A slow website has serious business impacts. Period. 40% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Many “Creative Responsive Multi-Purpose” themes are beautiful and flashy with their demo content, but have speed indexes of more than 50 times* what is recommended. How can you tell good themes from bad ones without buying them? Never fear! There are several ways to vet a theme before shelling out the cash.

In this talk, we’ll cover strategies for evaluating themes’ code quality and performance, and creating healthy, content-oriented websites. In many ways, this is a call to action to the WordPress end user community: let’s shift our values from flashy effects to rock-solid content and fast websites. Scroll-jacking and parallax are over!