Compass Designs .net

Over the last year, I have seen a continuing trend in Joomla templates that are being produced; they seem to be getting bigger and bigger in file size and filled with more and more widgets and gizmos. This thought occurred to me again when Steve of alledia.com launched "The World's Fastest Joomla Template" (a claim we'll put to the test shortly).

Steve and I (and Google as it happens) agree that light is good, heavy is bad. I would even go so far as to say that source ordering is important as well (aka tableless layout) so you critical content appears as close to the top as possible.

Now, when you try to compare load times, its easy to get in a mess quickly. You can't just check the demos of template sites. The demos are full of rich image eye candy. Speed will be server dependent too.

So, I tried to get my hands on as many templates as I had appropriate licenses for, and decided to load up a single site, with consistent content and see what we found.

So, here was the process.

We had a site, that had simple text based content with no images. We took 3-6 templates at random of 2008 releases, we loaded up the templates and measured two things:

• The size of the site using Firebug
• What line number the first line of the main body article occurred.

Here is what we found...

So what are our conclusions?

Yup, Joomla templates are getting bloated. Most of them are big and complex.

• Tables rule. There are very few pure CSS layouts being used.
• Hardly any source ordering. Content appears far down the page in the code. Many of the templates had some much in the head, they needed an include file to insert it all!
• Javascript conflicts rock!
• Released in 2006, the Simplicity template from Joomlashack broke the mold. I think its *still* the only fluid source ordered pure CSS layout template available on the web. It looks great and is almost as fast as Bolt. It was even the first Joomla template to have width switchers!
• Yup, Bolt is the fastest template in the world... by a sneeze ;)

Speed comes at a price. The trend towards heavier templates is because of eye candy and widgets, and they bloat them template.

Which do you prefer? Fast or complex?

If any other template producers would like to donate some templates, I'll put them on the test site and add their results.