Schema WordPress Theme Review, Loads under milliseconds, helps you rank higher!
Finding a fast loading WordPress theme for your blog is indeed a tiring process, but don’t worry I’ve done the hard work for you. Read my honest Schema WordPress theme review, why it’s the ultimate blogging tool, and how it can help you to accelerate the growth of your blog.
The secret to make your WordPress site faster and make it more SEO friendly, relies in your WordPress theme.
No matter, how tidy is your WordPress site installation is, or the low numbers of plugins you’re using on WordPress sites. If the theme on your site is bulky and stuffed with too many graphics or scripts, chances are high, that your WordPress site could never make it load under 1.5 seconds.
Yes! 1.5 seconds is the ideal time, for any website to load in your visitor’s browser.
Similarly, if the structure of your WordPress theme is not on par with SEO rules, then no matter how much you try to configure the SEO on your WordPress sites, you won’t be able to rank better.
Even with a dedicated SEO plugin you won’t able to achieve the desired rankings in SERPs unless you change the SEO structure of your WordPress theme.
Hence, what I’m trying to tell you that in order to make a WordPress website rank high in SERPs, you need a fast loading WordPress theme, which is also designed to adhere the rules of search engines, such as Google.
Now, comes the question on how to make your WordPress theme “healthy”? simple! by trimming down the extra weight of scripts and make its HTML output more SEO friendly.
I know, a majority of you people are not good at customizing your existing WordPress themes, and hiring a professional WordPress developer to make your theme fit for speed and search engines isn’t a viable idea, as it’ll be an expensive affair. And even if you could fix, your WordPress site theme all on your, it’ll consume a neat portion of your time and the end result won’t be satisfactory.
Therefore, instead of fixing your WordPress theme, I would suggest you to better opt for a fast WordPress theme, which could not only fix the above issues but, also comes with a modern design and offers you several built-in features, to make your blog look stand out, and cut down several numbers of external plugins.
One such theme, that I came across in recent times is Schema by MyThemeShop. It’s a fully responsive WordPress theme with all sorts of features for a WordPress site to succeed on the web.
- Fully responsive
- In-built Review system
- Ultra fast & SEO friendly
- Built-in social media buttons
- Built-in related posts
- Voting feature
- Custom Widget
- and more.
What I genuinely like about Schema is that there’s no addition of any fancy sliders or builder feature, which not only makes your WordPress site slow but, also harms your Search engine rankings, as a whole.
Disclosure :- Bhanu, at MyThemeShop was kind enough to provide me a review copy of the theme.
Schema WordPress Theme Review
Today, I’m going to take an honest review of the Schema theme for WordPress. Let’s find it out, whether Schema is worth enough, as a default theme on your WordPress site or fails to be the one?
Schema is a premium WordPress theme, it comes at a price tag of $59.
After installing the theme, it asked me to install the required plugins.
An updater plugin for MyThemeShop to update the Schema and other plugins by them.
While, the other plugins are also by MyThemeShop, and adds various functionality to the site such as Review, Shortcodes, Subscription, and a lightweight tabbed widget for your sidebar.
Once you finish installing the above plugins, Schema is now ready to use on your WordPress site.
The theme comes with an easy to use control center, and it offers a wide-set of tabbed options to configure.
Let’s take a quick overview of each options available.
General Settings
To begin with, there’s a set of options to upload the logo image, favicon, touch icon, metro icon, there’s a brief description about the icon type, size and where it’ll appear on your site.
You can define your Twitter username, FeedBurner URL (If you’re still using one), header codes that need to be placed before the closing </head> tag, such as Google WMT, Bing Webmaster, etc. Snippets, such as Google Analytics code can be saved in the Footer code box.
What I really liked about this theme is the option to select pagination type, I’ve never seen anything like this before in any WordPress theme, so far.
Even with the current theme (Divi) on this site, I’ve to use a third-party plugin to show the numbered pagination type.
So, I really appreciate, the idea to put the choice for pagination type, it includes the default, next/previous, numbered, Ajax (load more button) and an Infinity scroll type.
Typically, WordPress themes are loaded with default WordPress search box, and it always feels outdated. However, with Schema you’re getting an AJAX powered instant search, which is not only time-saving but, also delivers accurate results.
Further, there is an option to set theme to be in Responsive mode, which is by default turned on.
Performance
Next comes the Performance tab, which contains all the options to tune the performance of your WordPress theme. With numerous built-in features, it’s very clear that the Schema theme is definitely built from the ground with performance in mind.
Prefetching – It’s a nifty performance trick, in which the files are already downloaded and save in cache. If the user accesses the resources, then it will load instantly. With Schema, if your visitor is on the homepage of your WordPress site, then a single post page will load faster, and vise-versa.
Lazy Load – This is a feature under which, the images will only load if it’s in the viewport, hence it speeds up the page load time and restricts the browser to load the images, only when they are required.
Async JavaScript – In simple terms, it prevents render-blocking JavaScript in above-the-fold content and helps your pages to load faster.
Remove ver parameters – WordPress automatically adds a version parameter to CSS and JavaScript files, see in the example below.
