(Entry was posted by Neil Cheesma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/29/2017).

Wordpress - with the huge emphasis on speed

Re Wordpress - with the huge emphasis on `speed` - why don`t they produce a slick theme that is fast? 2017 Theme: "Twenty Seventeen brings your site to life with header video and immersive featured images. With a focus on business sites, it features multiple sections on the front page as well as widgets, navigation and social menus, a logo, and more." with all that going on... I cannot imagine that it is fast... and yes it does depend on the actual content, but even so...

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Jeremy L. Knauff: The widgets have very little impact on speed unless you stick bloated shit in them. Even less of an issue with decent caching.
Neil Cheesman: What are `immersive` featured images?
Neil Cheesman: Built for speed.... "Itâ€™s a fancy way of saying that the images are so big you feel like youâ€™re in a movie theatre" I did wonder if they might be interactive...
Alan Bleiweiss: The default theme is bloated in stupid ways. It`s nonsensical at this point for WordPress to offer bloated code that then ends up being customized with more bloat, and churned into countless other themes.
Gregor Grigorian: Yeah but the header video takes too much space, is their anyway to customize the size of the header? Like seriously its a big problem. I was wondering a few things about this theme if anyone would like to answer, let me know. I think numerous people are curious.
Jody Nesbitt: Neil, how fast would a clean 2017 theme install be before you considered it fast, what I am getting at is maybe the bottleneck is not WP, but elsewhere
Doc Sheldon: Neil, I just binned two premium themes I had purchased, and switched to WP`s 2017 theme... I`ve had no problem getting my pageload on the heaviest pages to stay consistently under 2 seconds. Out of the box, no... with some optimization, you bet!
Neil Cheesman: How fast is fast? Hm... Ideally, for me I would say under 2 seconds is fast - BUT, being realistic I would probably say around 2.5 seconds would be fast - and 2.5 to 3s `okay`. Has anyone got any load-times with the `out of the box` 2017 theme?(with content) and yes - it depends on the hosting and also connection - so those factors very important. Personally I use Genesis. (the theme not the band) I have the 2015 theme loading at 2.6s...
Randy Milanovic: Ignorant clients ask for bells n whistles. Debs give them what they ask for. You can`t fault them for being stupid.
Jody Nesbitt: so, at under 200ms, you would be impressed i guess :-) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dev.campaigns.io/GuCcHRIf (i have done under 2-300ms on plenty of different configs, so its more than possible to achieve, see here https://gtmetrix.com/reports/optimisation.io/7CbqHTFT with a themeforest theme and also running visual composer and coming in at half second, in browser second load generaly 0.3 - 0.6s (i have not optimised inner pages yet and still working on it and playing with caching configs, but its more than doable to get down this fast
Gregor Grigorian: I think a lot of people are going to start using the WP 2017 theme.