Wordpress legatus theme slow loading

Question

I’m a non-technical person want an expert opinion from stackoverflow.

I own a Newspaper site developed by third party vendor who should have build it right from scratch (their costing is done that way) but recently because of slow loading issues I found out they used WORDPRESS with LEGATUS theme, anyway.

Now they ask 300 USD per month only for dedicated server hosting (excluding maintenance and other). Which is too much for me though I wanted to test if it will really help have a VPS. So I lend a VPS from my friend for 7 days and told them to show me the performance.

Page loading improved from 30 sec to 10 sec now, so still it bit slow.

Now they are telling me to buy below things for more better performance:

1. Dedicated Cloud hosting.
2. Dedicated CDN.
3. Varnish cache system.
4. APC Accelerator.
5. Mem cache.
6. Provisioned for load balanced (IPVS) cluster.

As most of above are alien to me I want your opinion on that. My users will be mostly in ASIA.

Beside that I heard LEGATUS theme itself is bit slow and I could rather accomplish all of their requirement buying a better Cloud hosting, Is it true?

Sorry for these long explanations, Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Don't worry a single bit and don't buy anything they recommended to you. Because Website Speed can be decreased without any of those features.

I've been providing Website Performance since 2011 and I know what you should take care at this moment.

Usually Premium WP Themes are slow, because they use slow Frameworks to build their Themes. In my life, I haven't seen a Framework faster than Genesis Framework. You can use Genesis Framework with your current design. It will save more than 7seconds of that 10sec Loading Time.

Concentrate on following things,

1. Number of Images used in the Homepage. Minimize that number.
2. Minify the CSS and JS files.
3. Minimize the number of external CSS & JS Files.
4. Reduce the size of your Images, Theme Images.
5. Use caching plugin.

This will decrease your Loading Time to 1sec < 3sec. If you're interested in getting your site Load less than 1sec, I can help you.