Are there themes that load faster and are more secure?

[gail]

Are there themes you'd recommend for a faster load time? What about security?

 

[EQnoble]

Generally a theme will only be insecure if someone intended for it to be insecure as it is all frontend stuff vs addons which use backend code. That said only a few themes actually use more than css/html to achieve their look and the ones that use more than styling you would have to vet yourself though given the amount of people using those themes I wouldn't worry about it.

Also in general to answer your general question a custom theme has the best chance of being fastest because you could have it built for you with speed as one of the top points to hold in regard vs a theme off the shelf that is built with many options in mind so that a large variety of people can use the same theme for different purposes and final looks.

 

[gail]

Generally a theme will only be insecure if someone intended for it to be insecure as it is all frontend stuff vs addons which use backend code. That said only a few themes actually use more than css/html to achieve their look and the ones that use more than styling you would have to vet yourself though given the amount of people using those themes I wouldn't worry about it.

Also in general to answer your general question a custom theme has the best chance of being fastest because you could have it built for you with speed as one of the top points to hold in regard vs a theme off the shelf that is built with many options in mind so that a large variety of people can use the same theme for different purposes and final looks.

Thanks for your reply. I'm a little bummed since we were thinking of buying a theme and asking the developers of the theme to make it match the colors of our website. It seems having a developer or designer do a custom theme is pretty expensive. Oh well, thanks a lot for your reply!

 

[Mouth]

I'm a little bummed since we were thinking of buying a theme and asking the developers of the theme to make it match the colors of our website.

Several themes have colour systems, allowing you to choose a base colour palette to start with and easily customise yourself from there.

 

[EQnoble]

Thanks for your reply. I'm a little bummed since we were thinking of buying a theme and asking the developers of the theme to make it match the colors of our website. It seems having a developer or designer do a custom theme is pretty expensive. Oh well, thanks a lot for your reply!

No need to get bummed here. I was just trying to put out some details to give you a better idea of the way things work or just are in order to help you in your journey.

There is nothing wrong with doing just that and the speed of any off the shelf style will probably be around the same as the default xf theme unless you find a premade theme built for speed listed in the RM which would be faster (not sure anyone can advertise that with any noteworthy margins at this point).

If a style you grab ends up making your site run more than 10-15% slower than the default style I would go back to shopping though I don't think this will be a problem.

I haven't tried a free theme that really made a site chug yet but can't say much about paid styles outside of ones I have done privately.

What I was getting at is if you are looking to make your site faster than the default xf style will more than likely need to have custom work done as not all of it boils down to custom styling, in fact from my experience once you drop unneeded images and needless heavy crap most of the changes are actually down to server side stuff.

There are many many server side things (which can not be included with an install-able style) you can do where if you are hitting a sweet spot in your configuration/setup you can speed things up anywhere from 2 to 12 fold on average from my hands on experience.

Now if you weren't necessarily looking to speed your site up and are just worried about not slowing it down, I'm sure you would be fine getting in contact with any developer who lists in the RM and I am just as sure that they will happily take the job of tweaking and customizing their own work for some lunch bucks.

 

[RobParker]

Thanks for your reply. I'm a little bummed since we were thinking of buying a theme and asking the developers of the theme to make it match the colors of our website. It seems having a developer or designer do a custom theme is pretty expensive. Oh well, thanks a lot for your reply!

Changing the colour can range from REALLY easy to moderately difficult depending on the theme. If it's all done in CSS and uses the Xenforo color palette, it's literally a couple of clicks in your admin control panel to change the colour. Some themes even have a built in colour options. If you need to start editing images/gradients then it becomes a bit more difficult but it shouldn't be out of the question.

Again, I'd suggest you talk to @pixelExit.com (@Russ and @Steve F) who are excellent (and cheap!) when it comes to all things theme related. Even if you just want a bit of expert advice I'm sure they'd help.

 

[gail]

Changing the colour can range from REALLY easy to moderately difficult depending on the theme. If it's all done in CSS and uses the Xenforo color palette, it's literally a couple of clicks in your admin control panel to change the colour. Some themes even have a built in colour options. If you need to start editing images/gradients then it becomes a bit more difficult but it shouldn't be out of the question.

Again, I'd suggest you talk to @pixelExit.com (@Russ and @Steve F) who are excellent (and cheap!) when it comes to all things theme related. Even if you just want a bit of expert advice I'm sure they'd help.

Thank you!!

 

[Mr Lucky]

Thanks for your reply. I'm a little bummed since we were thinking of buying a theme and asking the developers of the theme to make it match the colors of our website. It seems having a developer or designer do a custom theme is pretty expensive. Oh well, thanks a lot for your reply!

You can't go far wrong with the built in colour palette. It's incredibly easy to match colours to your existing colour scheme. All you need to bare in minded is that when replacing the default colors, replace a dark colour with a similarly dark colour, medium with similarly medium and light with similarly light. It's not obligatory but that way you would retain good readable contrast. OTOH for a drak looking theme, you might just do the exact opposite, ie light for dark, dark for light.

You can even try it out on the xenforo presales demo.

 

[gail]

You can't go far wrong with the built in colour palette. It's incredibly easy to match colours to your existing colour scheme. All you need to bare in minded is that when replacing the default colors, replace a dark colour with a similarly dark colour, medium with similarly medium and light with similarly light. It's not obligatory but that way you would retain good readable contrast. OTOH for a drak looking theme, you might just do the exact opposite, ie light for dark, dark for light.

You can even try it out on the xenforo presales demo.

Thank you Mr. Lucky

 

[eva2000]

Are there themes you'd recommend for a faster load time? What about security?

if you want the fastest and light weight theme, you need to check out PixelExit's FlatAwesome free and FlatAwesome+ theme

• https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flat-awesome-pixelexit-com.3409/
• https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flat-awesome-pixelexit-com.4706/

I went from free to paid version and both are one of the fastest and most light weight themes I have used for my forums https://community.centminmod.com (though speed is also about how your server is configured and optimised too )

 

[gail]

if you want the fastest and light weight theme, you need to check out PixelExit's FlatAwesome free and FlatAwesome+ theme

• https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flat-awesome-pixelexit-com.3409/
• https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flat-awesome-pixelexit-com.4706/

I went from free to paid version and both are one of the fastest and most light weight themes I have used for my forums https://community.centminmod.com (though speed is also about how your server is configured and optimised too )

Thank you!