10 Fastest WordPress Themes

The speed of your website has a major impact on your search engine rankings and visitors’ experience. It is important for everything from user experience to Google rankings, conversion rate, and engagement metrics such as bounce rates. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, your visitors may decide to leave instead of waiting to view your pages. However, if you want a fast WordPress site, you are going to need a fast WordPress theme. Using one of the fastest WordPress themes could definitely boost your efforts to gain subscribers or sales. Luckily, there are many lightweight themes that can help you achieve this goal. 

The best thing about WordPress is that you don’t need to crack open your wallet just to get a fast-loading theme. In fact, you have plenty of free options, and in this article, we have collected some of the fastest free WordPress themes for you. The themes mentioned below can help you create a fast and personalised WordPress website, no matter what budget, technical experience, or business goals you have.

1. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a WordPress theme built with speed and user experience as its top priorities. Its high coding standards keep it stable and secure. It’s also search engine optimization (SEO) friendly, giving you an upper hand on improving your Google rankings before you even add your content. This theme comes with excellent customization options as well. You will be able to tweak all layout elements, install demo sites, and more. GeneratePress  It’s also compatible with Elementor, which will enable you to modify both desktop and mobile versions of your website.

There are 15 modules that let you leverage the functionality of the theme and you can activate/deactivate the modules you aren’t using to make sure they don’t add extra load on your site.  It comes as both a free and premium version, but the paid version has a lot more useful features. 

Features

• Built-in support for Schema Markup to help you achieve better rankings and a higher CTR in search engines.
• The theme is translation ready, so you can easily translate it into multiple languages.
• Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices.

2. Astra

Astra is a fast, page builder friendly WordPress theme that is designed by Brainstorm Force. Most people love Astra because it’s so lightweight (less than 50KB). The theme is performance-optimized and needs less than 50 KB of resources to load. In fact, it doesn’t even use jQuery, it uses Vanilla JavaScript instead. It also allows you to pick individual modules to include on your site so you can edit your content more efficiently.  

Astra is a multipurpose theme that you can use for pretty much any niche. You can also import hundreds of demo sites built with Elementor, Gutenberg (block editor), Beaver Builder, and Brizy. The core theme is available for free while paid plans start at $47. Also, the theme comes with a real-time customizer so you can see your creation unfold in front of your eyes. 

Features

• Simple, yet beautiful designs for whatever type of business you are in
• SEO friendly foundation and all the necessary Schema.org markup
• Extendible with hooks and filters that let you customize any Astra theme

3. Neve

Neve is a fast and lightweight theme designed by developers at Themeisle. It is optimized for mobile devices, giving you an extra SEO boost. Above all, you can start customizing it almost immediately without digging into the code by installing one of its pre-built designs. While a default WordPress install is less than 28KB and loads in under a second, a more complicated website with images, texts, and animation effects built on Neve will still run fast.

Neve is compatible with all popular page builders. You can easily customize various elements of your website and see real-time changes as you edit. Overall, this theme is super flexible and user-friendly, which makes it a perfect solution for beginners or advanced users who want to work more efficiently. 

Features

• Quality code optimized for speed and superior performance
• Easy, flexible and fully customizable designs, so you can create the perfect website easily
• Mobile-ready and fully responsive designs that look great on all screen sizes + AMP support

4. Blocksy

Blocksy is another outstanding multipurpose theme. You’ll be able to design your pages easily with its drag-and-drop functionality. The theme was built using modern web technologies like React, Webpack, and Babel. This makes it fast and gives it a compact codebase. It’s compatible with popular page builders such as Elementor, too. You can also customize individual features of your website with numerous colour and layout options. Blocksy integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, making it an excellent theme for online stores. It’s also SEO-friendly and super responsive, which should positively impact your conversions. 

The theme looks great out the box and if you’re a beginner then you don’t need to do much to get a lot out of Blocksy. When you first activate the theme, you will be asked to also install a plugin called Blocksy Companion(optional) which lets you add a lot of other enhancements, demo templates and extensions to the theme.

Features

• Built from scratch to be 100% compatible with the Gutenberg editor and blocks.
• Easily build and customize your online store in minutes
• Translation ready and fully responsive.

5. Zakra

Zakra is a light weighted multipurpose theme that is best suited for online stores. It’s optimized for speed, thus maximizing your chances for conversions. Zakra is also fully responsive and AMP ready, so your website will look its best on any device. Like the previous themes, it also makes a great option to pair with a WordPress page builder plugin.

