23 Fastest WordPress Themes (With Test Data) 2023

This Post Has 210 Comments

1. Thank you so much, I was looking for a fast and seo friendly themes for my website.

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   1. Abdur,

      Website load speed does dramatically affect SEO, so it is definitely worth it to invest in fast and well optimized theme. However, in most of the cases theme is not the main reason why your website is slow. Most of the problems comes from cheap shared hosting that are oversold and they just can’t handle all traffic and all websites on these services gets really slow.

      Other thing is that users have no idea how to optimized WordPress performance. There are plenty of great tools available for that such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and most webmasters are using these but their default settings does nothing and no one realizes it. Users thing that installing and enabling plugin will solve all problems but in fact you have to spend a lot of time tweaking plugin settings.

      Another this is that webmasters doesn’t spend time tweaking their shared hostings or even VPS configuration. There are some things such as cache and gzip that can be enabled for both shared hosting (for some with limited options but still) and VPS but not many bother to go that route.

      The last but not least is that webmasters tend to install much more plugins than they need, so website gets slow and they tend to blame theme for their slow loading website but it was their own fault in the first place.

      Reply

      1. Thanks for your comments, helpful

         Reply

      2. Thanks for this helpful post. I recently migrated from a free WP theme to a shared server and started using HighEnd theme, but now my page load speeds are slow. I’ve spent weeks trying to figure this out but I’m this close to just deleting that theme and going back to WordPress.

         I’ve installed the WP caching and WP optimize plugins but have left them on the default settings (I don’t know what any of the settings do/mean). I’ve read the documentation that comes with those plugins but they don’t shed light on how to tweak settings to maximize performance. Google Insights gives me a very poor score and talks about removing render-blocking Javascript and Optimizing CSS delivery. How does one do that?

         Reply

         1. Someint,

            Our website doesn’t score high on Google PageSpeed Insights or other testing tools but it still loads relatively fast and that’s the main important thing here. We use good hosing, CDN (Content Delivery Network) to get the most out of our website and i think we are doing great as our actual website load speed have improved significantly. In your case WP Super Cache does a good job with cache but it takes far too long for your server to load those cached pages because your server is slow because it is a shared hosting. And it doesn’t matter if you manage to fix render blocking javaScript problems and will optimize CSS it will still load slow because of your server. Personally I would start with better hosting such as one from WPEngine. They will also help with other optimizations to make your website as fast as it can be by using any free or premium WordPress theme.

            To get rid of render-blocking JavaScript and Optimize CSS delivery you need to properly configure WP Super Cache but it depends on what other plugins you use, what CSS and JavaScript files are included with your theme and how well they will work with minification as it might break some functionality when poorly configured. That’s why WPEngine and other WordPress managed hosting providers offers full support that will make sure to make your website fast and score high on performance tests like GTmetrix, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights and others.

            If you want to get done everything on your own you will have to spend a lot of time trying to find the right configuration that works for your plugins, themes and website setup in general and for beginners it might take forever to finally get there.

            Let me know if you have any other questions. For more information about WordPress hosting you might want to read this guide.

            Reply

            1. False Claims, although WPengine does use their own optimization to deliver good results however with few good wordpress plugins and other good hosting you can get similar and even better results .
               wpengine or any hosting will never be able to solve your render blocking issues unless you have a good theme period!
               we have tested wordpress with optimizing plugins on cheap hosting and achieved 30 on google performance then tried the same thing on wpengine and got 35 in the end not worth the migration for a normal website
               basically wpengine is good for high scaling ecommerce websites but usually ecommerce websites that are scaling they would usually do their own configs and opt-in for dedicated instances or their own aws instances so if you want to pay lots of cash into a hosting like wpengine to justify to your organization that you got the best thing out there based solely on price then you got it! but if you really care about your money you will realize that wpengine is just a front for all their affiliates such as cloudfare and theme creators and google cloud. BTW they will claim they have good support then you will say yeh it’s true but you will wait in queue for an hour minimum such great support

               Reply

         2. Yeo that is true!.
            I was a PHP Developer and on UpWork I was hire to Optimize the site with that theme.
            with WPML + Woocommerce Installed ( THE NIGHTMARE ) on siteground hosting.
            Suddenly I’ve got 504 – Time Out Error

            I think the Developer of HE theme does not care about how code run safely.
            I found tons of bugs and found tons of WP Query uses on every page they code!

            On Most of WP Developer recommend to avoid uses many of QP DB Query , and use alternative features for Building theme proccess.
            I try to debug this theme on my Virtual Machine , and I get Bad news, that the theme got tons of bugs and use much Database Query.

            WPML is heavy enough if implemented with Woocommerce Multilanguage Plugins, so if you want to use woocommerce multilanguage +WPML you must choose the Best Server, or if you doing little wrong setting, maybe your hosting account will be suspend!

            On this case I was successfully optimize this theme without change the code , but I must uses :
            1. Pagespeed Modules on Web Server
            2. Cache Plugin uses W3TC with memcache (Disk Enchanced is not fast enough).

            Don’t activate not important plugins that not very very important for your site.

            Reply

            1. Nawa or Aigars could you clarify which theme was mentioned above? I am looking for a new theme for a client and am wondering if the one mentioned above is the one I was looking into. The DB Query issues is precisely what i am concerned about. I have these issues occuring with other themes I have purchased that I need to replace.

               Reply

2. All WPlook themes are extremely fast, for example the Conference theme has 97% and we don’t use any cache plugins. I didn’t saw any other theme to have a better score.

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   1. I can’t open your site. Just looking for a new theme. Because now I am using Schema theme as mentoned above. But it’s not really works if we do not tweak in htaccess or W3 Total Cache.

      Reply

      1. Febrian,
         Thank you for your comment!
         Actually you are using eMaxStore WordPress theme by MyThemeShop and not Schema.
         WordPress by default is very slow and you need to use caching such as one provided by W3 Total Cache. If you have a proper server configuration and have created correct permission for your website files then W3 Total Cache will modify .htaccess file for you and you won’t need to do anything manually. If you are having problems with .htaccess file you must contact your hosting provider and explain what is going on as its their job to help with things like these.

         Like I mentioned before, all themes are very similar when it comes to performance and WordPress is slow by default, so it is your server configuration that can help. For example you can enable gzip compression, enable database, object and browser cache and that will dramatically improve your website performance. All above themes does have this things in place for their themes, so they load fast but they are not going to work the same way on your clean WordPress installation without any tweaking. The good news are that W3 Total Cache will help you with most of the optimization and you won’t need to write your own code as long as your server works like it should.

         Reply

   2. Really ?

      Conference has
      63 – mobile
      83 – web

      Screenshot: http://take.ms/wtcfn

      Reply

3. Thanks for showcasing some of the best themes. However i wanted some of the best themes for starting a tech. blog. Anyway these themes are great. I just wanted to tell you to use a larger font for the article as it’s slightly difficult to read. Thanks.

   Reply

   1. Ritwick,

      Tech news themes are not a problem as well and you just need to look in the right category. Here is an awesome collection that showcases the best tech news and magazine style themes. We have more than 140 unique theme collections available on our website and it is more than likely that you will be able to find the right theme for you.
      Let me know if you have any further questions about these or any other themes listed on the Colorlib.

      Reply

4. Wow. Thank you for this. I’m looking for a pink theme though

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5. I personally like Newsmag theme, because this theme is equipped with numerous features.
   Hopefully this finest collection will redirect my mind to right point.
   Thanks for sharing this informative idea.

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6. Nice templates. Still looking for a good one for photographers. Mine is ok but always looking for improvements

   Reply

   1. Robi,
      For photography WordPress themes you might want to check this theme collection for premium themes and this one for free themes dedicated for photography websites.

      Reply

7. Great article, thank you!

   I am considering the Parallax Pro with Genesis Framework as I’ve heard it is fast, however I notice that it has only received a Google Page Speed Insights score above of 68?

