Site speed is an important factor in web development. It can affect multiple areas of your business, from the loss of conversions you may experience if your site loads too slowly to the low Google rankings you may acquire if Google feels your site is too slow. In this article we've tested some of the fastest WordPress themes on the market for you. Let's take a look!
What affects site speed of WordPress websites?
Several different factors affect the performance of your WordPress theme and website. This includes the way it's designed as well as the code it uses. If your site uses too many animations or bloated code, your visitors may have trouble getting it to load as quickly as they'd like. Similarly, if you use too many unoptimized images, your pages may take longer to load as well.
How to optimize a WordPress site for speed
We’ve written a few articles on this topic if you’d like to optimize your site:
- How to optimize the performance of your WordPress theme and site
- Best caching plugins to speed up your WordPress site
- 5 Tips to speed up your WordPress site
- Monitor your WordPress site speed with these tools
- How to offload WordPress images to Amazon S3
Fastest WordPress themes
There's a lot that goes into site speed, but this post has you covered in terms of what WordPress theme to use to improve your site's overall performance. We checked some of the fastest WordPress themes and used the Pingdom / GTmetrix tools to test the performance of each theme’s main demo.
We tested each WordPress theme five times. The load times and scores you see below are the average of all five tests. It should be noted that nearly all of the demos produced alerts to use a CDN, optimize WordPress, minify JS and CSS resources, and optimize images. These were the main alerts that impacted the scores you see below, so there's plenty of room for additional optimization.
Fastest WordPress Themes
Popular Magazine WordPress Theme
MH Magazine
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.86s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 3.4s
- Pingdom Score: 88
- PageSpeed Score: 93
- YSlow Score: 87
MH Magazine is one of the most popular magazine & news themes for WordPress. This fast loading magazine theme offers plenty of customization options and flexible custom widgets to launch your editorial website. The MH Magazine theme has been performance optimized to not load unnecessary scripts or stylesheets for optimal performance and less bloat. There are various theme demos for this popular magazine theme available where you can see the flexibility of this WordPress theme which is suitable for editorial websites from basically any topic or content genre.
Dynamic WordPress Theme
Divi
- Pingdom Load Time: 962.4ms
- GTmetrix Load Time: 5.82s
- Pingdom Score: 82
- PageSpeed Score: 89
- YSlow Score: 72
Divi is a multipurpose WordPress theme powered by the Divi Builder, a powerful page builder plugin developed by Elegant Themes. The plugin gives you the ability to design and build your own website, even if you don't know how to code, but it also comes with over 20 pre-made layouts. Our performance tests were conducted with the Agency demo of this fast loading WordPress theme.
Stylish Magazine Theme
Braxton
- Pingdom Load Time: 1.396s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 3.1s
- Pingdom Score: 91
- PageSpeed Score: 63
- YSlow Score: 73
Braxton is a simple yet powerful, well-designed magazine theme. It comes with a single homepage demo, but it features a well-designed layout designed to display your latest and greatest content in a visual hierarchy. It also features a modern, chic style that suits nearly any niche.
Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme
Soledad
- Pingdom Load Time: 1.332s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 5.56s
- Pingdom Score: 83.6
- PageSpeed Score: 79.4
- YSlow Score: 63.2
Soledad is a multi-concept magazine theme that comes with plenty of homepage demos. Its main demos feature different layouts and cater to different niches. It even comes with over 300 options in the live theme customizer as well as different article layouts, a recipe plugin for food blogs, a review plugin for reviews and more. This fast loading WordPress theme is suitable for various topics.
Modern Newspaper Theme
Newspaper
- Pingdom Load Time: 1.69s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 4.5s
- Pingdom Score: 94
- PageSpeed Score: 95
- YSlow Score: 84
Newspaper is one of ThemeForest's best-selling newspaper and magazine themes. It comes with several homepage demos, each of which feature different layouts and different styles for a variety of different niches. It's designed for speed. It even comes with a specially-crafted mobile theme designed to improve the speed and overall user experience of the mobile version of your site.
Creative Multi-Purpose Theme
H-Code
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.956s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 3.72s
- Pingdom Score: 99
- PageSpeed Score: 55
- YSlow Score: 82
H-Code is a multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with over 50 ready-to-use homepage demos designed for different types of businesses and niches. It also comes with over 20 one-page demos that can be used as landing pages to introduce your services, your team and more.
Popular Restaurant Theme
ROSA
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.384s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 4.14s
- Pingdom Score: 78
- PageSpeed Score: 51
- YSlow Score: 59.2
ROSA is one of the most powerful restaurant themes available for WordPress. It allows you to display a dedicated menu on your site independent of dodgy PDFs and offer online reservations as well as ordering, the latter of which is possible through an integration with WooCommerce. It also integrates with four different page builder plugins, giving you the ability to tailor the theme to your needs.
Flexible Gaming Theme
GoodLife
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.532s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 5.98s
- Pingdom Score: 91
- PageSpeed Score: 88
- YSlow Score: 79
GoodLife is another multipurpose magazine theme. This one comes with a handful of demos, they all cater to different niches, including sports, gaming and fashion. It was designed with speed and SEO in mind, and it gives you multiple different ways to customize the design of your site. This includes the addition of five article layouts, four gallery and video pages, and three header styles.
Viral & Buzz WordPress Theme
Bimber
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.734s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 4.4s
- Pingdom Score: 85
- PageSpeed Score: 94
- YSlow Score: 84
Bimber is another powerful magazine theme, only this one is geared toward sites that produce "viral" content similar to media sites like BuzzFeed. It comes with several templates, layouts and styles for archive pages, headers, mega menus and more. It also features support for Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles, which help to improve the mobile version of your site.
Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme
Enfold
- Pingdom Load Time: 3.912s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 6.26s
- Pingdom Score: 90
- PageSpeed Score: 37
- YSlow Score: 73
Enfold is a popular multipurpose theme with over 120,000 sales on ThemeForest. It comes with two main demos that feature over 100 pages, posts, portfolio entries and products. It also comes with several additional homepage layouts for different niches and purposes. You can customize the design of this theme even further with the built-in, drag-and-drop layout editor.
Flexible Magazine WordPress Theme
Extra
- Pingdom Load Time: 2.85s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 18.3s
- Pingdom Score: 95
- PageSpeed Score: 45.4
- YSlow Score: 66
Extra is Elegant Theme's latest magazine theme. This one is powered by the Divi Builder, the drag-and-drop page builder plugin that powers the Divi theme. You can import one of the theme's demos to streamline the development process, but the Divi Builder gives anyone, coding knowledge or not, the ability to design and build their own pages.
Powerful Magazine Theme
Nexus
- Pingdom Load Time: 1.906s
- GTmetrix Load Time: 6.76s
- Pingdom Score: 93
- PageSpeed Score: 63
- YSlow Score: 77
Nexus is a fast loading magazine theme. It's a theme Elegant Themes released before Extra came out, but it still packs a punch. It comes with a homepage builder you can use to control the content that appears on the homepage as well as ad-support with several areas you can use to display ads.
Conclusion: Make use of fast loading WordPress themes
We've tested some of the fastest WordPress themes on the market and we hope that this article has been helpful to find a suitable WordPress theme for your website. In case you're looking for more awesome WordPress themes, these collections may be suitable as well:
