Homely WordPress Theme Review: A Developer's Real-World Diary : General Discussion Forums

Building a Luxury Apartment Site with Homely: A 7-Day Coding Case Study

A few weeks ago, a local real estate developer came to me with a challenge. They had just finished constructing a high-end, 12-unit apartment building and needed a modern website to showcase the property, list floor plans, and capture lease leads. They wanted the site ready quickly because their physical marketing banners—complete with QR codes pointing to the landing page—were already being printed.

They decided to buy the Homely - Single Property and Apartment WordPress Theme and asked me to set it up, customize the layouts, and optimize it for high traffic. I tracked my entire process over seven days to see how this theme holds up under a strict timeline and real-world performance standards.

Day 1: Setting up the Sandbox and Cleaning the Bloat

I began by setting up a staging environment on a cloud server running Nginx and MariaDB. After running a fresh WordPress installation, I uploaded the Homely theme. The theme installation process was painless, prompting me to install Elementor and a custom helper plugin designed specifically for property features.

I imported one of the single-property demos to get a quick visual baseline. It looked promising, but like many real estate themes, the demo was packed with massive, unoptimized high-resolution images of kitchens and living rooms. Some of these placeholder images were over 6MB each, which bloated the database and clogged up the media library.

Before doing any visual work, I used WP-CLI to prune the unnecessary media and clean up the database. This kept my development environment lean and prevented future performance issues.

# Delete all unneeded default attachments imported by the demo
wp media regenerate --yes
wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type=attachment --format=ids) --force

With a clean media library and database, I was ready to upload the developer's actual compressed WebP images and start configuring the layouts.

Day 3: The Mobile Speed Roadblock (and My PHP/CSS Fix)

By day three, I had the main apartment details page looking great on desktop. However, when I ran a performance test on Google PageSpeed Insights for mobile, the score slumped to a mediocre 52. The biggest culprit was the interactive floor plan image gallery.

The theme uses a heavy JavaScript slider script to let users swipe through apartment layouts. While this works fine on desktop, the script was loading on all mobile viewports, blocking the main thread and causing a noticeable delay in visual loading. To make things worse, this heavy script was being enqueued on pages that did not even feature a floor plan grid, like the "Contact Us" page.

I did not want to rely on heavy plugins to fix this. Instead, I opened the child theme's functions.php file and wrote a PHP filter hook. This script checks the current page and completely dequeues the heavy slider JavaScript if the user is on a page that does not require interactive floor plans. For the mobile version of the floor plan pages, I replaced the JS slider with a native, lightweight CSS horizontal scroll layout.

// Dequeue the heavy gallery slider script on non-essential pages
function homely_child_clean_scripts() {
    // Only keep the script on the specific property single pages
    if ( ! is_singular('property') ) {
        wp_dequeue_script('homely-swiper-slider');
        wp_dequeue_style('homely-swiper-styles');
    }
}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'homely_child_clean_scripts', 100);

For the mobile layout, I added a small CSS override to enable simple touch-swipe navigation without using any JavaScript at all:

/* Native CSS scroll swipe for mobile floor plans */
@media (max-width: 768px) {
    .property-floorplans-grid {
        display: flex;
        overflow-x: auto;
        scroll-snap-type: x mandatory;
        -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
    }
    .property-floorplan-item {
        flex: 0 0 85%;
        scroll-snap-align: start;
        margin-right: 15px;
    }
}

This technical tweak got rid of the render-blocking JS issues, instantly pushing our mobile PageSpeed score up to 88.

Day 5: Prepping for QR Code Traffic

On day five, I started thinking about the physical marketing banners. When those banners go up around the city, hundreds of people might scan the QR code at the exact same time. If a sudden wave of 500 mobile users hits a dynamic WordPress site at once, the database can easily crash.

To prevent this, I set up custom FastCGI caching rules directly inside our Nginx server configuration block. This bypasses PHP entirely for repeat visitors, serving them a static HTML version of the page instantly.

# Nginx FastCGI Cache rule for high traffic landing pages
fastcgi_cache_path /var/run/nginx-cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=HOMELY_CACHE:100m inactive=60m;
fastcgi_cache_key "$scheme$request_method$host$request_uri";

server {
    # ... other server configs ...
    
    set $no_cache 0;
    
    # Do not cache logged-in users or administrators
    if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-8]+|wp-postpass|wordpress_no_cache|wordpress_logged_in") {
        set $no_cache 1;
    }
    
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_cache HOMELY_CACHE;
        fastcgi_cache_valid 200 301 302 30m;
        fastcgi_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header http_500;
        fastcgi_no_cache $no_cache;
        fastcgi_cache_bypass $no_cache;
        # ... standard fastcgi pass settings ...
    }
}

This configuration meant that even if a local advertisement went viral, the server would handle the traffic easily without exhausting its database limits.

Day 7: Live Launch and Final Thoughts

By day seven, we pointed the client’s domain to the live server. The final round of tests came back incredibly strong. The page loaded on mobile devices in 1.4 seconds, and the site remained stable even during automated load tests simulating 200 concurrent users.

After a full week of deep work with this template, here is my balanced breakdown of its strengths and weaknesses.

The Positives (Pros)

Tailored Layouts: The templates are designed specifically for properties. You do not have to struggle to make default layouts fit real estate data; the custom fields for amenities, bedrooms, and bathrooms are already built-in.
Elementor Integration: It is easy for the client's internal sales team to change copy, swap out floor plans, or edit pricing on their own without needing developer help.
Clean Code Standards: The theme developer followed clean WordPress practices, making it straightforward to dequeue unnecessary assets without breaking other parts of the site.

The Drawbacks (Cons)

Heavy Asset Loading: Out of the box, the theme loads its custom gallery slider scripts globally. If you do not manually dequeue them from pages where they are not used, your mobile speed will suffer.
Simplistic Documentation: The basic setup guides are helpful for beginners, but they do not offer much detail on advanced styling or child theme overrides. You will need to dig into the PHP templates yourself to make structural changes.

Overall, the client was incredibly pleased with how fast and polished the site turned out. By avoiding heavy optimization plugins and applying clean server rules and custom hooks, we built a highly reliable property showcase site that will easily handle their upcoming leasing campaign.

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Homely WordPress Theme Review: A Developer's Real-World Diary