   I’m a photographer and looking for a customisable theme that offers speed and excellent SEO.

   Reply

8. Tracey,

   Parallax Pro Genesis child theme does score much higher on Google PageSpeed Insights. Most likely you tried to test iframe version of it with that blue responsive layout testing tool at the bottom. It won’t score high on tests because there is a lot of javaScript to be loaded. To test this theme properly you need to test that iframe itself and not the entire Genesis Framework testing platform as well as demo itself. Direct link to a Parallax Pro demo test on Google PageSpeed insights you can find here.

   Let me know if this helps.

   Reply

   1. wow — yes much faster when you pull out the iframe!

      Reply

9. Hey!
   Taskerr looking nice to me and when I clicked on demo to have a look, the link takes to other theme. It would be good to change the url. Anyways, this post is very nice.
   Thanks!

   Reply

   1. Sagar,

      There is no theme named Taskerr listed on this theme collection. Could you please have another look?

      Reply

   2. My bad. There was an error in theme description. I have fixed it now.

      When you click on Taskerr demo link default AppThemes demo will pop up and then you can switch to Taskerr theme using dropdown available in top bar. There is no direct demo link available and it always redirects AppThemes default template demo.
      Sorry for inconvenience.

      Reply

10. Thanks for this helpful article. I want to buy a theme for WP download manager

    Do you know if any of them are fast or how I can test them to see if they are fast enough?

    Reply

    1. Sam,

       Unfortunately, I am not familiar with WP Download Manager plugin, so not sure how it works and what themes will work with it. But above listed themes are the fastest premium themes that there is that still have all the functionality you would expect from a premium theme. If you will be sharing large downloadable files on your website then these theme won’t affect it and it is completely up to your web hosting to handle these downloads. WordPress and WordPress themes won’t affect file download speed by making it faster or slower as files and downloaded directly from hosting. If you are using a cheap shared hosting then you can’t expect that downloads are going to be as fast as you would download a file from Dropbox, Google Drive or other large file storage services.

       Let me know if you have any other question about these or any other WordPress theme listed on Colorlib

       Reply

11. Hello,

    The article was really good.
    But i am looking for website layout for fashion blogging. I am looking for a customisable theme that offers speed and excellent SEO.

    Thanks

    Reply

    1. Namrata,

       For fashion themes you might want to check this theme collection. From above listed themes I can recommend Braxton, Schema and Genesis.

       Since you are looking for WordPress themes they are SEO friendly by default because WordPress coding standards doesn’t allow to create something that isn’t SEO friendly. To optimize things even further you can use SEO by Yoast or some other free SEO plugin that will help with more advanced optimizations.

       WordPress by default is very slow and to make things even worse most of the websites are hosted on a shared hostings such as Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator and others. Their cheapest plans are dead slow because you are sharing the same server with thousands of other websites. If you care about website performance you should invest in a decent managed WordPress hosting such as WPEngine, Pagely, Kinsta or others. These hosting providers will help you to optimize any WordPress theme to load it incredibly fast.

       Like I said WordPress is dead slow by default and it doesn’t matter which theme will you choose because it won’t make it any faster or slower. The main thing is to implement proper caching. This can be done from server side (managed hosting providers will do this for you) or you can spend time configuring W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Rocket. All plugins does the same thing but all of them have hundreds of different options and you need to test your website extensively to find the right configuration for your website.

       To find out more about how to choose the right hosting for WordPress you might want to read this guide.

       Let me know if you have any other question about WordPress performance, hosting or themes.

       Reply

12. Awesome template, i think wordpress and seo very Amazing. 🙂

    Reply

13. I agree with Aigars. WordPress is slow by default and finding a good managed host is even more important than the themes. I’ve used the same theme at GoDaddy and now at RoseHosting and the difference is enormous.

    Reply

14. Really Great Collection. Wanted a very fast theme.

    I chose Schema from the list.

    Thanks.

    Reply

    1. Felix,

       You are actually using Dynamik Website builder which is powered by Genesis. Still a great theme but it is not Schema.

       Reply

15. Hi Aigars,

    I see you put Avada theme on the right side in the first paragraph.
    I really like the Avada theme.It will be perfect for my site, but I am afraid that with all its great functionalities, it could hurt the Seo optimization.
    Is Avada a fast theme ?
    Thank you

    Reply

    1. Hi Daniella,

       Avada is by far the most popular premium WordPress theme ever released. It got there because of its outstanding functionality and well optimized code base which is fast to load and completely SEO friendly. However, I see that you are among those who believes that themes are what slows your website down the most. The truth is that in most cases it’s your hosting provider. Recently we wrote an article about how to choose the right hosting for your website. We recommend managed hosting for any WordPress website because it will make your website at least 3x times faster and several times more reliable and secure. This service comes at cost but if speed is crucial (it is a major SEO ranking factor and helps to improve conversion rates and makes your users happy) for you then managed hosting is the right choice.

       Let me know if you have any other question about Avada theme or WordPress hosting and I will be happy to help.

       Reply

       1. I use for testing, and with speedinsights 81 and Kingdom 66. On same server (for testing uses only) others templates 89 / 92

          Server it’s Nginx 10.1 with module page speed.

          Slowly, too many js, too many code.

          I’m looking for quickly templates.

          Reply

          1. Make sure to use Autoptimize or some other CSS and JavaScript file combination and minification tool to reduce number of files. Better yet use HTTP/2 and don’t care about multiple files altogether since it uses parallel downloads. You won’t score high on oldschool website performance test tools such as Pingdom or Google Page Insights but your website will load much, much faster.

             Reply

       2. Hello Aigars. When you say “managed hosting” do you mean someone who has a dedicated VPN? Thanks. My Avada is on my own VPN and it’s speed ranking isn’t the best. I’m wondering if there is a better option.

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          1. I think you are mixing VPN with VPS. VPN means Virtual Private Network also know as proxy. VPS on other hans is Virtual Private Server (usually shared). The thing with VPS is that you have allocated resources and freedom to install whatever you want but in most cases no one knows how to implement a proper caching and optimisations to actually make a fast website. That’s why managed hosting is for where experienced professionals will tweak your server to run exactly your website as fast as it is possible.

             Reply

16. Thanks for sharing! What about Socially Viral??

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    1. Pier,

       There are just too much themes out there, so we can’t list all of them on this list. If you are looking for SociallyViral theme review you can find it here.

       Reply

    2. 🙂

       Reply

17. Hi there. thanks for the article & links.. and support in the comments!
    I’m looking into creating a new wordpress site (online presence for a print magazine) using a theme as a basis.
    Themes rarely list performance as an attribute, but in our experience, many of the do-it-all themes (color pickers, drag and drop etc) sacrifice performance for admin user friendly-ness..

    Do you have any recommendations as to how one could assess performance of a theme prior to purchase?
    Will page speed be accurate if run on themeforest for example? …or should we be looking out for a theme built on bootstrap or something? ….any tips during this selection process will greatly assist time and efforts put into themes that may just never be able to speed up!

    Thanks in advance!
    Jim

    Reply

    1. Jim,

       Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTmetrix and other tools shows how well theme demo website is optimized and not how fast/slow is theme itself. If theme developer have invested in decent WordPress managed hosting their score will be much higher than those who are trying to showcase their themes on cheap shared hosting.

       There aren’t any huge difference between premium theme performance and the main difference comes from hosting you use. If you are using a shared hosting or VPS with default apache and nginx settings you can’t expect it to load fast under any circumstances. It is all about caching and well optimized hosting for WordPress that’s why managed hosting is so popular and well regarded. These hosting providers have done everything to make sure your WordPress website loads as fast as possible using any premium WordPress theme even one that has no optimization and code is written by a newbie developer.

       Here you can read more about WordPress hosting and what you should keep in mind when you choose the right hosting for your projects.

