Lovecraft Theme Updates
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I currently use the Lovecraft theme on my site – which I’m quite happy with design wise. It is however quite an old theme now which I understand doesn’t fully support new WordPress features and also scores quite poorly in Google’s Core Web Vitals index.
Looking through the available themes I see that two similar Anders Noren themes (Baskerville and Radcliffe) have been replaced by new versions (Baskerville 2 and Radcliffe 2) which fix many of the issues I’m having. Is there any chance of the Lovecraft theme receiving the same set of updates at some point to bring it up to date or would I be better choosing a new theme altogether?
Frustratingly the Lovecraft theme does seem to be kept up to date by the author himself (https://andersnoren.se/teman/lovecraft-wordpress-theme/) – last updated in Jan 2021 however this doesn’t necessarily seem to have filtered through to the WordPress.com site.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi @marioncollinson, the updates to Baskerville 2 and Radcliffe 2 weren’t necessarily for block compatibility, so much as for features that were necessary before full site editing was an option here.
The new theme you mentioned doesn’t seem to include Full Site Editing either.
Can you clarify which features you were looking for in a change?
Also, if you’d like to tinker with new themes without affecting the live site, feel free to make a new private site:
https://wordpress.com/startThen you can use export and import to get the content into the new site.
https://wordpress.com/export/Then you can change the themes, or try full site editing if you’d like. You’ll have a clearer idea of what features are available vs the ones you need right now, too, which may help inform your decision.
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Hi @supernovia thank you for the reply. My main interest in a new theme was really to improve the Google page experience/ core web vitals score. I just noticed when looking at other themes that some had additional options available in terms of layout and sidebar widgets etc. that looked like they might be useful. Plus if I’m going to move to a new theme it seems sensible to use one that offers all the new features.
I’ll set up a private site as you suggest to test new themes and see how my existing content maps onto them and what I can do with the full site editing options.
As an aside the only real issue with the current Lovecraft theme seems to be that it fails to preallocate the vertical space for the featured image, resulting in the main blog post content loading and then being shifted down the page when the featured image loads later.
Thanks.
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the only real issue with the current Lovecraft theme seems to be that it fails to preallocate the vertical space for the featured image, resulting in the main blog post content loading and then being shifted down the page when the featured image loads later.
Hmm, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that, as everything loads correctly on my end. Do you think you could share a screenshot (or a screencast) of what you see? We’ll be happy to check.
To add a screen share or a screencast, you’d need to upload it to any cloud service and share a link in your reply. Thanks!
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Sorry for the slow reply. The image at the link below shows a time-lapse (left to right) of how a typical page loads (generated by https://pagespeed.web.dev/).
Each timestep is only a thumbnail but the progression of the overall page layout should be clear. You can see the title and the bulk of the blog post loads first and then the header image loads later, pushing the rest of the content down the page. This leads to a poor ‘cumulative layout shift’ (CLS) rating simply because the page content shifts while loading. In reality this is probably only really noticeable for someone on a very slow internet connection but more importantly it does have an impact on Google search results so ideally would be improved upon.
I’ll have a look at alternative themes as suggested previously and see if I like the look of any others that might perform better. Thanks.
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Got it. I did take a quick look at webpagetest.org. Here’s how the front page loads:
https://webpagetest.org/result/220326_AiDcV5_8DF/?view=webvitalsYou could probably speed it up a bit by reducing the number of posts loaded per page, and reducing outside resources pulled into the site (maybe four IG posts vs 8, for example.)
More likely to be indexed and important to people searching for info, though, are your actual articles. So I tested one of those. By default, we enable AMP for articles, which is what Google will be looking at and typically linking to. Here’s how an article performed:
https://webpagetest.org/result/220326_AiDc8V_8J4/?view=webvitalsI’m sure you can tell by the AMP pages, there’s always going to be some tradeoff between performance and style. Perfect performance usually isn’t necessary, but we do pretty well when you factor in AMP.
Does that help with how you’d want to proceed? I’d still recommend tinkering just to know what’s possible with newer features, too, but I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a rush to change, either.
Hoping that helps.
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