Frank: A Free WordPress Theme Designed For Speed

• 3 min read
• WordPress, Freebies, Themes, Speed
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About The Author

P.J. is a design technologist by trade. Check out his thoughts, work and findings on his website. More about P.J. Onori ↬

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Today we are pleased to release Frank, an open-source WordPress theme designed and built to provide a light, responsive and unobtrusive reading experience. The theme’s default home page makes 9 database queries and consists of 2 requests weighing at roughly 30KB (9.5KB gzipped). Frank keeps it basic: no Javascript dependence, no unnecessary images, just a simple, no-frills, fast blog theme. —Ed.

With intense use of HTML5 and CSS3 Frank cuts down on complexity and improves performance. Frank works decently on Internet Explorer 8+. However, at the moment no guarantees are given for any earlier IE versions. It is packaged with the parent theme (in the frank directory) as well as the child theme (in the somerandomdude directory) which I use for my own site. By using Frank, my home page weighs in at 43.65KB over 6 requests (Google Analytics accounts for ~15.5KB and 3 requests). In addition, 33.78% of global page loads completely within 1 second or less (55.75% in the US). On Google Page Speed, the demo gets an overall PageSpeed Score of 97 (out of 100).

Also, Frank uses a subset of Foundation to provide a responsive layout for desktops, tablets and phones. Add this to the theme’s small footprint and you have a mobile-optimized blog. The theme is 100% open source and developer-friendly. The parent theme (/frank) is released under the GNU Public License and the child theme (/somerandomdude) directory is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Recommended reading: What To Consider When Choosing WordPress Themes

Demo And Downloads

You can check the live demo of the theme.

• live demo
• large preview (.png)
• check the theme on Github
• download the theme for free (.zip, 349 Kb)

Why Did I Make Frank?

There are three reasons:

The first reason was to make good on a promise. I made the commitment that everything I created on my site would be open source. That is how Iconic was born, and this is how Frank came to be. My site is now 100% open source.

The second reason is that I believe that speed is an essential part of user experience. I wanted my site to reflect that belief.

The last reason is that WordPress has an unfair reputation of being a slow, resource-hungry blogging platform. Make no mistake, WordPress can be slow, but that is often due to poor use. I wanted to make a WordPress theme to break the unfair stereotype.

Frank shines for sites that need a no-frills blog that focuses on the reading experience. Frank is not for everybody, but it shines when used in its sweet spot.

Future Development

Frank is ready to be used, but there is still a long way to go until it’s in tip-top shape. This theme can and will get faster. Here’s what is currently being worked on.

• Greater typographic and visual polish
• Increased CSS optimization
• HTML cleanups and structural improvements
• Modernization and optimization of Javascript components
• Improved organization and structure of SCSS files
• Developer-friendly build tools
• Guides for optimal use of Frank

Credits

This theme was built with significant help of some great folks. My sincere thanks to Felix Holmgren, Jon Christopher and Josh McDonald for their tremendous contributions.

Further Reading

• WordPress Full-Site Editing: A Deep Dive Into The New Feature
• How To Reduce The Need To Hand-Code Theme Parts In Your WordPress Website
• How To Prevent Common WordPress Theme Mistakes
• Useful WordPress Tools, Themes And Plugins

(ea, vf, mrn)