       Like I said, you can choose any theme but you must do other things right and hosting is by far the most important thing to get done right.

       Let me know if you have any other question about WordPress performance and I will be happy to help.

       Reply

18. This post is total BS.

    Reply

    1. Alonso,

       Thank you for your feedback! Please let me know why you think that his post is total BS. Just coming up with statement like this doesn’t say much unless you can come up with reasonable explanation. Looking forward to your response.

       Reply

19. I’m using Schema from MyThemeShop on most of my sites. It is really clean and fast loading with CloudFlare. Seems they are inspired from copyblogger design. Thanks for lot for letting me know more fast loading themes.

    Reply

    1. Amar,

       You are actually using shared hosting from InMotion and don’t have CloudFlare enabled at all. However, you have done a good job using W3 Total Cache and your website loads really fast for a shared hosting. Just in case others others are looking how to implement caching they should refer to this guide. Another thing is that you are not using Schema theme by MyThemeShop but Genesis Child theme. Which is not the same thing. Genesis is an amazing theme framework for WordPress and I can highly recommend it for everyone. Also Schema theme is the beast and is SEO friendly and incredibly fast.

       If you are thinking about enabling Cloudflare on your website I wouldn’t recommend it unless your website is under attack, undergoes heavy DDoS or receives traffic that you otherwise can’t handle. Your website is now really fast and Cloudflare will just slow it down because of extra DNS request that goes through their services. Time To First Byte (TTFB) will increase dramatically and that’s something you don’t want to experience. If your hosting is unable to handle traffic and your website is under attack there is no better way to protect it from downtime than using CloudFlare but otherwise don’t use it.
       For other who haven’t done a proper homework and their website doesn’t have a proper caching in place I do recommend CloudFlare because it could make your website faster and more reliable.

       Reply

20. I see that you know a lot about WordPress themes and WordPress performance in general. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us! Do you have any hosting recommendation that would go well with Divi WordPress theme by ElegantThemes?

    Reply

    1. Winifred,

       Thank you for your comment!

       I have tested a lot of hosting options for Colorlib and during the last 3 years I have switched between 6 WordPress hosting providers and 14 different service plans. Which means that I have changed hosting every 6 months. Right now I have found the fastest and most cost-efficient WordPress hosting. The took 3 months to setup and test everything and it is still under heavy monitoring because there are so many thing that can go wrong with it but at least it’s fast. If I would choose fully managed WordPress hosting for Colorlib I would end up paying $1,800-4,200/month and that’s something you can’t afford if you are running a simple blog. The main setback is amount of data Colorlib uses each month (several terabytes) and its gets expensive really fast.

       If you get only few thousand visitors each day it’s not a major problem a at all and every hosting plan will be able to handle it with ease. Your monthly hosting bill is not going to exceed $30/month if performance and reliability is important for you, $10 if you are willing to implement your own caching or $3-4 if you don’t care about performance at all. All these hosting options will be able to handle Divi theme but you will see a noticeable difference in performance. When it comes to hosting you get what you pay for.

       To find out more about WordPress hosting you might want to check this simple yet informative guide on how to choose the right hosting for your WordPress website.

       Let me know if you have any questions about WordPress hosting or WordPress performance in general.

       Reply

21. Great article and great looking themes! Thanks for putting this one together for us.

    Reply

    1. Dean,

       Thank you for your feedback! Comments like these are what keeps us going. Thank you!

       If you have any questions about WordPress or theme performance, please let me know.

       Reply

22. Hello Aigars,
    thanks for the sharing the useful info.
    Can you tell me some Fastest loading FREE themes.
    I can’t afford to buy premium themes
    Thanks

    Reply

    1. Rahul,

       Most free WordPress themes are fast by default. The thing is that it is hard to find fast performing premium themes because they are packed with loads of features that slows down your website. Most free WordPress themes are very simple with limited functionality but as a result these themes loads much faster than most premium themes. In that in mind, you can feel free to choose any of these free WordPress themes.

       Reply

23. Thanks. thank you so much!

    Reply

    1. In your case switching to a new WordPress theme is not going to be enough and you will have to change your hosting provider as well. You are now using Apache which was great back in the days but now Nginx is the default standard for WordPress because it runs so much faster on it. You can check our website’s performance to understand what I mean by that. Our hosting runs on Nginx and our CDN uses Nginx as well and this is a killer combination.

       If you can’t decide which hosting provider is the right one you can check this WordPress hosting guide.

       Reply

24. I faced many problems while optimizing some of these wordpress themes for getting Google Speed Insight 100% score so I finally migrated my web-site to Drupal solution, If you would like I can post the tips how to avoid problems with Speed Insight optimization in Drupal.

    Reply

    1. Austin,

       High Google PageSpeed Insight score doesn’t mean that your website is fast. It might be good optimized but there is a chance that you might over optimize it therefore causing more problems than getting any performance benefits. With Colorlib we don’t do any site optimizations such as minification, file combination or anything of that sort but we believe that a good hosting is what matters the most. If you will browse around our website you see that we have done good as our website pages have 30 images each but still loads incredibly fast on any device and network anywhere in the world because of hosting and CDN.

       Reply

25. It is always hard to choose the right theme for every blog. I have tried quite a few and google analytics metrics are similar but little downs and ups make the difference right? I think I will prove Foundly… hope die at last

    Reply

    1. Usana,

       WordPress is slow by default and no WordPress theme will help to magically speed things up. I see that you have already done optimization for your website using W3 Total Cache but you are missing the most important thing here – good WordPress optimized hosting. You can do whatever you want with your website but as long as you are using Bluehost you have no chance to make the fastest website around. For that you need a WordPress specific hosting with nginx, fast_cgi and memcached or Redis. That’s what SiteGround offers for a very reasonable price.

       Reply

26. whats the fastest genesis/studiopress theme you recommend for a site selling 1-3 products and blog? I’m thinking something that will still be fast with woocommerce

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    1. Mike,

       Default Genesis starter theme is going to be the fastest. However, WordPress themes have very little to do with performance. Most of the performance comes from your hosting provider. If you are using some shared hosting such as one from Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator or other then you can use any theme out there and your website will still be slow because of WordPress. WordPress is slow by default and that’s not a secret but if you are using a well optimized WordPress hosting just like we are then you can achieve outstanding performance. Our recommended hosting providers are SiteGround for small websites and WPEngine for larger websites or multiple website.

       Reply

27. Hi there colorlib,
    Thank you for some really great insight on the WP univers and on what to look for when going through all the web hosting services out there. A really great site with loads of info.

    I´m looking into buying a WP theme and hosting in the near future, but would like to get some advise if possible.

    In the above article you highlight “speedy” themes and I´ve got my sight´s on Stockholm from this article and Corpus, Kalium or Avada from some of the other articles on colorlib. But what about security ? Are all themes build equally secure (if just WP is kept up to date)?

    From searching the great internet I found articles stating that one should bye Premium WP themes (maybe you can elaborate on the term premium a what makes a theme Premium). Studiopress with there Genesis framework comes up as build with SEO and security in focus. Is the “security” phrase just a marketing term or are there any truth behind it? To me the Studiopress themes is not that pleasing to my eye design wise. But would a studio Press theme be a good investment with regards to SEO, speed and security in mind?

    And what kind of backup strategy would you recommend when you have your site up and running besides the one that the hosting service provides for a newbee ? Would something like a VaultPress subscription be a good investment?

    I know there is a lot of questions but I would really appreciate you answers as I´m a new to this world of WP:)

    Thank you for your time/

    Kind regards Jorgen

    Reply

    1. Jorgen,

       1. For small website we recommend SiteGround which is the only shared hosting provider with managed hosting style functionality. SiteGround has WordPress specific cache and other optimizations that will make your website to load much faster than using any other shared hosting for WordPress. Right now you can save up to 60% on their hosting using this link.
       For larger sites we recommend WPEngine which offers even more personalized service with some advanced features but it is going to be costly for a simple website. But if you can afford it, then it is totally worth it.

