Comment on Stallion WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

PageSpeed Insights Stallion WordPress SEO 7.1.1 (theme you are running) does not include mobile responsive or Google speed performance features. Even so the results are better than a lot of websites running WordPress: I coded Stallion v7 for speed, but not specifically to pass performance tests so missed some issues.

The next version of Stallion that was released early 2014 does include mobile responsive and Google speed performance SEO features, see Stallion Responsive Theme.

Stallion Responsive though built on from the Stallion WordPress SEO v7 framework is a new theme (so many code changes had to be a new theme) and gives significantly better Google PageSpeed Insights results over Stallion WordPress SEO v7, for my sites tending around 90/100 for Desktop and slightly less for mobile results.

BTW I’m in the process of moving the old Stallion theme support site to Stallion Theme Support, so by the end of this month (June 2104) the old site (including this post and comment) will be pretty much gone (think I might leave the home page only as a sales page).

Check the Google PageSpeed Insights results for the new site that runs Stallion responsive, you will note almost all the pagespeed issues are off site related to AdSense ads and Facebook like buttons etc… which other than not using AdSense or social media buttons there’s not a lot a webmaster can do to improve.

With AdSense and Facebook buttons on the desktop result is 91/100 for Desktop.
With AdSense and Facebook buttons off the desktop result is 95/100 for Desktop.

If you can find a WordPress theme with AdSense ads and social media buttons running on the site with significantly better Google PageSpeed Insights results I’d like to see it so I can see what they are doing to improve Stallion Responsive further.

I’m afraid website features use resources, all we can do is try to mitigate most of the bad issues. For example a site with comments running avatars from Gravatar.com will take a big hit from the way Gravatar.com sets up it’s avatar images, Stallion Responsive includes a Gravatar Cache feature to remove the issue completely.

The WordPress Features Image Slider and the Photo Navigation Menu built into Stallion (v7 and v8) use javascript which has an impact of pagespeed, if you want those flashy features it has a cost in performance, I’ve tried to mitigate the issues best I can in Stallion Responsive, but can’t completely remove them.

Even the new responsive navigation menu built into Stallion Responsive has a performance hit, it uses Jquery to load the mobile device version of the menu. If I want a navigation menu that resizes on smaller screens I need to use the Stallion Responsive navigation menu, I can completely disable it, but then I won’t have a nav menu below the header area.

Another performance issue: Stallion Responsive in combination with an image optimization plugin** resizes images so they don’t list images as an issue in Google Performance Insights results, but it doesn’t work completely with png images use as Stallion featured thumbnails: those used by the widgets (not sure why). My choice is don’t use png images as Stallion featured thumbnails or take the performance hit.

** Not suggesting Stallion Responsive alone will deal with all pagespeed issues, WordPress doesn’t optimize images at upload, WordPress doesn’t cache HTML pages or minify HTML/CSS/JS as a matter of course. I use EWWW Image Optimizer plugin for image optimization and W3C Total cache plugin for caching. Without those two plugins my pagespeed results would be lower.

WordPress/Stallion Responsive/WordPress Plugins have little impact on a cheap host, if you are using a low quality cheap host the server response time might be dragging your results down.

David Law