I used the Fast Velocity Minify Plugin to combine CSS files and minify HTML, CSS and JS code to reduce the Stallion Responsive Theme and the Astra Theme basic output to a bare minimum for comparative speed testing in GTmetrix.
You can see from this GTmetrix speed test the Stallion Responsive Theme has a smaller frontend footprint vs the Astra Theme.
Astra Theme GTmetrix Speed Results
- PageSpeed Grade A (100%)
- YSlow Grade A (98%)
- Fully Loaded time 0.7s
- Total page size 29.2KB
- Total # of requests 4
Those are very good pagespeed results for the Astra theme.
Stallion Responsive Theme GTmetrix Speed Results
- PageSpeed Grade A (100%)
- YSlow Grade A (98%)
- Fully Loaded time 0.6s
- Total page size 16.5KB
- Total # of requests 4
Stallion Responsive is better, a little faster (144ms faster) and a little smaller (12.8KB smaller).
The difference between Astra and Stallion Responsive is minor.
To put things into perspective adding a small image to the content and it’s going to be FAR bigger than 12.8KB and 144ms is a tiny. The majority of the size difference between the two themes is the size of CSS files, the Astra theme has a LOT more CSS rules vs the Stallion Responsive theme.
Continue Reading Astra Theme Review