       Siteground also offers daily updates to your website and store those updates for 30 days. Therefore I don’t think that it is worth to invest in VaultPress unless your site receives hundreds of comments, forum threads and new posts. If you are going to build a static website then there is no point of VaultPress as long as you go with SiteGround or WPEngine that offers daily updates.

       2. “Security” is just a sales pitch. The main thing is to choose theme which is regularly updated, that way you can know that all bugs will be fixed. WordPress it not bulletproof and new security vulnerabilities are discovered from time to time and same goes with plugins and themes. Continues development is the key here because developers aren’t creating themes and thinking, “let’s leave a vulnerability here”. Everyone thinks that their code is the most secure one until someone finds that it isn’t and reports it back to developers.

       3. SEO is yet another sales pitch. WordPress itself is SEO friendly and it is hard to break something with themes. For more SEO flexibility we recommend to use Yoast SEO, All in One SEO or other WordPress SEO plugins but it is only optional and is better suited for advanced users.

       Reply

       1. Hi Aigars,
          Thank you so much for your fast and informative reply. I really appreciate it and the fact that you share your insight´s on the topics to a newbie like myself on your site. Great to pickup on clues from articles and comments on the site.

          Thanks/

          Jorgen

          Reply

28. I’m moving a friend’s video-centric multimedia Blogger fan site to my self-hosted WP. She has over 3500 posts. I have been searching all week for the best responsive theme to support that kind of content, much of which is archival, without ending up with horribly slow load times. I’m not a developer but know enough to get by. Can you make any recommendations for a magazine type theme that can handle Embedly (she uses many different sources), can preview videos on Homepage, and has at least one video slider (she loves sliders, bless)? Love this page and your answers to questions. So glad I stumbled upon it. Isla.

    Reply

    1. Isla,

       Thank you for your question!
       WordPress can easily handle millions of entries without any problems. It’s built to scale and can be used for very large and well trafficked websites. However, most cheap shared hostings are built for small static websites or small blogs. If you want to get the best possible performance you should get a hosting which is specially built for WordPress with all its requirements in mind. For smaller websites we recommend SiteGround and for larger we recommend WP Engine.

       Siteground and WP Engine will be able to handle 3500 posts like nothing but once you will receive loads of traffic WP Engine will handle it much better. Still SiteGround is far better than any other shared WordPress hosting out there but it has its limits. That’s where WP Engine comes into the game. It is more expensive but you get what you pay for.

       This thread is not the best one for magazine style themes and you might want to check this one instead. All of those themes can be used with videos on front page and inside posts. So that’s not a big problem at all. Themes that supports Revolution slider also supports video inside slider. Therefore you can choose the one you like the most from design perspective and not concentrate too much on functionality and performance as long as you use my recommended hosting providers.

       Reply

29. I am interested in the theme NEXUS. Because of its model boxes: D

    Reply

30. Thanks for the list of high speed websites.
    Our team uses Google Page Speed Insights for every page we build. We like it more than the Pingdom tool

    Reply

    1. Jason,

       Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom are two completely different tools. Google PageSpeed Insights shows how well your page is optimized but it doesn’t show how fast is your website unless it has some serious speed problems then it shows that it is slow. Pingdom on the other hand shows how fast is your website and does very little to offer information how optimized it is. There are some metrics but those aren’t as important as speed which is put in front as the most important one. Personally I am using Pingdom a lot more than PageSpeed Insights because I care about performance and not how well the page is optimized. I spend a lot more time in server performance optimization therefore I don’t care how big are images on how many CSS files I have because I know that good server will make it up for it.

       Reply

31. Hi, I run a magazine that publishes mostly literary stuff and wishes to go quarterly soon—publishing 4 issues a year. Could you suggest a fast, minimal theme with not too much clutter on the homepage and meant for longform writing?

    Reply

    1. Debojit,

       We have a dedicated list on WordPress themes that are well suited for longform writing. You can find this list here.
       Regarding theme performance. As we all know WordPress is slow by default but with some slight tweaking it can load very fast. For that you need hosting which is specially built for WordPress. For smaller websites we recommend SiteGround and for more popular ones we recommend WP Engine. While most hosting providers does advertise that they are built for WordPress they actually aren’t. 99% of hosting providers doesn’t have WordPress specific cache and that what makes the main difference.

       Reply

32. Hey,

    I am a bit confused between Schema by mythemeshop and newsmag by themeforest.
    If you have the same choice what will you choose keeping loading speed, SEO and Ad optimization in mind?
    Please suggest me the best among newsmag and schema.

    Thank You,
    Karan

    Reply

    1. Karan,

       Schema theme is lighter therefore it will load faster than Newsmag theme. However, difference won’t be noticeable if you are using some well optimized WordPress hosting such as SiteGround or WP Engine.

       Other things such as SEO, AdSense, schema markup are there for both themes. If you are using a low quality hosting then Schema is going to be a better alternative but with a good hosting you can feel free to choose the only you like better.

       Reply

33. You refer to host ‘speed’ as being very important. How I can assess our current website host?

    Are Time To First Byte (TTFB) issues related to something in my configuration or a server-side configuration; possibly a server-side configuration that I could change? I see a lot of “waiting” in our speed-test results.

    Reply

    1. Pam,

       Time To First Byte (TTFB) is very important and you can assess it using free website performance test tools such as GTmetrix.
       You can tweak your server setup only if you are using dedicated server or VPS. None of server tweaks done via cPanel or other hosting control panel won’t bring any benefits. Once you are have access to server you can implement custom cache, add HTTP/2 support and install a better database platform. This is something you can’t do using s shared hosting unless you use SiteGround which has my mentioned WordPress performance improving tools enabled by default.

       Reply

34. When is someone going to do a speed comparison of load time of the WooThemes themes? These are the only themes that get someone support from Woo. We need barebones new install load times. For example (with the same size header logo on each):
    Theme | loadtime desktop | loadtime mobile
    Canvas | 0.54 seconds | 0.43 seconds
    Hustle | 1.02 seconds | 0.89 seconds
    and so on.

    This is important in help choosing a theme. Anytime something goes wrong, Woo support will first look at the theme and plugins. If an alien theme that they did not create, then you are stuck.

    Reply

35. Every theme I’ve tested is full of bloat! Sure, looks good, but try real-world speed testing (such as GTMetrix) and you find bloat bloat bloat! Isn’t there any theme out there that does basic bootstrap but doesn’t add all the other crap (google fonts, font awesome, sliders, 300kb images, preload video viewers, blah blah blah?

    Reply

    1. Jeff,

       You need to get some web dev basics in place.

       1. Google Fonts are fast because they are embedded on millions of websites therefore they are already cached inside user browsers. They aren’t loaded each time again and again. Make sure to use popular Google fonts such as Open Sans and you won’t see slow load speed. GTMetrix is not a real-world example because it doesn’t store any cache therefore it loads fonts over and over again. Your browser doesn’t.
       2. In case you aren’t using any icons on your website you can remove Font Awesome completely. You can do it by just commenting out code from functions.php. 20 seconds of hard work.
       3. 300kb images? None of these themes comes with images included. Images are part of theme demo to showcase what this theme is capable of. They won’t magically appear on your website for no reason.

       Reply

36. What are the scores for the GoodLife theme? We are running our site on the ET Divi theme and it’s super super slow so are looking for alternatives.

    Reply

    1. Divi theme is not really that slow theme and in your case it is your content and hosting to blame.

       1. Your website is hosted with Godaddy and it is on the same server with 320,085 other websites. By that I mean that you share the same exact physical hardware with over 300,000 other websites. It is just insane amount given that Colorlib is hosted alone on its server. Here is a proof about your website and Godaddy:
       
       There is no way to optimize your website to load fast as your website performance depends on all those other thousands of users on your server.

