - missing words
    • This topic was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by freedombuilders. Reason: more info
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Theme Author Brainstorm Force

    (@brainstormforce)

    Hi @freedombuilders

    So sorry, you think we’re misleading. But I believe, nowhere on our website we offer any false promises? Please correct me if I’m wrong and we will get that fixed right away.

    Astra is a lightweight theme, which acts as a solid base and foundation for your website. But end metrics would also heavily depend on the other content on your website (images / videos) other plugins and most importantly, the hosting.

    We say Astra is fast and lightweight because –

    1. We have taken a lot of efforts to optimize and profile every line of code to ensure there are no heavy queries and unnecessary calls
    2. The code architecture is object oriented
    3. The theme itself does less than 6 HTTP calls
    4. What it loads on the front end is less than 50 KB
    5. And we’ve heavily compared Astra with many themes on WordPress Repository, and it performs better.

    If you need help with your site or our thoughts why it is still not working as expected after switching to Astra, please get in touch and we will do whatever we can to help.

    Thanks for your rating. Honestly I’m bit disappointed you found us misleading and hope you will change it.

    Regards,
    Sujay

    Thread Starter freedombuilders

    (@freedombuilders)

    Unfortunate you guys use a help desk service whose domains/IP’s are blacklisted on my email server. I think I am fully aware “end metrics would also heavily depend on the other content on your website (images / videos) other plugins and most importantly, the hosting.” I believe I alluded to this, but my hosting is excellent. Marketing hype attributes between speed, lightning fast and simply updating to more modern code attributes to the ‘misleading’ and my ultimate disappointment, but this disappointment doesn’t entirely rest with you guys. I recently discovered what appears to be hundred or so lines of code repeated on my pages pertaining to the header and nav…. now to figure out why and how to fix.
    Ultimately I appreciate all that you guys are doing as a whole.

    Curious as hell as to which “old theme” the OP is referring to. I sure hope it isn’t Thesis.

    Thread Starter freedombuilders

    (@freedombuilders)

    @treeflips Atahualpa was the old theme I was using. I did not name it here as there is a reported XSS vulnerability and I had not changed my website yet.

    Development has ceased

    That’s a really dry theme in comparison…in fact, I would say it’s not even a fair comparison. It’s a bit like saying a calculator is lighter than a computer. I suppose if you want something so completely stripped down, might as well go with a raw framework or starter theme. Atahualpa doesn’t seem very extensible out of the box, if at all. As lightweight as Atahualpa appears to be, I’m curious how it outperformed Astra which is already extremely lightweight.

    Thread Starter freedombuilders

    (@freedombuilders)

    Atahualpa is about twice the weight out of the box, but has customizing options not found in Astra (as it is) unless you purchase the pro addon. Atahualpa combined all it’s, including customization, CSS- Had a choice to inline it or external. Also had built compression option for css and javscript. Believe me when I set it up on the same VPS – same personal nameservers with own dedicated Cpanel account and each had own dedicated IP, Same content (mostly *see first initial post), same htaccess optimization, but less overall plugins (astra) – I was surprised seeing the side by side scores using Gtmetrix. To be fair only a 3-5 point difference on Pagespeed but a 20 or so point difference with yslow. 3-4 (1.2 – 1.6 seconds) point diff on Fully Loaded Time. Don’t recall what the TTFB were

    I expected at or above Gtmetix scores with Astra. I’m using Autoptimize on my Astra site to bring scores up to where I used to run with my older site.

    Other than these things I mentioned I don’t really know why Atahualpa out performed Astra with my site. Out of the box, Astra probably would have outperformed Atahualpa

    It would be helpful for you to have a developer diagnose your site and compare difference in queries and script loads. I really can’t believe Astra runs slower but I won’t know unless I see it for myself. Either way, Atahualpa isn’t reliable for you going forward and you don’t have the knowledge to use Astra on your own. Might be a good idea for you to try another theme altogether.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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