Testing Adon Theme: My 7-Day Creative Portfolio Build
How I Rebuilt a Brand Studio Portfolio in 7 Days with Adon
Day 1: Setup and Typography Review
A brand design studio contacted me last week. They wanted to replace their slow, bloated portfolio site with something clean, bold, and minimal. They wanted to show off high-resolution images of their packaging designs without frustrating mobile users. After looking at a few different design layouts, we decided to build their new site using the Adon – Creative Agency Portfolio WordPress Theme.
I did a fresh installation on my local development setup. The installation went smoothly, and importing the demo assets only took a couple of minutes. The layout uses space really well, and the typography options look very modern right out of the box. However, as someone who builds sites for a living, I knew that dynamic layouts often come with some performance tradeoffs. I immediately ran some baseline speed tests to see where we needed to optimize.
Day 3: Moving Dynamic CSS to Static Files
By day three, I ran into a standard technical issue. The theme stores its custom colors and font settings in the database. Instead of loading these as a static stylesheet, it was generating a massive block of inline CSS inside the HTML <head> on every page load. This prevented browsers and our server from caching the styles, which hurt our Time to First Byte (TTFB).
To fix this, I wrote a PHP function in the child theme’s functions.php file. This code hooks into the customizer save action. It grabs the dynamic CSS, writes it to a physical .css file in the uploads directory, and then enqueues that static file:
add_action('customize_save_after', 'adon_generate_static_custom_css', 10);
function adon_generate_static_custom_css() {
$custom_css = get_theme_mod('adon_dynamic_css_styles');
$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
$css_file = $upload_dir['basedir'] . '/adon-custom-static.css';
// Write the database styles directly to a static file
if (file_exists($upload_dir['basedir'])) {
file_put_contents($css_file, $custom_css);
}
}After saving this, I registered the static stylesheet and dequeued the dynamic inline code. Now, the custom CSS is cached properly by our server, speeding up page delivery for repeat visitors.
Day 5: Tweaking the Backend
On day five, I started preparing the site for production. A clean portfolio needs clean background tools to support it, so I searched for a few Must-Have Plugins to handle local image resizing, secure SVG support, and basic XML sitemaps. Using these tools helps keep the site running quietly without adding extra bloat to the pages.
To keep the database light and clean before going live, I also used WP-CLI in my terminal to prune old dashboard metadata and run a quick table optimization to ensure fast query times:
wp db query "DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = '_edit_lock';"
wp db optimizeRunning these steps cleaned up a few megabytes of useless database records.
Day 7: Performance Review and Launch
By day seven, the site was ready to migrate to the live production server.
Here is my honest take on working with this theme:
- The Good: The visual style is great for creative agencies. It uses bold layouts and clean white space that make portfolio items stand out.
- The Bad: Out of the box, its dynamic styling setup relies too much on inline
<head>CSS. If you do not write a quick script to compile it into a static file, your server overhead will be higher than necessary.
The client was very happy with the final speed and layout. Adon is a great framework for creative studios, especially if you spend a few minutes tuning how it handles its custom styles.
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