Notice, the version parameter appended at the end of CSS file, this ver query string parameter prevents the CSS and JavaScript from caching. Browsers and CDN, won’t cache these files, considering that these files will change every time the page gets load. Every time, the browser will load a fresh copy of these files, resulting slow down of your site.
Enabling this feature will remove the ver parameter from the CSS and JS file calls, and will further speed up your WordPress site load time.
Optimize WooCommerce scripts – If you’re using WooCommerce on your WordPress site, and the feature is turned on then this plugin will load WooCommerce scripts only on the WooCommerce page. That means no un-necessary WooCommerce scripts get loaded on all the pages across your WordPress site and will cut down the load time of all the other pages.
Styling Options
In order to control the visual appearance of Schema, there are options to change the color scheme, you can change the sidebar position either right or left.
If you want to control the site background, Schema comes with multiple options such as, background color, background image with a pattern, gradient and a custom image that you can upload from your computer.
Custom CSS box is provided, in case if you want to use customized CSS on your site, then you can add them here.
The lightbox feature is optional here, if you prefer to show the larger version of the images on your site in a pop-up, then better turn this feature on, or else you can keep it off.
Further, the theme has a separate styling section to configure, including header, homepage, footer, single posts area, and even sidebars. I’m going to give you a brief overview of all the sections.
Header
Under the header, you can select the header design with two different types,
- Site logo merged with a navigation menu (personally, I found this option visually aesthetic)
- The site logo with a separate section and navigation menu will appear underneath.
Floating navigation Menu, if turned on, will float the navigation menu along with scroll down and up movements.
If you don’t want to show the primary menu, in the navigation bar, then you can also turn its visibility off.
Similarly, it also provides you the option to hide or make the site logo visible.
There’s a feature, to show social icons with links to your social media pages, all you need to do is provide the links. You can also create custom social icons and links, I like this option to create custom links.
Homepage
This section, gives you access to control elements available on the homepage.
There’s a slider, if enabled, will show the most recent articles from the selected categories.
You can show a full width featured thumbnails for your articles or a nice square version of the featured thumbnails on the homepage.
Another feature I like is, where you can create custom sections to show latest posts on your homepage, from specific categories you choose.
Additionally, the homepage post meta info can be also organized, like if you don’t want to show the author name, date, categories, comment count of the articles on the homepage, then you can choose to disable it, by simply dragging it to the disabled box.
Footer
Again, in Footer area you’re provided with all the controls.
You can enable or disable the footer.
Change the footer background color, pattern, or even upload a custom image as background for footer.
The copyrights text can be changed or removed easily, as well as the color of the background for the copyrights section can be also altered.
Single Posts
Okay, so Schema without a second thought, offers a great level of customization, even on single posts section.
You can alter the layout of single posts pages the way you want, like post content, related posts, author box can be set to appear in a different order or certain elements can be completely disabled, without touching a single line of code.
The meta info of each post can be similarly configured, each element can be set to appear the way you want and can be also disabled.
Breadcrumbs are built-in, so no need to install any third-party plugins, just enable them and breadcrumbs will appear on your site.
Featured image, can be set to on and off.
There’s an amazing feature built-in, to automatically highlight the author’s comments. It’s a good idea to make the replies by authors to stand-out from the rest of the comments.
In the last, you can configure the theme to show or hide the date in comments.
Social Buttons
With Schema, you don’t need to install any third-party social media buttons as the theme is already mated with built-in social media buttons.
The position of social media buttons can be set to show above the content, below the content or keep them floating.
You can also arrange the order of all social media buttons.
One thing worth to mention, is that Schema shows the native social media buttons instead of custom buttons.
Ad Management
Ad management is pretty standard here, like pre-defined ad slots where you can paste your ad-snippet from Google Adsense or any other advertisement provider or just your own custom ad codes.
There’s an option to display ad in the header area, below post title and after post content.
Sidebars
If you’re fanatic about controlling the sidebar on your WordPress site, then Schema gives you ample of options to configure.
You can not only create n numbers of sidebars, but you can also define which sidebar you want to appear on which page of your WordPress site.
You can set a different sidebar for homepage, single post pages, single page, archives, categories, tags, search, 404 error page, and even on WooCommerece pages.
Navigation
Under the navigation section, it just gives you the link to WordPress native Menu section from where you can configure all the navigation menu for your site.
Typography
Although, personally I don’t fiddle much with typography of my theme. However, if you want to change the typography then, Schema offers pretty decent set of options, to change fonts and add custom CSS to a variety of theme elements
You can alter the typography for logo, primary navigation font, secondary navigation font, home article title, single article title, content font, sidebar-title font, sidebar font, footer links and fonts, and all H1 to H6 fonts. Plus there’s also an option to choose the character sets you wish to enable.
Import/Export
The import export tab, provides you option to clone your Schema just alike two different preset demo, the default and minimal.
You can import theme options, widgets and content, all together.
Next there’s regular import and export options to quickly copy the theme settings, across the other sites using Schema.
And in the end, there’s an interesting feature to create a child theme. I like this native feature to instantly create a child theme, rather of manually creating one.
