Part of the reason I’m creating this site right now is to try out a few starter themes that make use of frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation. I’ve used LESS before on a free site I created recently and I would like to explore CSS preprocessors a little further. Both of the above frameworks I mentioned use a CSS preprocessor which is why I’ve chosen these possible themes:
WordPress-Bootstrap - Described as a WordPress theme based on Twitter bootstrap. Looking at the codebase it’s also heavily based on bones, minus the LESS stuff.
WP-Foundation - A WordPress starter theme built on the Foundation 3 framework although it seems to be missing the main SASS files. This one also seems to rely on the bones codebase.
Bones - A starter theme with options to use SASS or LESS.
I’m currently using Bones simply because I can use LESS with it pretty much out of the box, it’s a nice fresh base to start on and the other themes seem to be based on bones anyway.
Performance tests
I have compared the homepage load times of the above themes and the default Twenty Eleven Theme (with 5 dummy posts with images etc) using the apache a/b benchmarking tool. I ran the test 3 times for each theme and picked the best performing run which I have included below.
I also noted down the page load data (an average based on 3 runs) from the Chrome Inspector network panel which I have included for each theme just above the a/b test results.
It’s pretty much of a muchness, none of the themes seem to add extra overhead compared to the default Twenty Eleven Theme despite having a number of extra PHP include files.
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