       2. Another thing is that while you blame Divi theme, there are 38(!) files loaded on your website’s frontend by plugins. It is way too much.

       3. Some of your images at least on frontend of your website are over 1MB in size. That’s completely unacceptable for a website like yours. Large images would be accepted only if you are distributing professional photographies or desktop wallpapers for 4-5k resolution displays but that’s not the case.

       Changing theme to another one is not going to make your website faster because of my above mentioned reasons.

       Reply

       1. Please see my comment below regarding this theme. There are issues with it far beyond speed.

          Reply

37. And as a follow-up, the scores for Soledad. Something tells me that the two themes i like are probably the slowest of the bunch! Thanks for this round-up!

    Reply

38. apprecaite your comments re. hosting and its effect vs actual theme but if you had to choose between avada, enfold and divi and you were trying to create an seo focussed site which would you choose ?

    Reply

    1. I would choose one that I like from design perspective. My first choice would be Divi, then Avada and then Enfold. Still Enfold is an amazing theme as it is among the best selling themes ever released for WordPress but my personal favorite currently is Divi. That might change as these themes are actively developed and there were time when Avada felt better designed than Divi. You can’t go wrong by choosing either of those themes.

       Reply

39. I am using SEO WP – most of demo content, so no extra heavy images etc. It is very slow! I am very unhappy, just not bothered to change the website now as all my business is generated from word of mouth, but articles like these are very misleading…

    Reply

    1. Juliette,

       Did a quick analysis for your website and here are things I found:
       1. You are hosting your business website on a hosting which cost $2.45/mo. That’s just insane. I won’t perform as good as WordPress specific hosting such as WP Engine that costs starting $20/month. When it comes to hosting good old saying “You get what you pay for” is generally true.
       2. You don’t have any caching installed whatsoever.
       3. Theme accounts for 1/5 of your CSS and JavaScript files and the rest comes from plugins.

       For more website performance tips please read this guide.

       Sorry for harsh answer but I really don’t like when users blame themes for their slow website and yet they have made a fundamental mistakes on their own that are not theme related.

       Reply

       1. SEO WP has a 69% score on mobile!!! So, who is misleading now? Everyone can check this! Even your website has 70%… pathetic

          Reply

          1. Did you know that well optimized website not necessary mean it will load fast? We don’t care about Google PageSpeed Insights for our website because I have done everything for it to make it load fast and not optimized it to score high on tests. Another thing is that Google PageSpeed Insights is also outdated because it gives suggestions that are no longer relevant since there is HTTP/2 around for a year now and Colorlib does use it to fullest. Things such as CSS and JavaScript file combinations are no longer necessary and you can live with minification only but PageSpeed Insights doesn’t take that into account.

             I would recommend to do your own research instead of believing automated tools. And don’t try to optimize your website to score 100 on PageSpeed Insights because it won’t meant that your website will become fast but instead test your website for load speed and that’s what matters the most.

             Please let me know if you have any questions about website performance and I will be happy to help.

             Reply

40. Thanks for the list. I am about to switch to Schema. I am on the free theme which is Sugar and Spice. It has been great so far, but I noticed that there has been an increase in the number of https requests so I would like to try other theme to see if it is taken care off.

    Reply

    1. Tung,

       What did you mean by “https requests” do you mean number of “HTTP Requests” or some other thing? If you mean “HTTP requests” then you can reduce those by using cache plugins such as WP Rocket or use some latest technologies such as HTTP/2 that eliminates this problem thanks to parallel downloads.

       Reply

41. Are the Google PageSpeed Insights scores that you note for the themes for scores for MOBILE or for DESKTOP?

    Reply

    1. Dev,

       In this case these are desktop PageSpeed scores.

       Reply

42. I use enfold theme. The initial page load speed is very slow. Can anyone help me to identify the problem? Thanks.

    Reply

    1. George,

       You have implemented and properly configured cache and CSS and JavaScript minification and everything works as expected. That’s as fast as your website will get while hosting it on Bluehost or any other cheap shared hosting. With hosting you get what you pay for and paying $5 is not going to provide the same service as paying $30 or even more a month. To put into perspective, it costs us 4 digits a month to host Colorlib and you can clearly see that in our website performance. Of course you don’t need this much bandwidth, CPU and RAM but you still need a proper WordPress hosting such as WP Engine. They will help to make your website much faster. You can also read our review and check benchmarks.

       Reply

43. Hi.
    You were kind enough to answer a question of mine on another page, and I hope you will let me “pick your brain” again! I tried to find an answer elsewhere first, but was unable to. I have chosen a hosting provider but haven’t yet set up my actual site. You told me not to worry about the theme, and I have it narrowed down to a few, but there is something I don’t understand: I notice that some examples show the page’s “tags” displayed right on the page, visible to users. Others do not. What is the difference? And is the term “tags” synonymous with “keywords” in this case? I hope you can clear this up for me. Thank you in advance!

    Reply

44. Thank you, I think I will use the newsmag. Currently installed system Jono theme.

    Reply

45. Based on this review, and other testing with Pingdom and Google, I went ahead and purchased the Goodlife theme. Unfortunately, it uses the WP Bakery Visual Composer plugin. I attempted to build a site on my shared hosting service (which isn’t the lowest end of offerings), and the plugin maxed out the CPU. It was so bad, I couldn’t even upload photos anymore. In the end, I had to resort back to my old theme. This was an utter waste of $50. It might load quickly if you have dedicated hosting, but not otherwise. In short, this article ended up not being very helpful, given that the one recommendation purchased after reading this, was a total waste.

    Reply

46. Hi Aigars,

    May I know what’s speed test scores for Goodlife theme?

    Reply

    1. Jon,

       It scores 90/100 in Google PageSpeed Insights. However, it is not very relevant metric since it shows how well their hosting works. In your case you might score much lower if you won’t invest in a good hosting. Here you can read more why good hosting matters and how to choose one.

       Reply

47. DROPDOWN MENU BLOCKING PAGE VIEWS ON iPHONE 4 –

    Your readers may want to know that ROSA 2.1.0 malfunctions on iPhone 4’s and iPhone 3’s. While aware they are quite old iPhone models, I know a lot of people still using iPhone 4. If they review a web site built with ROSA 2.1.0 they will be faced with about ninety percent of their browser screen filled with the menu (that doesn’t go away on page re-load and shows on all pages of the site).

    SLIDESHOW HEADER CONCERN –

    Another concern pro web developers may have with ROSA 2.1.0 is that the slider header doesn’t include the ability to hyperlink each slide image to a different page!

    Stephen Bradley – creative director
    veetoo UK

    Reply

    1. Stephen,

       Thank you for your feedback about ROSA theme. I don’t have iPhone 4 or older to test it but it works perfectly fine on iPhone 6, 6S Plus and iPhone 5. Which accounts for majority of iPhones these days. However, you should still report this problem to PixelGrade as they probably are not even aware of this problem and it might be a very easy fix.

       Reply

48. Thanks for posting, anyone can suggest a fastest with visual composer ?

    Reply

    1. Manny,

       Stockholm is my favorite theme that comes with Visual Composer. It is also fast to load.

       Reply

       1. I will have to do this test thanks!

          Reply

49. What hosting can you suggest for a fast loading site? Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Wilson,

       The best price/performance ratio is for WP Engine as you can get firely cheap fully managed WordPress hosting with them. However, there are loads of other such as Kinsta, Pagely, Flywheel but they are much more expensive. The main reason is because their hostings are built for larger and more trafficked websites and might not be the right fit for everyone.

       Reply

50. Thank you Amit for sharing fastest loading WordPress themes.I used Schema and I can say it is responsive and loads very quickly.But I didn’t know all these alternative WP themes.Thank you so much.

    Reply

51. Very deceptive article disguised as FREE, nasty

    Reply

    1. Kim,

       There are no mention for “Free” in title of the article. It might show up among top results when you look for free WordPress themes because we have plenty of them available here.

