“Enhancing WPBakery’s Impreza Theme Efficiency with Smush and Hummingbird Plugins”

Impreza, a theme based on WPBakery, is well-liked for its unique style. In this article, a member of WPMU DEV discusses tips for enhancing the performance and speed of this versatile WordPress theme.

Phil, a member of WPMU DEV and web developer who operates the web design company CapitalWebDesign.ca in Canada, mentioned to us that there is currently a high demand for improving themes based on WPBakery. He added, “I wanted to give my input on the Impreza theme powered by WPBakery that I’ve been utilizing recently.”

In this article, we will discuss the following topics:

• Overview of Impreza Theme for WordPress
• Method for Improving the Performance of the Impreza Theme through Testing
• Benchmark Results
• Making Impreza’s Performance Even Better

Overview of Impreza Theme for WordPress

Impreza is a high-quality WordPress theme that utilizes WPBakery. It is created and updated by UpSolution and can be purchased from ThemeForest, where it is one of the top-selling themes with more than 88,000 sales and a 4.89 out of 5 star rating based on over 2,400 user reviews.

The theme’s license normally costs $59 (but occasionally goes on sale for $39), and comes with 6 months of support.

Phil asserts: “On average, they roll out significant updates every month. Seriously, take a look at this changelog and attempt to persuade me that it’s not the most impressive changelog layout/styling you’ve come across in quite a while.”

The Impreza theme uses WPBakery but with their own flavor thrown in. It’s an incredibly modular theme that decouples many of the structural components, including:

• Grid layouts: Impreza lets you customize how you display groups of data such as posts, custom post types like testimonials or products, image galleries, etc. You can effectively customize any element in a grid. Check out their grid layout doc page for a glimpse.
• The theme offers reusable blocks that allow you to make edits in one location, and these changes will be applied wherever the block is used. Utilize these for elements such as footers and call-to-action sections.
• Page templates: You can build a template using WPBakery that can be applied to any post type or page. Use these to have different footers for posts versus pages or to support a different template based on the post type (e.g. a cooking recipe vs a product review in a blog).
• Header builder: Impreza provides a unique, powerful, and very intuitive header builder. Check out the header builder doc page.

Additional information to consider regarding Impreza:

• It natively supports most of the ACF custom fields (doubly great if you use our SmartCrawl plugin for SEO, which also supports ACF).
• 100% compatible with WPML language translation plugin.
• Built-in performance optimization options (including a one-click asset optimization for WPBakery elements: only include CSS + JS for elements that exist on your pages)
• Built-in maintenance mode, button builder, custom image sizes among others
• Ability to import individual demo pages or copy in specific rows from specific demo pages. This is a great quality of life option: when you see a specific row in a demo that you’d like to replicate, just copy + paste.
• Every license is applicable for one live website and one testing website (which requires maintenance mode). With a licensed website, you will have access to a white-labeled theme, demo content importation, easy theme updates (no need for Envato Plugin), and additional or suggested plugins (such as Smush).
• Note: Running a license per site is not necessary and you can rotate a license where you need to install addons or import demos. Theme updates are still available through Envato Plugin for unlicensed sites, too. Also, while your support is active, the theme developers will help you with pretty much any theme customization and, according to Phil who uses the theme extensively, their support staff are incredibly knowledgeable.

So, Impreza is a great WordPress theme to use, especially if you love using WPBakery.

However, what we truly desire to understand is the following:

• Do sites created with Impreza load fast and perform well?
• Can we make sites created with Impreza load even faster and perform even better using our optimization plugins Smush and Hummingbird and managed WordPress hosting?

Let’s seek Phil’s input for these responses.

Testing Methodology for Optimizing the Impreza WordPress Theme

Impreza is very performance-oriented, as evidenced by some of the advanced theme options they provide.

Here’s Phil’s approach to evaluating Impreza’s performance on Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix, in his own words:

(Editor’s Note: WPMU DEV members like Phil get access to the Pro versions of our plugins automatically as part of their WPMU DEV membership but you can follow the same methodology shown below using the free versions of Smush and Hummingbird.)

• Use a real website: The website I used in this benchmark is a real, fully-built website. Although it’s not yet live to public traffic, it’s running WPML and is full of real content including images.
• Located on WPMU DEV: A basic bronze-tier server situated in Toronto, Canada. We will be examining FastCGI serverside caching.
• Smush Pro: Image optimization is important to this site as every blog post has a featured image. This website is likely to grow to 10,000+ blog posts over the next 5 years, so we need to make sure we optimize from the start.
• Hummingbird Pro: Test to see if asset optimization works with Impreza.
• Caching: We don’t need redundancy in caching solutions, so either Hummingbird Pro caching or serverside FastCGI caching was used.
• Impreza performance settings: keep “http/https” in the paths to files, disable jQuery migrate script, move jQuery scripts to the footer, dynamically load theme JS components, disable extra features of WPBakery Page Builder, disable Gutenberg (block editor) CSS files, optimize JS and CSS size, and merge Google Fonts styles into single CSS file.

Benchmark Results

Tests were performed by starting with both plugins disabled, Impreza performance settings off, and serverside cache disabled.

Phil then incrementally enabled one component at a time. Google PageSpeed Insights was run three times (average of three runs kept) and a GTmetrix performance report was generated.

