Finding the fastest WordPress themes from the overload of themes and templates is not that easy. So, today we provide you with the fast-loading WP themes that we have tested from a list of different categories/niches.
Does speed matter?
Imagine that you are lining up for coffee at a new coffee shop on the street. They have a great selection of coffees, but even though it is not the busiest hour, it takes more than fifteen minutes to receive your order. Will you go back to that cafeteria again?
If you have the patience of a saint, you will probably give him another chance. The same can happen if they make exceptionally good coffee. But the reality is that not everyone has the time or patience to tolerate slow service.
Similarly, this case applies when loading a website. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of visitors leave a site when the loading process takes more than three seconds.
With these statistics in mind, imagine the number of leads you would lose if they didn’t have the patience to deal with your slow site.
Of course, your content or products may be unique enough that new visitors will come back in the future. But sadly, in some cases, this is not going to happen either. Kissmetrics states that 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with the performance of a website do not return to the same site again.
In addition, the page load time will not only affect your traffic but also your search engine results pages (SERP). Therefore, poor web performance will hurt your sales and your brand awareness.
There are several factors that can affect the loading time of your page.
One of them is bad web hosting. The quality of the hosting provider’s performance contributes to your page load time. To avoid this problem, make sure you choose a web hosting provider with a good track record.
You can check with Hostinger, SiteGround, and Bluehost for the blazing speed performance and very affordable prices.
Related: How to Choose High Traffic WordPress Hosting 〉
Another factor that can cause this problem is the theme of your website. This is a very common problem on WordPress sites, as website owners tend to prioritize price and appearance over performance when choosing a theme.
Here are the top 10 Fastest WordPress Themes of 2021
Considering the number of WordPress themes out there, we’ve taken the liberty of making a list of the fastest ones to save you time and money. Our choice of themes is based on the aesthetic aspect of the design and the page load time.
Since the maximum tolerable time for a page to load in three seconds, the WordPress themes below have passed the Pingdom website speed test.
Table of Contents
1. Astra Themes
Astra theme is a great multi-purpose theme that is not only fast but contains tons of customization options for your dream website. It includes several pre-designed templates to choose from, but if something is pending, you can modify them to your fondness.
Whether you want to create a personal blog or an eCommerce store, Astra is one of the most versatile WordPress themes available today. Best of all, you don’t need any programming knowledge to get started on your project.
It is incredibly light and uses the best development standards to achieve a smooth and pleasant experience for your visitors.
Astra is also SEO optimized out of the box, easy to use, and packed with tons of useful widgets and features. If you ever run into trouble, you have an extensive documentation page to help you out.
With over a million active users, WooCommerce integration, and the promise to load your pages in less than a second, Astra is definitely a WordPress theme to be reckoned with.
Price start from $47
2. GeneratePress
GeneratePress has proven to be one of the fastest WordPress themes today. It’s a versatile theme in a small package, with support for several page builders, WooCommerce, and a variety of sidebar and widget layouts.
GeneratePress has huge popularity, as evidenced by its ratings and reviews. You can either download the free version or upgrade to the premium version to get more features.
Extra modules for typography, demos, colors, and more are included with the premium theme. The original theme file size, as well as the demo files, are both very small. This suggests that it will not slow down your website or cause server issues.
The price starts from $59 & the lifetime access is only $249.
3. Divi Themes
Divi is a popular name among WordPress users, and it’s a popular WordPress theme. Divi is Elegant Themes’ great product and a trusted name in the business, with thousands of customers. It’s a multipurpose/multi-niche theme with a ton of features and customization possibilities that let users create the website of their dreams. Divi Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder plugin is used to power the theme.
With a variety of design elements and modules, templates, header, and footer options, the Divi theme provides endless creative possibilities. Furthermore, the theme is totally responsive, meaning it will fit any device and screen size, as well as being SEO optimized and blazing speed.
Although there are other pre-made theme demos, we used Pingdom to evaluate the primary sample site. Just above is a summary of the results. The data on the 4.0 MB page loads in about 1.15 seconds, which is quite impressive.
Furthermore, the site performs faster than 86% of the sites tested.
Price: $89
4. Avada Themes
Avada is one of the best multi-functional themes as it offers a long list of demos to cater to your needs.
More than 50 demos are available for immediate use or to mix with each other and create the site of your dreams. You can import each demo with a single click and the customization process does not require custom code. How cool is it, huh?
Another great feature that Avada Theme offers is related to the General Data Protection Regulation of Europe. To help ensure that your website is GDPR compliant, Avada equips its users with GDPR tools to manage various privacy-related activities within your site.
With these GDPR tools, you can protect the privacy of your visitors and therefore build trust with customers.
Even though Avada has powerful functionalities, it is still one of the fastest WordPress themes with a 1.24 second load time. Your visitors and your business will appreciate the choice of this theme.
Price: $60
5. TheGem Themes
TheGem is one of the fastest WordPress themes that deserve to be considered. Launched by Codex Themes, TheGem offers 40 pre-designed demos for various types of websites that can be easily imported into your site.
It also has the customization feature with a powerful and extensive panel of theme options and drag-and-drop page building tools.
Related: 6 Best WordPress Page Builders Plugin of 2021 〉
With this option, TheGem makes it easy for non-tech savvy users to customize every corner of the site’s appearance.
Like Scalia, TheGem supports a number of translation, newsletter, e-commerce, and optimization plugins such as WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and MailChimp. In addition, it is fully responsive and compatible with mobile devices.