       Reply

52. Thanks for great themes. But as you know page speed depends on many factors and hosting as you mentioned is very important.

    Reply

53. Thanks for sharing these information !
    Can u suggest me a theme for a Digital Agency ? It would be something like creative,innovative & great user interface, need to work & look great on both desktop & mobile ! Currently , I’m looking at lorem theme & Stratus theme.

    Reply

    1. Lorem and Stratus are great themes for digital agencies and both will get the job done in a similar manner. Other options that you might want to consider can be found here.

       Reply

54. hi,

    I have been using sportsmag and I am getting issues setting up my ad units on the homepage.

    can you suggest how do i add a code to place ad at the desired location ?

    Thanks

    Reply

    1. Hey Akhil,

       Please make sure to contact SportsMag developers directly. This isn’t our theme therefore we don’t provide support but theme developers will be happy to help you.

       Reply

55. Great article and comment responses. I’d like to host for specifically UK visitors so don’t need CDN but need a good UK host. Is it too much to ask if you can recommend any? I’m on a premium uk reseller host at the moment using Cloudflare (which I’m planning to come off). Any suggestion welcome

    Reply

    1. Victor,

       I am not aware of any good UK hostings but the thing with hostings in general is that large hosting providers have servers in many locations. For example we are using WP Engine and our server is based in NY but we could as well locate it in London, India, Singapore or any other of their locations. Just make sure that hosting provider you choose have server closer to your audience any just go with it. Not necessary it will be advertised as UK hosting as most large hosting providers are headquartered in US but has their servers all over the world.

       Reply

56. So Schema and Best are the two fastest loading themes. Thank you. I’m probably going to go ahead and download Schema now.

    Reply

57. Nice wordpress theme collection and Schema theme seems best of all. thanks

    Reply

58. I used to use you guys often for finding WordPress themes. However, I have lost faith in your reviews after buying the theme “GoodLife” based on your glowing review in this article. The theme is coded absolutely terribly and the support is awful. If you look at the reviews for it on Envato, you will see that. Please reconsider your support of this theme. Your review has led to me tearing my hair out for the past week.

    Reply

59. I want to create a design blog and portfolio. What is the fastest theme that is suitable for my blog? You can check my blog

    Reply

    1. Gillion is going to be the best choice here. Fast and user friendly.

       Reply

60. Very fresh, extremely wonderful, great theme, wonderful theme.

    Reply

61. I am using Newspaper on my site using VPS + Maxcdn combo. Very fast! Couldn’t be happier with the results!

    Reply

62. Great summary. I’m gonna totaly use it as i plan to use SEO on my new site with extreme care. Good job.

    Reply

63. What about newspaper theme Aigars

    Reply

    1. Gaurav,

       Newsmag is identical to Newspaper theme when it comes to performance. The only real difference is in theme design but it does not affect their performance.

       Reply

64. I am looking for another theme that I can optimize and can load a lot faster than mine. But upon checking the theme on your list, Copenhagen, Google Speed Test rated it 53/100, even slower than my site.
    So if you are looking for a really fast site, look somewhere else.

    Reply

    1. First of all there are no themes called Copenhagen on this list. Another thing is that it doesn’t matter how well theme is optimized, the speed is what matters and these are absolutely two different metrics. Page Speed Insights, Pingdom and other tools show how well theme is optimized such as minified and combined JS and CSS files, losslessly compressed images, fewer requests etc. These tools can be easily fooled by simply installing Auto Optimize or some other similar plugin. This might results in slight performance boost but a very tiny one as the rest comes from proper cache and more importantly your hosting. Yes, most of the performance comes from your hosting provider and not theme. Even the most bloated theme will loads blazing fast on a good hosting and by that I don’t mean Bluehost, Hostgator, Godaddy and others but some real decent managed hosting such as one offered by WP Engine, Kinsta, Pagely and others.

       Reply

65. Aigars,

    Thank you very much for your breakdown of the themes. I decided to go with Divi based on your recommendations, but I also had some speed issues. Fortunately I tweaked it with some caching, image minimization etc. I still load at around 6 seconds which is frustrating…

    Maybe it’s time to think of a better host? I’m a bit lost, I’ve heard other people say things about Divi being slow, but not sure if that’s my ultimate problem.

    Reply

    1. Alexandros,

       Here is how to choose the right hosting for your WordPress website. You can also read comment section for that article where I have outlined many important details regarding WordPress hosting and website performance.

       Reply

66. Awesome buddy, I have been looking for that list, especially you added the page score from google, well done! I have been checking many themes ago to find the right one. Actually there a lot of nice themes out there but then you check them for speed and 90% of them just fails :/ So I am on a pagespeed trip since days and found you listing. Great, really appreciate your effort!

    I just checked “schema” and I guess I will give it a try. Love it! Thanks a lot!

    Greetings from good old Germany,
    Dimitri

    Reply

67. There’s a simple trick to increase PageSpeed/Pingdom grade in a matter of minutes – get rid of useless CSS and JS files provided by theme. It’s often practice that themes are universal which is a performance problem because theme authors implement general functionalities. A lot of them is simply useless and waste bandwidth.

    Reply

    1. Very helpful post, that’s exactly what I was looking for: A speed-based selection of elegant themes. I’m so glad I found my way here. I’ll test the Stockholm until we get bigger and switch to something like Soledad.
       Can you suggest good and fast hosting sites in France? I have some interested European friends asking me for recommendations. Thanks a lot!

       Reply

       1. Kris,

          Most managed hosting providers allows you to choose your server location. My personal recommendations are WP Engine and Kinsta. While they doesn’t have the cheapest offering the performance is just outstanding and something you will never achieve using shared hosting.

          Reply

       2. Kris,

          Most managed hosting providers allows you to choose your server location. My personal recommendations are WP Engine and Kinsta. While they doesn’t have the cheapest offering the performance is just outstanding and something you will never achieve using a shared hosting.

          Reply

68. I was looking fot his, thank you for your efforts. I recognized that many WordPress Themes are scoring very bad in this PageSpeed issue.

    Reply

    1. Markus,

       Your theme is simple enough and it scores fairly good on Google PageSpeed Insights but in your case problem is with hosting. I would strongly recommend to check some better alternative. People usually blame themes for their website performance but in most case it is their hosting and misconfigured WordPress with no caching.

       Reply

69. Dear Aigars,
    As much ad I like my new website creation,
    it is slow as hell even with a high performance theme “ronneby” and caching enabled!
    Do you think it is only my hosting that slows down the site?

    Best regards,
    Michel

    Reply

    1. Michel,

       Either your hosting or theme is not to blame for your website performance. It actually loads really well but that video is slowing down everything. It takes a lot of time to be loaded therefore holding back your entire website. I would recommend using CDN for it or just stick with Vimeo and Youtube for video hosting. Otherwise your website loads smoothly and you can stick with your current theme and hosting setup.

       Reply

70. Nice templates, but i prefare genesis framework

    Reply

    1. Franklin,

       Thank you for your feedback! As you can see we have Genesis Framework listed as well.

       Reply

71. looking for fastest theme for my Lyrics based website .. please suggest

    Reply

    1. Rick,

       It depends on the layout that you are looking for. Themes that you can’t go wrong are Newsmag PRO and Jevelin

       Reply

72. Very Nice..

    How about genesis themes?

    Reply

    1. Toko,

       We do have Genesis listed on the list. Please have another look.

       Reply

73. Hello,

    First of all which theme do you use?
    I need to make a site like the website i wrote to website section while posting this comment. Which theme do you offer me?
    Also you know it should be a fast loading and seo friendly wp-theme.

    Finally, good work :D. This is very useful article.

    Reply

    1. Tuğberk,

       We use a heavy modified version of the Jevelin theme. But you will be able to achieve the same results using any of these multipurpose themes. Performance won’t be an issue for you since you use WP Engine for hosting which makes your website to load really fast regardless of the theme you use. For SEO we highly recommend using Yoast SEO plugin which we have installed on our website as well.

