The Twenty Twenty WordPress theme is one of the most popular themes in the WordPress community. Known for being simple, lightweight, and fast it is a very good base theme for customization, as well as a great fallback theme that can be used for WordPress testing if and when problems arise. It is known for being an effective, stable WordPress theme.
As of the date of this blog post, Twenty Twenty has been downloaded more than one million times, a testament to its popularity.
As of now, the Twenty Twenty theme has received 4.5 stars out of 5 stars, signaling that WordPress users find it to be a very useful, well-performing theme.
While Twenty Twenty is clearly a widely-adopted and appreciated WordPress theme, the question is whether Twenty Twenty is a fast theme or whether it could potentially cause negative speed impacts on your WordPress blog or website.
The question of “Is Twenty Twenty a fast or slow WordPress theme” is exactly what our WordPress speed tests are designed to answer. Depending on the answer, it will be interesting to see how it compares to its competitors.
Our WordPress Theme Testing Methodology
In order to determine whether the Twenty Twenty theme could potentially slow down your WordPress site, we have designed a process to test the theme for speed. Our goal is to provide fair and accurate testing that gives us baseline data to compare to.
We feel that first capturing baseline speed metrics of a bare-bones WordPress site allows us to effectively observe any negative speed impacts that occur when a theme is installed and activated.
Our testing environment does not use any additional caching plugins or features, beyond what our host provides. We do not use any third-party Content Delivery Networks like Cloudflare and we don’t use any optimization features like script and CSS minification.
Essentially, our sandbox is a very basic WordPress implementation with a lightweight theme and no plugins other than the Classic Editor and the Twenty Nineteen theme.
Establishing The Baseline Sandbox Environment And Content
Our methodology creates a basic WordPress installation using the Twenty Nineteen theme for testing purposes. We call this environment our testing sandbox.
With the sandbox environment, we create a single post that uses 800 words of Lorem Ipsum text and three appropriately sized images for the Web. Each of the images is 1920 pixels wide and 1280 pixels high and are resized by the theme to responsively fit the screen. We feel that a post with 800 words, one featured image, and three images accurately represents an “average” blog post that can be found on most WordPress sites.
Again, no lazy loading, image compression, or optimization has been done other than the lazy loading features offered by WordPress.
With the sandbox environment and test post in place, we first baseline the environment for speed to determine how fast the test post loads without the Twenty Twenty theme installed. This baseline gives us the metrics to compare to once we install and activate Twenty Twenty.
To generate baseline metrics for the sandbox environment, we use multiple tests of three different speed testing tools.
- Google Page Speed Insights – We run the GPSI speed test five times and take the average scores of the five tests in order to determine the average desktop and mobile scores for the baseline testing post before the Twenty Twenty theme is installed and configured.
- GTmetrix Speed Test – We run the GTmetrix speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Twenty Twenty theme is installed and configured.
- Pingdom Speed Test – We run the Pingdom speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Twenty Twenty theme is installed and configured.
With these baseline metrics captured, we have the necessary data to conduct the actual testing of the Twenty Twenty WordPress theme.
The baseline data for the environment prior to installing and activating Twenty Twenty was as follows:
From the results, our sandbox environment was generating near-perfect scores via Google Page Speed Insights for desktop and a high score of 97 on mobile.
Using GTmetrix and Pingdom to test the post, we are able to discern that the page loads at right at one second for the largest contentful paint and the total page size came in at 344kb.
Essentially, the blog posts loads very quickly across all three tests.
Installing And Activating the Twenty Twenty Theme And Testing Any Site Speed Impacts
Once the baseline data has been captured, we proceed on to installing and activating the Twenty Twenty theme from the WordPress theme repository. For testing purposes, we left all the configuration as basic as possible.
For Twenty Twenty, that means we install the theme and activate it. We don’t apply any customization or additional theme settings.
Using the same test post we leveraged to gather the baseline data, we followed the exact same data-gathering processes outlined above and gathered the resulting data.
By comparing the post-installation data to the baseline data, we are able to determine whether activating and configuring the Twenty Twenty theme on WordPress has any negative speed impact on the testing post.
Results From The Twenty Twenty Theme Testing
As seen in the testing results below, the Twenty Twenty theme had nearly no negative impact on the Google Page Speed Insights Scores, the GTmetrix web speed test, or the Pingdom web speed test.
This is a good indication that Twenty Twenty operates as a lightweight, streamlined theme and can be used without any concern of slowing down your WordPress site.
Observations Regarding The Twenty Twenty Theme
Twenty Twenty has long been trusted as an effective WordPress theme and now we can rest assured that the theme is not slowing down our WordPress sites
With respect to the Google Page Speed Insights scores, the average Twenty Twenty results were nearly identical to the baseline tests, indicating that Twenty Twenty will not negatively hurt your GPSI scores. Similarly, the GTmetrix and Pingdom tests demonstrated that there were virtually no measurable negative impacts caused by installing and activating Twenty Twenty to protect your WordPress blog or site from spam comments.
As a result of our theme testing, we give Twenty Twenty the rating of:
SAFE– This theme causes no negative site speed impacts to a WordPress site. The theme loads quickly and it does not appear to slow down page load times or excessively increase the number of requests made by a WordPress site. As a result, installing and using this theme will likely neither increase or decrease your site performance.
NOTE: While a theme may not cause negative site speed impacts, there are always possibilities that a theme could conflict with installed plugins. Please test all plugins carefully to ensure that they work properly with your host, WordPress theme, and all other plugins.
To view our testing results sheet, you can download it in PDF format here.
Additional information that might be useful in your evaluation or our test results are as follows:
Test Date: 11-20-2020
Theme Version Tested: 1.5
WordPress Version Used: 5.5.3
WordPress Theme Used: Twenty Twenty
WordPress Theme Version: 1.5
Hosting Used: Siteground GoGeek
URL Of Test Post: https://sandbox.sitespeedsteps.com/site-speed-steps-testing-post/
Number Of Words In The Test Post: 800
Number Of Images In The Test Post: 3+Featured image
If you have questions about our testing methodology or results, please feel free to reach out via our contact form