Choosing the right theme for your website or blog is an important task. There is an endless sea of themes out there to choose from, and many seem to offer what you need and more. That being said, if you’re looking to minimize the chances of bogging down your site’s speed, then consider opting out of the themes that do too much. These are the themes that register short codes, handle your SEO, Google Analytics code and many more tasks. A theme that does all that is unnecessary. Instead, it’s a bloated one.

There is no shortage of complaints from terribly made, slow, clunky, bloated theme owners. Sometimes it takes experience to figure out that all of the bells and whistles aren’t necessarily such a great thing. After your site crashes three times in one day, and you’re stuck trying to handle your sales on another computer, you’ll reconsider purchasing another bloated, premium theme. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going to happen, and the developer’s specifications might appear great on paper. Once you get the theme installed, however, it can quickly become another story.

Some developers have opted to give their clients the option of installing a cheap Themeforest theme without any customization beyond what the theme itself offers, or creating a new one from scratch. This is because they end up pulling hairs out and wasting hours just trying to customize usually trivial issues in themes from Themeforest and other theme sites that could’ve been used a lot more effectively. There are horror stories of having to deal with bloated code, and having to completely re-design the site from scratch. Bloated code is code that has been designed to perform multiple functions, many of which are seldom, if ever, needed. Bloated code is also poorly documented, and is therefore a nightmare to maintain or update.

If you have your own site and you’re dealing with a slow or cumbersome theme, then chances are you’re theme suffers from bloated code. Unfortunately, many of the premium themes available to users come with such bloat, and the user is then left to figure out how to fix it. Does your premium theme have a multitude of features? Is it loaded with plug-ins? Chances are, you’ll eventually find the theme too frustrating to work with. A premium theme should essentially function as an all-in-one package for your site. However, you need to be careful with how you navigate this tricky area between function and features. Any tendency to incorporate more and more functionality into a theme needs be managed properly or avoided entirely. Remember – sometimes less really is better.