       Reply

74. Hi,

    Thank you for the great post. Did you ever tried BeTheme from Themeforest? I used it to build a dozen sites and it’s really flexible but I find it a bit bloated. Unless you use wisely W3 Total Cache, that theme feels pretty heavy. I’ll try the suggested themes!

    Reply

    1. Using W3 Total Cache or other cache plugin is a must regardless theme that you use. The only case when you shouldn’t use caching plugin of any sorts is when you choose managed WordPress hosting providers such as WP Engine, Pagely, Kinsta or others. They have their own custom cache built for WordPress therefore making W3 Total Cache redundant.

       Reply

75. These are some great themes.

    I’m looking for a theme that would work best for many events for clubs. thank you

    Reply

    1. Andrew,

       We have a dedicated list of event WordPress themes and you can find them here.

       Reply

76. Im looking for a very fast Theme for photography. Which to choose ?

    Reply

    1. Rene,

       For photography website your should prioritize hosting and CDN. The thing is that for photography websites you will share large images that are pain to load on most shared hostings such as Bluehost, Hostgator, Godaddy and others. What you can do is to use CDN or even invest in a good hosting provider in the first place. Our recommendations are WP Engine and Kinsta.
       Theme won’t affect performance for photography website because images are going to be way larger than theme itself.

       Reply

77. I can appreciate the spirit of the post, so thanks for writing it. But I ran a test against one of the first templates using pagespeed insights & it failed miserably. 24/100 and 27/100 on mobile/desktop respectively.

    That said, I appreciate that Brando’s scripts load async, but it doesn’t take any steps to minimize stylesheets. It’s loading at least 5 stylesheets AND calling 3 Google Fonts. That latter is unnecessary and overkill because the fonts are loading all the weights (Roboto is loading 6 weights, most devs don’t even realize their are more than 3, let alone your average WP user).

    Reply

78. Hi these! These are the best themes that loads fast with good SEO. Thank for these themes and keep sharing and keep updating us.

    Reply

79. The trouble with a lot of WordPress themes is that they try and be everything to everybody and of course this means lots of bloaty plugins.. I’m currently working on a basic css framework (under 2kb in size) which helps with css bloat of css frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap. The next stage is to start integrating into WordPress. The idea is to have a WordPress site without caching load in under half a second. My only warning about the above scores would be things like… If you add compression on the Server is can actually increase serve times and in-lining css for page speed can in fact affect SEO in the wrong way..

    Reply

80. Hello. I am the owner of a small law firm, and do all website work myself (with the help of developers). We switched last year to A2 hosting, and added a CDN (Cloud Flare). That improved the speed but then it slowed down again recently. Also, I noticed above that you recommended NOT using CloudFlare. But when I paused CF last week for developer to do some work, website speed plummeted. It’s still not great but better with CF enabled.

    I am requesting a developer give me a quote right now to improve speed. But I have some questions for you:

    (1) do you think CF is helping my site?
    (2) do you like A2?

    Also, I am about to build a second site, which will have mostly longer posts, and video & images with many of those posts. I will need a new host. Traffic is not enormous but I want speed optimized to best extent possible. I will need a separate host (not my existing host). I heard WP Engine didn’t allow CPanel access, which scared me. So some additional questions:

    (3) best theme for law firm *considering speed is important* with longer posts and videos (simplest to set up would be ideal — nothing fancy needed on this one)?
    (4) Do you recommend Site Ground or WP Engine for what I described?

    Thanks very much for an awesome site with great comments too!

    Reply

    1. Tina,

       1. CloudFlare is a good idea but it is not an actual CDN. It works by rerouting your traffic via their servers but they also reroute assets such as HTML, DNS and other things that normal CDNs doesn’t. But each time your website is loaded, CloudFlare connects to your hosting provider first to see nothing has changed on your website and then it loads it to the user from their server.
       Which brings us to the 2. point. Since all assets aren’t stored on the Cloudflare servers, it still needs to connects to your A2 hosting. If it is slow to begin with, you can’t expect Cloudflare to speed it up as it still needs to connects with A2. CloudFlare does reduc number of requests to A2 as some assets are cached on their servers but those missing from cache are what’s increases load speed dramatically.

       Therefore, I good hosting is still a must have and as you can see A2 clearly isn’t one of them. If you are concerned about website performance and your business in general you absolutely must use managed WordPress hosting such as Kinsta or WP Engine. We use Kinsta in combination with Cloudflare.

       3. Themes doesn’t affects performance much so doesn’t length of the posts. For videoes make sure to host them on YouTube, Vimeo or elsewhere but not on your hosting because your server (A2) won’t be able to handle it or with managed hosts you will end up with a huge monthly bill as videos are resource intensive. With that in mind, any theme will do the job as long as you use a proper hosting. Also performance optimization won’t be an issue anymore since managed hosting providers will take care that for you. No need for hiring a dev.

       4. SiteGround is fine for small sites that doesn’t make any money or represent a company with a brand. It does work but your site won’t load any faster than on A2. WP Engine is another thing. It will help to improve your website performance as well make it more reliable even when turning CloudFlare off.

       Reply

81. Nice list. Basically this means that any other theme has slow page speed? Or is this just basically a list with themes you prefer or recommend?

    Greets Mario

    Reply

    1. Hello Mario,

       These are ones that I recommend for a better performance. It is a combination between functionality and performance.
       However, if you are serious about website performance make sure to invest in a good hosting such as WP Engine or Kinsta. Hosting accounts for 90% of the performance of your website and theme, plugins and your content does the rest. Therefore, investing in a hosting is crucial if you are looking to achieve good performance.

       Reply

82. Thanks for sharing, i search actually for a new theme optimized for SEO so i check you recommended themes ^^

    Reply

83. Hi
    Great article, thanks so much.
    I want to make an e-commerce site with WordPress, I’m a bit confused about site speed and performance.
    I’m between Oxygen, Nitro and TheGem but I’m not sure if those themes are the best for my case.I have no coding experience.Could you please advise?

    Reply

    1. Maria,

       If you are concerned about performance you should choose a proper hosting that cares about website speed and optimizations. Our recommendations are WP Engine and Kinsta. These are rather pricy options but with hostings you get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
       Themes very little affect website performance while hosting accounts for at least 80% of the performance.

       Reply

84. Thanks so much for your prompt response, they are quite pricey you are right, I think you are right, I’m with Siteground – Go Geek at the moment and they are ok, however, once my business goes well I will have to look into it.Kinsta looks great.
    Again thanks so much for your help.
    I love this website is so informative and helpful for someone who is just starting!
    Not sure if you can help with this too: I’m looking into learning to create websites HTML and Javascript. I was advised to look into Coursera or Udacity. Any suggestions?Many thanks
    Maria

    Reply

    1. Mari,

       Thank you for your feedback! I highly appreciate it!
       Both are great resources for learning web development. But keep in mind that it will take a lot of time to master JavaScript. HTML/CSS ir simile and will take few weeks to get basics in place but JavaScript is a very wide and complex language that will take many months to get it to a decent level if you have never coded in any other language. It is not like other languages are easier, but first language takes a lot of time to master.
       Learning coding just to build a single website is not going to cut it and you need to have a bigger goal in place. It is totally not worth it to spend years learning just to build a website unless you are building a Facebook or something of that size 🙂

       Reply

       1. I’m looking into a career change, so I guess it’s worth taking some time to master coding:)I appreciate your honesty.
          I’m into blogging, marketing, and graphic designing and I would love to learn to code:)
          Again many thanks for the advice and help, really appreciate your help:)

          Reply

85. Thank you for the list. I’ll try to change my current theme to one of your suggested theme.

    Reply

86. Hello,

    What is the fastest loading wordpress theme at the moment?

