What are the 7 fastest WordPress themes out there? With a wide variety of free or premium themes available, choosing the right tool can certainly become an overwhelming process. That’s why we’re here today – to present some of the fast-loading, SEO-friendly, top-notch solutions that’ll bring your business to the next level.
GeneratePress
- Speed/Performance Score: 99%
- YSlow Score: 94%
- Total Size: 39.8KB
- Fully Loaded: 1.1 sec
- HTTP Requests: 10
Our first pick is GeneratePress, a popular and flexible theme with a focus on usability and speed. It’s an admirable SEO-friendly solution that will help you improve your rankings even before you add the content. How exactly is this possible?
Well, SEO optimized themes have a codebase that follows the best search engine practices. This way, it’s easier for Google bots to crawl your website and recognize it as relevant.
GeneratePress is a highly beneficial tool with a 5-star rating and thousands of people downloading it on a daily basis. No wonder, since we’re talking about a lightweight theme you can easily adjust to any preferred niche. It also pairs well with various page builders, together with Elementor, a helpful tool that modifies mobile and desktop versions of your site. Need to use it in some other language? No worries, it’s translation-ready for more than 20 of them.
This theme is free unless you want to upgrade it to the premium version. In that case, the price is $59 annually or $249 if you want to make it a one-time payment.
Astra
- Speed/Performance Score: 99%
- YSlow Score: 92%
- Total Size: 107 KB
- Fully Loaded: 0.9 sec
- HTTP Requests: 15
Astra is another lightweight, speedy, and highly customizable solution that’s lately been rapidly growing in popularity. Once it’s installed on your WordPress, you’ll see it has a completely prepared premade site where you can modify the majority of the theme’s elements without even touching the code. For instance, there are layout settings that offer an option of adding sidebars, headers, or single page layouts.
Its speedy and high-quality performance happens because of eliminating jQuery dependencies – which actually creates delays on your site. This particular theme also offers translations into different languages.
You can integrate Astra with some third-party plugins such as Yoast, LearnDash, or WooCommerce. As a matter of fact, it even has some special WooComerce-related settings you can’t find on some regular themes. So, is this theme worth trying? It absolutely is – and that’s something over a million active users and almost 5000 5-star reviews can confirm.
Same as with GeneratePress, Astra also gives a free base as well as the possibility of purchasing premium add-ons. The starting price for the upgraded version is $47.
Neve
- Speed/Performance Score: 99%
- YSlow Score: 93%
- Total Size: 57.6 KB
- Fully Loaded: 0.9 sec
- HTTP Requests: 12
Our third choice is Neve, which is another reputable, fast loading, and multipurpose theme where you can successfully base your content. It offers plenty of WordPress customizer controls, together with pre-built demo sites made with Elementor.
With Neve, you can modify the header and footer as well as get to choose amongst various layouts. In addition to that, Neve brings over 120 demo websites that may be an excellent starting point to set your WordPress site. The great news is around one-third of them are free.
Same as with previous options, the plain theme is also completely free of charge. The premium version, on the other hand, has a starting price of $59. It offers additional features such as blog boost, custom layout, header, and numerous updates that can help customize your site.
Zakra
- Speed/Performance Score: 99%
- YSlow Score: 87%
- Total Size: 97.1 KB
- Fully Loaded: 0.6 sec
- HTTP Requests: 16
Zakra is the next well-designed, speedy, and lightweight theme with plenty of demos that can help you create a rather unique look for your site. It successfully pairs with various page builder plugins. It’s AMP ready and fully responsive which means your website will be adjusted to any screen and device your visitors use.
One of the things you will certainly like about this theme is how well-documented it is compared to some other free ones. Zakra allows you to adjust your blog’s style with a wide range of grid designs and layouts. There are numerous typography options, rather flexible sidebars, and many more other customizing elements that will help with shaping your page the way you want to.
It’s multifunctional, but also has some eCommerce demos where you get essential customizing tools for your online store. It pairs with Elementor and is quite SEO-friendly.
Its core version is free, while the price for the premium option starts from $149. It actually goes higher, depending on the package you purchase.
Customify
- Speed/Performance Score: 99%
- YSlow Score: 90%
- Total Size: 381 KB
- Fully Loaded: 1.5 sec
- HTTP Requests: 19
Even the name suggests it – Customify is a fast loading theme that’s all about features allowing for advanced-level customization. It’s simple to use and easy to adjust to any type of content.
Customify brings numerous demo options that will allow you to be creative and change every part of your site in a preferred way. This tool is highly versatile which is why it especially comes in handy for small businesses, eCommerce, portfolios, or sites led by nonprofit organizations.
Its simplistic design offers a flexible header, sticky posts, left/right sidebars, and many other useful features that will come in handy for customizing your site.
It’s well compatible with Elementor and some widely used plugins like WooCommerce. This theme also comes as an excellent SEO solution that will help you reach higher Google rankings.
The price for the premium option starts at $59.
Page Builder Framework
- Speed/Performance Score: 98%
- YSlow Score: 93 %
- Total Size: 69 KB
- Fully Loaded: sec: 1.2 sec
- HTTP Requests: 11
If you’re looking for a minimalistic, yet well-balanced, combination of customization tools and speed, Page Builder Framework is it. This theme is lightweight and quite similar to GeneratePress and Astra. Still, as the name says, it’s actually more oriented to page building.
You can easily integrate it with page builders as well as develop a wide variety of website designs without interrupting the code.
Page Builder Framework is also an SEO-friendly tool that will certainly help you set up a page Google will be able to recognize as a valuable source of relevant information. You won’t have to struggle with adjusting the website to mobile or tablet screens, because this theme already does it for you.
X Theme
- Speed/Performance Score: 98%
- YSlow Score: 91%
- Total Size: 122 KB
- Fully Loaded: 1.2 sec
- HTTP Requests: 12
Maybe you’re up for X Theme? It’s a modern WordPress theme that brings various useful tools and excellent plugins that may help with extending the functionality of your website. It’s highly customizable so you can make almost any change that comes to your mind.
It’s also multifunctional and integrated with WooCommerce which is why it suits any type of business. Coupled with that, it delivers 5 different demos. Considering there are so many customizing features, you may think it’s not that fast – but it fully loads within 1.2 seconds, which is an excellent speed score.
Even if you don’t have any coding experience, X theme makes it all really simple with its drag-and-drop building system. Layout, navigation options, a choice of content blocks, template manager – it’s all there to help you out with giving your business a new dimension.
Conclusion
Site speed is one of the essential features that will, without a doubt, positively affect customer’s reviews. Not only that; it also improves your SEO ranking and boosts generating organic traffic. That’s the important step that eventually leads to attracting visitors as well as turning them into subscribers or customers.
Google ranking is another element crucial for your business. That’s why these 7 super-fast WordPress themes make this part way easier and turning your business into an SEO-friendly site before even setting the content. They are also quite helpful because each brings some different features and great customizing tools to modify your site in a preferred way.
All in all, it’s impossible to clear out which theme deserves a throne – which is why we hope this list can help you choose one that suits your needs best. Any particular WordPress theme you’d like to add here?