Here are Phil’s test results:

As you can see from the above, Phil’s test results went from…

Before (Impreza only):

• Google PSI mobile score: 27
• Google PSI desktop score: 83
• GTmetrix score: A – 92%-94%
• GTmetrix *FCP: 1.1s
• GTmetrix **TTFB: 0.8s

After (Impreza + Smush + Hummingbird + CDN/Caching):

• Google PSI mobile score: 87 (222% improvement)
• Google PSI desktop score: 96 (15.6% improvement)
• GTmetrix score: A – 100%-95%
• GTmetrix *FCP: 0.461s
• GTmetrix **TTFB: 0.206s

* FCP = First Contentful Paint
** TTFB = Time To First Byte

After running the above tests, here is the setup that Phil found to perform the best:

• Impreza performance settings: ALL enabled.
• Smush: ALL recommended + CDN + WebP (Pro-only features). Additionally, make sure the WPBakery Page Builder integration is enabled in the Smush > Integrations menu. This will smush custom-sized images resized using WPBakery’s Page Builder editor.
• Hummingbird: ALL recommended + CDN + Asset Optimization Automatic/Speedy.
• Caching: EITHER Hummingbird Pro or serverside FastCGI.
• Impreza + WPMU DEV hosting on their own still do a good job out of the box. 83/100 on PageSpeed Desktop and an A grade (92%; 94%) on GTmetrix is impressive, but obviously the 27 score on Mobile is not desirable.
• The performance enhancements built into the Impreza theme are highly efficient. They boost Google PageSpeed scores to levels in the 90s, which is particularly crucial for mobile optimization.
• Smush doesn’t appear to make much of a difference to performance scores, but it will reduce your overall page load size where images are present.
• Hummingbird cache appears to be on-par to FastCGI serverside cache.
• Hummingbird Pro CDN appears to be on-par with letting the server provide CSS + JS via FastCGI caching.

Here are some additional valuable insights that Phil provided after running the tests:

• “The #1 thing that completely ruins these scores is Google’s reCAPTCHA javascript.”
• “I am honestly surprised at how well the theme + WPMU DEV Hosting w/ FastCGI serverside caching performed. TTFB of 0.224s and 92/98 on PageSpeed Insights without additional plugins is incredibly impressive. Smush Pro is then an extra layer of optimization on top by serving super-optimized image files. Hummingbird Pro can relax a bit and not have to worry about serving cache. Rather, it can focus on setting all our expiry headers, monitoring uptime and serving CSS/JS from CDN.”

Enhance the performance of your Impreza by using Smush and Hummingbird, allowing you to enjoy the best of both worlds!

Making Impreza’s Performance Even More Imprezive

According to Phil’s personal statement:

“Having used many of the top ranking multipurpose themes in the past (Avada, Enfold, Etalon, Extra, Jupiter, Salient, etc.) I have never had as much success building modern, minimalist, efficient and hyper-performing websites as I have with Impreza. Trading pre-built template and demo libraries for thoughtful design, extensive customizability and ridiculous performance is worth it to me.

And look, the results don’t lie: not a single test dropped out of the A grade on GTmetrix.”

And there you go!

Impreza is not only a fast-loading WordPress multi purpose theme powered by the WPBakery page builder but its performance can be improved using Smush and Hummingbird optimization plugins with serverside hosting features like CDN and FastCGI enabled.

To access our entire suite of Pro plugins, blazing-fast managed WordPress hosting, and expert 24×7 help and support for all things WordPress, become a WPMU DEV member today without risk (we offer a 100% money-back guarantee).

[Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2022 and updated in Dec 2023 for accuracy.]

Contributors

This article was written in collaboration with:

Phil –  Capital Web Design.  Phil uses his twenty years of web design experience to achieve one goal: give back to his hometown by building modern websites for businesses and nonprofits in the Canadian capital!

WordPress is a widely-used content management system that powers a vast number of websites globally. Its popularity is partly due to the vast array of themes and plugins available, which let users tailor their sites to their preferences. The Impreza theme by WPBakery is one such example, praised for its adaptability and user-friendliness. Nonetheless, Impreza can encounter slow performance issues, often caused by hefty image files and other elements. This article will explore methods to enhance Impreza theme’s performance, focusing on two renowned plugins: Smush and Hummingbird.

Smush is a plugin that improves image optimization on your site by compressing them while preserving quality. Bulky image files can dramatically decelerate your site as they require more time to load. Utilizing Smush can decrease your image file sizes and thus boost your site’s loading speed. Smush includes a “Bulk Smush” feature, enabling you to optimize numerous images simultaneously, making the process more efficient.

Hummingbird is a plugin that enhances your Impreza theme’s performance through caching and performance optimization. It accelerates your site by diminishing page load times. Hummingbird achieves this by generating cached versions of your pages, which are served to visitors instead of the original pages, cutting down the time needed for pages to load as the cached versions are readily available on the server.

Hummingbird also offers “Minification,” a feature that shrinks the size of your site’s files by eliminating redundant characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This can further improve your website’s loading speed since smaller files take less time to load.

To sum up, if you’re utilizing the Impreza theme by WPBakery and facing sluggish performance, employing the Smush and Hummingbird plugins can be beneficial. Compressing images with Smush and caching pages with Hummingbird can greatly enhance your website’s loading speed, leading to an improved experience for your visitors.