Thanks to the excellent quality of the images and icons optimized for Retina and its loading time of 2.00 seconds, TheGem will give your website maximum power.
Price: $59
6. Skylar Themes
Skylar makes sure that all types of websites can use its service. The six available demos cover not only popular sites like personal blogs and online stores, but also niche-specific ones like agencies and industry websites.
You also have a wide variety of customization options to make additional modifications through Visual Composer.
With the intention of satisfying all your needs, Skylar equips its users with the Ultimate Addon for Visual Composer plugin. With this, you will get 36 additional shortcodes to build a solid website.
Some examples of the use of these shortcodes are the insertion of animations, integration with Google Trends, and a countdown timer.
If we consider that Skylar has more than 820 template options and 75 shortcodes, it should be noted that the loading time is only 961ms. Did we also mention that it is optimized for SEO?
Price: $59
7. Newspaper Themes
Newspaper is another popular ThemeForest theme. The theme is the most popular in the magazine/news category, with over 60,000 users trusting it, and user ratings averaging 4.8 out of 5 stars. For online magazines, news websites, and blogs, the theme has a gorgeous look. The theme has YouTube integration, a rating system, a bbPress forum, BuddyPress support, and WooCommerce, among other features, to provide you with all of the tools you require on your website.
The Newspaper theme’s secret lies in its well-structured, SEO-friendly, and high-performing design. The performance grade for the default demo was 93 out of 100 when we tested it. The sample site takes 2 seconds to load. It takes 22 seconds and is faster than 66% of all websites evaluated.
Price: $59
8. TopNews Theme
TopNews is one of the fastest WordPress themes focused on news sites.
Built as a theme for news, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, TopNews specializes in organizing your content to be eye-catching and accessible directly from the home page.
As of this writing, TopNews offers 11 modern homepage demos that focus on popular niches like travel, food, and technology.
Still, there is a selection of header and menu styles that you can choose from to customize the appearance of your site. The Visual Composer page builder is also available to facilitate more elaborate modifications.
Also, all themes are fully responsive and SEO-friendly to help you gain long-term traffic. To make your site go viral even faster, you can use the TopNews social counter widget to keep track of social media activities.
With 1.87 seconds of load time, TopNews’ solid yet fast WordPress theme is definitely worth considering.
Price: $49
9. Adaline Theme
Adaline is one of seven magazine themes created by Themetry. Contrary to what multifunctional themes offer, Themetry does not allow large modifications to its themes. The only alteration allowed is related to the site’s color schemes.
The developers claim that this limitation is a strong point, as they do not want users to spend more time choosing between various options rather than making decisions.
That said, Adaline is perfect for users who don’t feel like dealing with too much customization.
Despite being a theme for magazines, Adaline can also act as a theme for fashion blogs. The frontend template has extensive support for hosting WordPress default widgets and multi-level menus, among other basic functions.
As for its load time, Adaline passed our speed test with a remarkable score of 560ms.
Considering the number of images it has when it is opened, it can certainly be rated as one of the fastest WordPress themes.
Adaline can be purchased separately for $69. But you can also buy Themetry’s seven theme pack for $99.
10. Jannah Themes
Another WordPress news theme that stands out from the competition is Jannah. With 27 pre-designed demos that can easily be imported with a single click, Jannah makes her services available to any type of website.
In addition to the powerful customization options, you can also upload your own fonts in case the available options don’t suit your needs. However, we imagine that you won’t need to use this feature as Jannah has over 800 Google fonts and 150 FontFace fonts.
To complement her elegant themes, Jannah equips her users with a ton of tools to improve the performance of your site. These tools include GDPR compliance assistance, Gutenberg support, and article-embedded ads.
One of Jannah’s standout features is its migration plugin. Jannah facilitates the migration process from 17 different themes without losing the data and shortcodes of your posts. Coupled with its 1.58 second load time, Jannah is one of the fastest WordPress themes out there.
Price: $60
11. Total Themes
With more than 40 pre-built demos with different tones and designs, Total Theme aims to satisfy the different tastes and needs of its users.
Plus, it comes with over 500 style options and 100 building modules, so you’ll have more than enough power to tailor your theme to your liking.
Additionally, Total Theme equips its users with premium add-ons to further improve site performance. With a payment of $59, you will not only get an impressive selection of web designs, but also powerful tools like Templatera, WPBakery Page Builder, and Slider Revolution.
Despite having the WPBakery page builder to facilitate the customization process, Total also provides more than 400 snippets to use through built-in hooks and filters. Thus, developers can make more comprehensive modifications without being limited by the capabilities of standard tools.
In addition to the default plugins mentioned above, Total also supports numerous third-party plugins such as Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, and Polylang. In addition to its 880 milliseconds of load time, we cannot fail to include Total on our list.
Price: $59
12. Wanium Themes
Looking for a simple but elegant WordPress theme? Wanium can help you with that. With a multi-concept theme and 18 demos suitable for various types of websites, you won’t have to fight hard to create the site of your dreams.
Plus, using Visual Composer as your page builder will make the creation and modification process feel like a breeze. You can also mix and match the features of each demo and create a new look for your website.
To facilitate your eCommerce needs, Wanium provides WooCommerce integration and ensures your site is SEO friendly. Along with the theme loading time, which only takes 1.35 seconds, and it’s an affordable price, we would say that it is a good opportunity to have one of the fastest WordPress themes.
Price: $16
