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Website page loading speed can significantly impact your conversions and create a smooth user experience. You may lose visitors if your site takes a long time to load, regardless of the type of site you have. Every millisecond counts if you want to gain subscribers or sell more products. Using one of the Fastest WordPress themes can help you increase your success rate. If you want to rank high on search results, you need a fast-loading website.
There are a ton of elements that influence speed, including your page size, responsive design, and good front-end features. So it can be hard to maintain all the elements. You can achieve your goals with the help of many professional lightweight WordPress themes.
The majority of themes claim to provide a good and fast loading experience. Selecting the right one to maximize potential can be difficult. Based on my experience of running WordPress sites and research, I compiled a list of the seven best Fastest WordPress themes in 2023. Have a look.
It’s quite difficult to accurately measure the speed of different themes because every theme comes with different CSS and JS sizes. So in this post, I’ll test some mainstream themes that are known for their speed by using similar demo content and images.
I will be using Cloudways‘ base plan to test these results. Also, I won’t be using any CDN or Cache plugins to make the test as much accurate as possible.
Fastest WordPress Themes Speed Test Results
Below are the Speed test results of the seven best mainstream themes that are popular for performance.
GTMetrix | |||||||
Performance | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Structure | 99 | 99 | 92 | 92 | 98 | 99 | 98 |
Total Size in KB | 120 | 68.7 | 74.8 | 75.8 | 277 | 60.70 | 49.9 |
CSS in KB | 18.9 | 20.7 | 30.3 | 30.5 | 54.8 | 21.4 | 17.5 |
JS in KB | 6.88 | 10.1 | 9.54 | 10.9 | 83.9 | 7.86 | 5.08 |
Fully Loaded Time | 629ms | 655ms | 730ms | 688ms | 896ms | 722ms | 622ms |
GTMetrix | GeneratePress | Astra | Kadence | Blocksy | OceanWP | Neve | Hello Elementor |
Total Page Requests | 13 | 9 | 13 | 9 | 26 | 10 | 10 |
CSS | 4 | 2 | 6 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 4 |
JS | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 14 | 2 | 1 |
PageSpeed Insights score on the default free version themes
PageSpeed Insights | Mobile | Desktop |
|---|---|---|
GeneratePress | 92 | 98 |
Astra | 99 | 100 |
Kadence WP | 100 | 100 |
Blocksy | 100 | 100 |
OceanWP | 99 | 100 |
Neve | 100 | 100 |
Hello Elementor | 100 | 100 |
Table of Contents
GeneratePress
The GeneratePress theme is lightweight and easy to use, making it one of the fastest WordPress themes. It is stable and secure because of its high coding standards.
You can also optimize it for search engines (SEO) before adding your content, boosting your Google rankings.
Additionally, this theme offers advanced theme options. The layout can be tweaked; demo sites can be installed, and more.
You can modify your website’s desktop and mobile versions with Elementor, a drag-and-drop page builder. You can create customized blocks without a page builder by generating blocks (a GeneratePress add-on).
In addition, the theme provides numerous templates for creating page heroes, content templates, custom footers, meta descriptions, and navigation.
Using these templates will save a great deal of time and money. With 30 days money-back guarantee, you can use this theme on over 500 websites.
I’ve been using the Premium version of GeneretePress for nearly two years now after moving away from Genesis Framework and I’ve managed to get 100/100 on PageSpeed score with a few steps. I highly recommend GeneretePress to build any type of website.
You can get the free version of GenertaePress here.
Astra
Next to our list of the fattest WordPress themes is Astra. With Astra, your website will load fast, rank well, and be fully responsive. You can get help with any issue with the theme’s support forum and active community.
The theme is also WooCommerce compatible and can be customized extensively. Having all the essential elements to create both e-commerce and blog websites is the advantage of using Astra.
With Astra, your content will get the attention it deserves without being drowned out by flashy animations.
On WordPress.org, Astra has over 5000 five-star ratings and 1.5 million active installations. All major page builders are compatible with Astra. Astra is an SEO-compatible affordable theme that can help you to make your desired WordPress website.
Kadence WP
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Kadence, a newer WordPress theme. The theme is highly customizable so that you can use it for any niche, similar to Astra and Blocksy (another entrant on our list).
WordPress Customizer offers many options, even in the free WordPress.org version of Kadence.
There are several features included in this WordPress theme, including Elementor Pro, Gutenberg, Beaver Builder, WooCommerce, LearnDash, Lifter LMS, and much more.
You can increase conversions by using lightweight pop-ups and other cool features in the Premium version. You can use transparent backgrounds, schema markup SEO, 100% responsive design, sticky header, CSS Pre-loading, and a good Footer Builder.
Blocksy
The Blocksy theme is an excellent option if you’re looking for a fast WordPress theme. You can also try the free version of the theme to understand whether it meets your expectations.
Blocky is lightweight and makes your website ultra-fast.
Additionally, it contains several features that can speed up the loading time of your site, including lazy loading images and async JavaScript.
You can customize everything on the page with Blocksy’s header builder. With WooCommerce integration, you can create impressive stores in no time.
Blocksy supports Google structured data and has schema built-in. Modern code is part of the theme’s performance capability to provide a smooth experience for the site owners and visitors. Get the free version of Blocksy here.
OceanWP
OceanWP is all about user-friendliness and you can import ready-to-use demo sites with a single click using the free import extension.
OceanWP comes with 11 premium extensions in addition to the 7 free extensions included in the free version.
In spite of the fact that OceanWP is not the fastest WordPress theme on the market, it is definitely worth considering when building an eCommerce store. Throughout your site, you can use one colour scheme.
It is possible to show/hide footer widgets, add a parallax footer, and even add a custom footer. On OceanWP, you can customize search pages and 404 pages, scroll to the top, add schema markup, and create retina logos. Get the free version of OceanWP here.
Neve
Neve can be customized in many ways, including colours, backgrounds, typography, fonts, headers, footers, and buttons.
Moreover, the theme offers 50+ ready-to-import starter templates. It’s compatible with AMP for WordPress, which helps your web pages load faster.
It is compatible with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Breadcrumb NavXT, and SEO Press). The theme works with most page builders and offers a great user experience.
The premium version offers customization options – custom layouts, Elementor add-ons, Type kit integration, Lifter LMS integration, Learn Dash integration, and white labelling.
The free version of the Neve theme has been used by over 3,00,000 active websites.
Hello Elementor
Hello Elementor is a plain theme for the Elementor page builder. Despite its fast load time and 300kb page size, we have placed this theme last on the list.
The theme does not offer any page customization. To create your pages and templates, you’ll need to install Elementor. Suitable for all Elementor versions and woo-commerce websites.
Your website will load fast on any device with this SEO-optimized WordPress theme.
Using the Elementor page builder plugin, you can customize your design. Neither the theme nor its settings page offers any design options. The theme works seamlessly with other translation plugins; creating RTL and multilingual sites is easy. You can find the Hello Elemetor here.
Final Words
Hope the seven fastest WordPress themes will help you to bring desired traffic to your website. The majority of these themes offer a free version, so you can decide whether to use it or not.
Are you looking for a multipurpose WordPress theme that loads blazingly fast? If yes, then you can use any of the themes that we have added to our list of the fastest Loading WordPress themes. Among these, I use and recommend GeneratePress.
