I have been following Income School for a while. They promote lots of things including a theme called “Acabado”
The believers in Acabado claim that theme is stupid fast, SEO-Friendly, clean, organized and mobile friendly.
I think the theme is not that extraordinary but it is embraced by many who want to do exactly what the Income Guys do to achieve their level of success.
I don’t have the WordPress theme but there are a lot of sites using including the ones created and shared publicly by Income School.
I am gonna analyze some of them and see if they are properly optimized optimized for speed.
Table of Contents
The Acabado Theme: Purpose in Christ
I decided to run some tests in a site which is not monetized by income school and that talks about the teachings of the Mormon Church.
The site is using CloudFlare so we can really see what hosting provider they are using for this one but the results are good.
It is a pretty minimalist theme, not for everyone.
I like minimalism so I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Note: I checked the Purpose in Christ site again and it seems that Jim is now using the Kadence Theme instead of Acabado.
Speed Improvements in the Acabado Theme
Don’t stop reading because the speed can be improved even further with some easy optimizations.
Since they are already using CloudFlare, I would try to improve the speed by using getting a CloudFlare APO subscription or implementing full-page caching.
The site has 29 requests. That’s a lot
These are some of the optimizations that I would apply to reduce the number of requests generated by the theme.
| Requests | Solutions |
| Google Analytics (3) | PerfMatters, WP Rocket or Flying Scripts |
| Google Fonts (3) | System Fonts, Flying Fonts |
| WP – Emoji (1) | Code Snippets or Perfmatters |
| WP – Embed (1) | Code Snippets or Perfmatters |
| Gravatar (1) | Create your Author bio |
| Lazy Loading (4) | PerfMatters |
| Comments (2) | Get rid of comments |
| Pictures (9) | PerfMatters |
I got myself a copy of the Acabado Theme with the optimizations described above and I was able to reduce the requests to five by simply activating some features in the Perfmatters Plugin.
So if you want to use this theme make sure to apply the speed optimizations described above using Perfmatters or some of the options mentioned above.
Conclusion
You can achieve pretty good results using the Acabado theme, but you can get those results using other lightweight themes out there such as GeneratePress, Astra, Kadence and Blocksy.
You can customize the Acabado theme that much, so you will find that their sites look all the same and they are clear about that in their sale page.
We named it “Acabado” (Portuguese for “finished”) because we don’t want the theme to need extensive customizing to look good. The customization options are very simple, but if you want to do some deep surgery on the theme to heavily tweak it, you’ll need to use CSS on your own.
Income School
If you ask me, I wouldn’t use the theme, I would go for far more popular options
