The following customer experience is adapted from an original DIYthemes forum post by web designer Pierre Lacroix.
I read a lot about website speed optimization, and Focus is the best answer—the best foundation—I’ve found to achieve this.
Recently, I put in many hours rebuilding my dad’s website from scratch with the Focus philosophy. The goal was to reach a good balance of UX, business value, and fast performance.
Focus made my graphs go up! 📈
So far, UX seems to be on target based on what visitors are sharing with my dad and me.
And business value—or should I say new email subscribers that eventually turn into donators and/or buyers—have skyrocketed since the redesign went to production!
The boost in impressions and clicks is due to the improvements from Focus!
As you can see, Focus totally changed the game for the better. (Please ignore the spike before the red rectangle—that day, another Pierre Lacroix died, and that generated a lot of queries on Google.)
At first, I thought the improvement might be due to a Google algorithm update, but I could not find solid evidence for that.
Here’s what I do know: The day after I put the Focus-based site online, I began to see real improvements.
Nothing else really changed except for the simplified and optimized design. I did not change my pages’ titles, meta descriptions, or content.
The improvements were due the simplicity and speed of Focus, and that translated in a lot more email subscribers every day—superb! 🙂
Focus helped me cultivate an optimization mindset
I care a lot—now more than ever—about website optimization.
While building my dad’s site, I spent many hours testing so I could understand how certain elements affect page speeds.
Specifically, I focused on getting better scores on Core Web Vitals, which Google now uses to assess the quality of a page’s performance and optimization.
In the end, Focus ended up having an even greater effect on my scores than caching Plugins like WP Rocket and Hummingbird!
I’m super proud of the work I’ve done, and my results prove that Chris is a great leader with the Focus WordPress Theme.