    Reply

    1. Themes very little affect your website performance. And the fastest ones will be themes that are completely empty and doesn’t do anything such as Underscores starter template.
       If you are serious about website performance you should implement a proper cache or choose a managed WordPress hosting that already offers cache for you. These steps will affects 90% of your website performance while plugins and themes will do the other 10%. That’s how significant is hosting and cache when it comes to WordPress performance.

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       1. Thanks Aigars for this interesting insight. Are there any hosting companies that you recommend?

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          1. Hassan,

             It all depends on your budget and features that you are looking for. If money is no object and you care about performance & great support then Kinsta is the one. But if budget is limited you might want to consider Siteground.

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87. I am very fond of changing themes very frequently and I like the list very much. Most of the themes listed I have tested already like schema and sociallyviral. Looking forward to use more on my blog and see how do they look.

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88. I have regional website, suggest me a mobile-friendly theme.

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    1. You are already using Sparkling which is mobile-friendly and fast loading theme. Any other of above listed ones are also mobile-friendly.

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89. Newspapper is my favorit but It’s still not look faster than i thought, maybe becoause my image not good compression.

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    1. Adam,

       Image compression, use of CDN, hosting provider, server performance, cache are the main things that impact website performance and themes has very little to do with it. Still having a good theme is important but that’s like 5% of the entire website performance.

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90. I’m looking to change my website theme, Nice theme section and appreciate your support. Again many thanks for the share this nice post with lot of business theme collection

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91. In this you did not add the Schema theme ? Why

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    1. There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress themes out there and there is no way we can list all them in a same article. We choose the ones that we feel are great design, functionality and performance wise.

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92. Great work 🙂 You have really made things easy for me.. I will not go and search for a better one in thousands of themes.. This page would be even better if you categorize these themes on this page as well.

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    1. We have categorised all the best themes: https://colorlib.com/wp/popular-wordpress-themes/
       Are you can just use search that we have on the website.
       We keep only the best ones that are constantly updated.

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93. Sir, I think theme is not Major reason for slow loading speed but responsive theme and lightweight can improve our speed

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94. I’m using the Schema theme. Is this very fast?

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    1. One of the fastest premium themes out there.

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95. What are the three best themes for an outdoor adventure company, you would say

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    1. You can find some great options here and here.

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96. This is exactly what I was looking for. Current settings in my website is giving me poor speed. Looking to change.

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97. sir is sahifa theme faster because am using sahifa theme and my website and it is very slow how do i fix this

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    1. Noah,

       You absolute must switch to another hosting provider because current one is terrible. Also, make sure to install cache plugin such as WP Rocket or WP Super Cache.

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98. Are performance and speed different things in google page insights? Are they related to each other?

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    1. They are related but are not the same. Performance is about how well your website is optimized but speed means the actual page load time. For example, your site might have minified CSS, minified and combined JS, optimized images but have a slow hosting and like 200 images on the page. It will come out as well optimized but not fast to load.

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99. Aigars, I understand what you are trying to achieve here, but this is meaningless post. And you know that too, being a wp theme developer yourself. These theme load fast because the theme developers have used plugins to speed up not because of their themes are well built. You can take twenty seventeen and achieve the same result with the plugins used. Total BS.

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    1. Themes accounts for max 5% of the total website speed. The rest mainly comes from hosting and caching and your content. Therefore, there is no difference which theme you choose since hosting is what makes the main difference. WordPress themes are based on the same structure and they don’t affect the page load speed as much as most makes out to be. Be smart, invest in a good managed hosting and you will be golden.

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100. Which theme will be best to get blazzing fast speed – schema or solded or genesis?

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101. Thanks! for sharing such an informative post about the fast and SEO friendly themes for a perfect website.

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102. Thank for sharing these awesome themes with us. They are really good.

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103. Having a fast loading template is a must for better ranking. I will check out all the specifications of all the themes to know which matches my intention.

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104. Think you need to doublecheck these. I came across this page as I have a client who currently uses Divi and we are looking to move away as mobile pagespeed score plummeted to just 19 after the last Google update to Pagespeed.

     If you input the Divi demo URL into Pagespeed Insights tool, it scores just 5 for mobile. Not great!

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     1. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve worked with Divi and all the websites are slow because of it. At most I got 10 from Google Page Speed on mobile, for a website that uses cache and Cloudflare as CDN for all the content.
        I also tested Jevelin, the first theme in the list, for which this is the good link to test if you don’t have the theme downloaded:
        https://jevelin.shufflehound.com/hello/ . This got a 14 on Google Page Speed. I think the tests should be on real websites that use those themes and have real content, because most of the pages don’t have just on section.
        With only one section using Visual Composer builder and their start theme I’ve got 80 from Google, but after adding all the content that client needed, I’ve ended up with 40.

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105. Thanks for sharing such awesome WordPress themes, with such amazing speed and performance for these.

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106. Thank you for such a brief list. We are a small company that builds WordPress-based websites for clients and our clients love fast loading websites. This list is going to be very helpful.

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107. Divi is terrible for speed, it will slow down every server. This is a highly questionable list, geared more towards affiliate links than information.

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     1. I agree.Some of this themes shouldn’t be present in the list at all.

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108. Is there any high performing gaming theme? I am currently using gamezone which sucks really bad in google’s page speed and pingdom’s.
     I am looking to move to a new theme, gaming oriented but it has to be optimised! I am running my own vps server with nginx, mariadb and php 7.3, if that can help

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     1. I would recommend to continue to ue the same theme but look into caching department since you haven’t done anything to optimize your website. More info about caching and plugin performance you can find here.

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109. Based on your recomendation of the Jevelin theme being fast, I went out and bought it.

     However after installing perfectly, I got only a pagespeed score of 21. Clearly it is not as good as you say it is. I am very dissapointed that I wasted money based on your advice.

     I have been building websites for years and I can assure you I followed the instructions perfectly.

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110. Hi Amit and Aigars,

     Thank you for the time taken for research. Unfortunately, I bought the Webify premium based on your recommendations on 22 July and since then I’ve only encountered a multitude of issues and no fast-loading wordpress theme.

     You can see from my speed test link here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nikithehealer.com%2F&tab=mobile

     After following instructions and installing their plugins for fast performance it has produced results that are not anything like what is promised in their theme. Yes, my images do take extra timeload BUT when I used a previous theme and optimised everything else this did not affect the score so poorly. I came to your list because I was looking for a theme that was specifically optimised for fast-loading and Webify fails to deliver on that.

     Further more the host, Envato and their support service is terrible. It took three days of waiting for responses and going back and forth and being no better off than when I started. Also, requested a refund and another two days later with no results have now launched a PayPal dispute.

     Upon further research: https://au.trustpilot.com/review/www.envato.com
     I am not the only one that is experiencing hardship from Envato theme and digital products failing to deliver on their item descriptions and poor customer service.

     In fact, I have since realised Envato Market is from my home country of Australia and will be looking into Australia Consumer Affair Regulation as this kind of product and service quality is not tolerated.

     I am just writing in because it was specifically this list that influenced my purchase decision. I understand you make money from affliate links but this particular affliate partnership is resulting in customers landing in vulnerable positions and having a hard time getting support, including their money back, when the products fail to deliver on what they promise.

     If you don’t want to take down the Webify (And other Envato themes which are failing to deliver) off your web page recommendation lists, could you please ask that customers do further research such as https://au.trustpilot.com/review/www.envato.com before they make a purchase. At this point in time it is providing a lot of pain for customers and colours your own authority as content curators.

     Thank you so much and

     Best wishes,
     Niki

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111. Hey dude, I am looking for a good theme for my blog which I’m dedicating toward anime.
     Thank you for your time.
     Could you recommend me a good fast page speed WordPress theme?

     Thank you once again.

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     1. This one is the one. It is the theme they use but with some modfications.

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112. some good options here, looking for something that loads quicker

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