The core theme is available for free while the premium version starts at $49.99. The developer provides multiple demos for this theme, including several eCommerce starter sites. Moreover, Zakra works seamlessly with WooCommerce and is SEO-friendly, making it an excellent choice for online retailers.

Features

• The header module is versatile and creative because of the multiple top header bars, transparent header options, and several buttons.
• The core theme offers a fast and reliable build to generate sleek sites for small businesses.
• The theme is packaged with hundreds of typography options.

6. OceanWP

OceanWP is a totally free WordPress multi-purpose theme that lets you build beautiful websites with WordPress. Like Astra, OceanWP lets you select individual modules to include on your site so you only have to edit the elements you need. It gives you a professional look for small businesses and agencies by default. It’s compatible with popular page builders and comes with useful extensions to further boost the functionality of your site. The theme is also compatible with King Composer, Elementor and Beaver Builder.

OceanWP is all about user-convenience and you can import ready to use demo sites with a single click using the free import extension. The free version comes with 7 free extensions whereas the premium version offers 11 extensions that let you extend the theme further. 

Features

• Built-In WordPress customizer options
• Built-in SEO for better indexing and search rankings
• A few WooCommerce features that come with OceanWP include a native cart popup, a floating cart bar, and a quick view. 

7. Writee

Writee is a 100% free blogging theme that’s available at WordPress.org. It offers built-in pagination options, social media sharing icons, and a related posts widget to make your site easier to navigate. You can also easily upload and customize a favicon and logo, enable or disable breadcrumbs, and choose from a range of sidebar options. The one-click demo import feature is a strong tool to help you have a beautiful website as in the demo by just 1 click. 

Writee is the first entrant on our list that is not a multipurpose theme. So if you want a blog-focused theme that will put your content first and not get in the way with bloat, this one might be a good option.

Features

• Standard post format
• Featured post slider
• Offers social sharing and social linking

8. Sydney

Sydney is a flexible WordPress business theme developed by aThemes that you can use to create all different kinds of business websites. In order to help you customize your site, Sydney includes an Elementor integration, as well as some of its own custom Elementor widgets.

The core Sydney theme is free, but you can also purchase a Pro version with more functionality for $59. It also allows blog and front page customizations with quick setting changes in the Theme Customizer. It has Google Font access, along with the custom Elementor blocks. The list goes on: parallax backgrounds, slider image headers, and social buttons.

Features

• Several social media options are available for linking to your social accounts.
• The theme options maximize your customization opportunities, with colour, fonts, and blog layout settings.
• Some of the WooCommerce features are unique to the Sydney theme. For example, the theme provides checkout modules and product preview tools.

9. Twenty Twenty

Twenty Twenty is the default WordPress theme that comes installed with every WordPress build. Apart from being a fantastic and 100% Gutenberg ready theme, Twenty Twenty also boasts some pretty stellar performance metrics.  This theme (regardless of the year) is consistently one of the fastest WordPress theme options, because of its small file structure and solid code. 

Twenty Twenty is designed to take full advantage of the flexibility of the Gutenberg block editor. Websites with this theme have the ability to create dynamic landing pages with endless layouts using the group and column blocks.

Features

• The theme is ready for mobile devices, with stunning attributes and highly user-friendly elements that adapt to every device size.
• You receive unique tools like editor styles, fonts, colors, and infinite scrolling.
• The blogging interface and customization tools are outstanding, with options for layouts, sidebars, typography adjustments, and more.

10. Schema

Schema theme developed by MyThemeShop is another lightweight WordPress theme that offers a responsive, fully customizable design. It is a great theme for creating any kind of a blog. Among its best features are a related posts widget, ready-to-use icon fonts, Google Fonts, social media integration, and more. This theme comes with built-in support for reviews to help you create beautiful looking review pages. It also provides built-in shortcodes, voting functionality and performance settings.

Features

• Comes with an Ad Management panel to help you easily manage the ads on your website
• Support for Google Fonts allows you to choose from hundreds of Google fonts you would like to see on your website.`
• Comes with support for rich snippets. 

Conclusion

A fast-loading WordPress theme can help you build a fast website that delights your visitors and improves your chances of ranking. All the themes we have covered here are responsive and offer dozens of customization options to help you improve load times. In this post, you have tons of multipurpose options that can work for all niches. To pick the best one for your site, consider the demo sites and customization options that each theme offers. So, if you want your site to load fast, picking one of the fastest WordPress themes will set you up with a foundation for success.