Support
In the support tab, the theme will generate a complete information about your server, and WordPress installation. In case of technical support, you need to provide this data at MyThemeShop support forums to quickly help them resolving the issue.
Schema WordPress Theme Performance
Alright, so now we are done with Schema Theme options, and as a blogger I am absolutely thrilled with the level of customization, Schema offers for a professional blog.
Since, Schema is marketed as a fast loading WordPress theme and highly SEO friendly, let’s take it performance for a spin.
First we’ll talk about the actual performance of the theme i.e Speed – Load time.
To keep the test genuine, I had chosen the popular WordPress hosting by SiteGround, it’s affordable, fast and used by lots of professional bloggers out there.
Schema Load Test #1 (Basic without Content)
My test setup is my spare domain, Likedesk.com.
I had installed a fresh copy of WordPress, ver 4.9.6.
Theme : Schema by MyThemeShop
Schema Performance options : All turned off
Plugins (Active):
- Loginizer
- MyThemeShop Theme/Plugin Updater
- SG Optimizer (native SiteGround Performance plugin)
- WP Review
- WP Shortcode by MyThemeShop
- WP Subscribe
- WP Tab Widget
In my first website load time test, Schema performed insanely fast and it managed to load my website in mere 408 milliseconds. It was all raw, I had done zero optimization, not enabled any performance feature of the theme and neither I had installed any third part plugin and still, the theme outperformed my estimations.
Schema Load Test #2 (With Content)
But, that was almost a blank site with a couple of articles and no images, at all and any fresh theme can make it under 1 second.
Let’s make this test site, more realistic and put Schema WordPress theme on a tough test, loaded with lots of content, and images.
My second test is same as above, along with some content
Total no posts and pages : 48 posts and 29 pages.
In the second test, Schema did fairly well and it still managed to get the site load in just 576 milliseconds. Although, the Google page speed performance grade is dropped to 70 but still, our test site is arguably faster than 96% of others website tested at Pingdom.
Schema Load Test #3 (Optimized)
In the third test, I kept the same environment of my test WordPress site as of second load test.
In addition, I had turned on all the Performance feature of Schema, as well as installed W3 Total cache plugin, to fully optimize the site for speed.
And W3 Total cache, did the remaining magic here, it made my test site score an A grade with 91 Google PageSpeed Score, plus the load time of the site is reduced to just 433 milliseconds.
I’m completely overwhelmed by the performance of Schema, it’s performing like anything on a common shared WordPress hosting, I wonder what it’s going to be the results, if we put Schema on a dedicated WordPress hosting environment? I would surely loved to do that test, but let’s keep it for some other day.
Schema SEO Test
Google uses structured data to identify the type of content on a webpage, it’s a web standard that Google uses to decipher the content on a web page. If your WordPress blog obeys the Google Structure data, then it’ll help you in attracting more visibility in search engine results.
For instance, on a website which shows recipe and adhere the rules of Google Structure data it’s eligible to gain more visibility in graphical search results. As the structured data labels each element of the recipe, and this allows user to search for your recipe by ingredient, calorie count, cook time and more.
Schema WordPress theme follows the Google Structured data labels, and it tells the web crawlers about the elements of your content in an organized manner.
I’ve tested a page from my demo site with Schema using Google Structured data testing tool, and the tool quickly recognized the structured items. That means search engines can read content on your site powered by Schema more efficiently and will results in better SEO for your WordPress blog.
Here’s a demo snippet, this is how the review on your site with Schema theme, is going to appear in search results.
The built-in Review system of Schema is pretty neat, and unlike third-party review system plugin, it beautifully merges with the theme, and allows authors, as well as users on your site to review, anything you wish. Plus, there’s also a voting system for each review to increase the engagement of your users.
Conclusion
I’ve used numerous WordPress themes so far, and nearly all of the themes claim to be super friendly, loaded with tons of features including sliders, builders, attractive designs and whatnot.
But after composing this Schema WordPress theme review, I’m heavily impressed, as it’s the most practical theme used by me so far.
It saves your time, in so many ways.
You don’t need to optimize the theme for Speed or SEO – It comes with pre-optimized code for SEO, and several built-in functions to enhance the speed of your WordPress site.
You don’t need to manually hack the code – There’s an option to customize nearly all aspects of the theme.
You don’t need to install several third-party plugins –
- It comes with a built-in review system
- Built-in schema markup
- Amazing sidebar customization
- Built-in instant search
- Built-in pagination type selector
- Built-in child theme creation
- Built-in social media buttons
- Built-in related posts
- Built-in breadcrumbs
- Bunch of custom widgets
In one word, for me, Schema is a brilliant WordPress theme, and if you’re looking to step into the World of blogging, look no other WordPress theme, other than Schema by MyThemeShop period
A single year license for Schema is available at a discount rate of $59, which you can use with total five sites.
Schema WordPress Theme Review
- Performance friendly
- Google SEO friendly
- Design
- Customization friendly
- Mobile friendly
- Value for Money
Summary
To conclude the Schema WordPress theme review, all I can say is that it’s one brilliant theme ever designed for the professional bloggers. It’s insanely fast, designed to be Google friendly, and offers everything you need to make your WordPress blog succeed.
