October 20, 2018/in , /by Kriesi

Enfold 4.5 – new template builder elements, more options, new demos focusing on gradients and a few words about the Gutenberg editor

A release that highlights some of the recent improvements of Enfold

In our last few major releases we were focusing a lot on improving the theme performance wise and making it as easy as possible to be GDPR compliant. During that time we also introduced some new visual features (like gradients for example) which did not get a proper introduction due to the emphasis on usability and non visual features. We figured we should spoil you with a design oriented update between those recent usability updates and the ones we are currently preparing for the future :)

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May 23, 2018/78 Comments/in , /by Kriesi

Enfold 4.4 and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

By now most people have probably heard about the new EU data privacy law that will come to full effect on May 25th 2018. We have adapted Enfold  to make the journey to compliance a little easier for those who deal with European Visitors on their site

First things first: especially if you are European this law was very present during the last weeks and there is a good chance you already know about it. If you don’t: what exactly is the General Data Protection Regulation?

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May 3, 2018/12 Comments/in , , /by Kriesi

Scoring 100/100 in Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix PageSpeed and Yslow (and why you probably shouldn’t bother ;)

This article will teach you how to get a perfect score with Enfold and its latest performance upate to Version 4.3 on Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. It will also explain why it’s probably not a good idea to obsess over it

Don’t let yourself get fooled by the title. You should definitely care about your site performance and using those tools allows you to identify problems easily. In general you get very good recommendations but you should know when to follow them and when to ignore them :)

The metric that is much more important than any score, awarded by those testing tools, is the page load time of your site. And to achieve a good page load time a good server environment and optimised images are usually much more important than any theme optimisations you can do.

So make sure to not get obsessed with a good score, just for the sake of the score ;)
Also, while building our latest Enfold Update we set up a total of 12 test environments and probably did 1000 speed checks. The conclusion we came to, is that the trade offs for a perfect score are often times not worth it. (eg: compressing your images to a point were quality suffers dramatically, using a ton of inline css and javascript to satisfy above the fold rules, etc)

So here is what we are going to do:

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April 24, 2018/80 Comments/in , /by Kriesi

Enfold 4.3: Performance Update

As announced earlier we wanted to improve the speed and usability of Enfold. I think you will like what we came up with :)

This release is probably one of the most important in recent years, since its the first major step in changing some of the core workings of our Enfold theme.

Whenever software is written, a developer has to make certain decisions on how this software works. Most of the stuff we decided on, when first building Enfold has served us well. But unfortunately some of those decisions now started to affect our ability to improve the theme further. This is why we decided to do a few major overhauls and Enfold 4.3 is the first one. This release affects performance in a few major ways and its hard to overstate how important all those performance changes are. So before we describe what we did, here is how it affects the theme:

  • A typical Enfold based Website now loads anywhere from 15%-75% less CSS and JS
  • Enfold is now probably the best optimised multipurpose theme out there. We checked the competition and Enfold now uses less CSS and less JS on an average site than anyone else.
  • In addition to being leaner and cleaner than the competition out of the box, the theme is now also exceptionally easy to optimize and you can achieve perfect google/gtmetrix pagespeed scores if desired
  • Search rankings will be higher for Websites using Enfold since loading speed for mobile will be factored into search results soon
  • Conversion from visitors to customers will be better, since it’s a fact that every millisecond you can shave off the load time has a positive impact

Achieving a perfect score in google or gtmetrix is now possible ;) – Blog post here!

So what did we change and why?

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January 30, 2018/8 Comments/in , , /by

A few updates regarding WPML: Introducing WPML’s Contractors System

WPML’s new contractors system makes it easier for Enfold users to find experienced developers to help them on  their multilingual projects and for developers to find Enfold users who need help.

WPML recently launched their contractors system to connect end users with contractors. End users can invite selected contractors to their projects in case they need help and the system will take care of the rest and distribute those invites. Once user and contractor are connected, WPML steps back and lets those two parties work out the details (WPML does not get involved in payments)

Now Enfold users can search for contractors on WPML’s Contractors System. Contractors are well experienced in both Enfold and WPML but services they can provide are not limited to making your Enfold site a multilingual one. Most contractors can help you build a new website, maintain an existing website, fix issues on your existing website, help with SEO and more.

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October 28, 2017/in , /by Kriesi

Enfold 4.2: Focus on Audio and 5 new Demos for creatives, as well as first steps in theme optimization

Since our last release only featured 2 new demos due to all the backend work, we decided to help our creative community with this release and a slew of new demos concepts

With that in mind we decided to cater for a few niche categories which were not really well supported by Enfold till now. Namely everything related to audio. And although we supported the WordPress audio player from the first release, it was more of an afterthought. We now added a dedicated audio player element with more options like autoplay so you can build Dj, Band, Nightclub and other sites that are focused on audio.

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