Feeling The Need For WordPress Speed? Meet Frank.

Yesterday I wrote a post about 3 ways to speed up your WordPress site. Then, last night before I was going to bed I was browsing some of the blogs I read on a daily basis and found that Smashing Magazine (one of my all-time favorites) had a great article about a WordPress Theme designed specifically to be fast. I haven’t used it yet but I’ve sent it over to my dev team to take a look at. After taking a look at there sample site I can tell you, Frank is fast, damn fast, and it look clean and easy to use.

frank_wordpress_theme

The default homepage for Frank makes only nine database queries and they’ve limited the number of requests down to two and those requests are tiny at only 30KB. If you’ve ever been for a ride in a Ferrari you’ll understand why Frank, like a Ferrari, is so fast. All of those bells, whistles, and frills that just about every WordPress Theme markets like crazy have been purposefully avoided in Frank, leaving you with, frankly, a nice clean, but simple theme.

Back to Ferraris. My first time in a Ferrari I looked at the interior and said to my friend (sorry no Ferrari for me yet!) – “Why does the interior look so basic?” His response, “Speed.” It’s true, Ferrari actually keeps the interior insanely simple, almost boring compared to other sports cars, but they do it for speed, Frank does the same thing, although costs about $200,000 less than a Ferrari since it’s actually a free theme.

As many of you know, it’s no longer good enough to use a theme that looks good on a standard computer monitor. There’s a good chance that many of your visitors will be accessing your site from a mobile phone and Frank is responsive which means it will look great no matter what device you are using. It’s easy to customize the theme to add as many rows or columns as you’d like which makes it easy to make something that looks unique without having to dive in and do a lot of custom coding.

If you want to take Frank for a test drive yourself it is completely free and you can download it here.

If you want to get geeky and read more about Frank, you can check it out on Github here.

I’d be interested to know if any of you use Frank and what you think of the experience. Feel free to come back to this post once you’ve had a chance to try it out and let me and everyone else reading this know what you think!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton