Fastest WordPress Themes for Incredible Page Speed
A fast and lightweight theme can do wonders for improving your page speed – and ensuring your visitors will hang around long enough to read your content.
Last week we looked at ways to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score. One of the recommended measures was choosing a quick theme that makes few HTTP requests.
Finding a fast theme, however, is no mean feat. Most themes available today are packed with features, such as parallax, social media and ginormous images, ensuring your site will struggle to get a score above 50 out of 100 on PageSpeed Insights.
But fast themes do exist. Below, I’ve ranked the fastest themes I could find in order from slowest to fastest.
Trail
PageSpeed Insights score: 87
Cost: $49Trail is a multipurpose port olio theme that focuses on big images and lovely typography. It features a stunning parallax scrolling effect.
Despite the demo’s big images, Trail loads quickly and looks great on any device thanks to its responsive layout.
Fable
PageSpeed Insights score: 90
Cost: $69Fable is a full-width blogging theme with a clean, beautiful design built for easy reading.
According to Elegant Themes, they use coding best practices to ensure their themes are fast and secure. Plus, their themes frequently undergo security audits.
Lucid
PageSpeed Insights score: 90
Cost: $69Another Elegant Themes design in the top 10. Lucid is a responsive magazine theme with a clean and organized layout.
As mentioned above, Elegant Themes adheres to coding best practices to ensure their themes are fast and secure.
Swift
PageSpeed Insights score: 95
Cost: From $57It’s not the most eye-catching theme out there, but Swift is certainly one of the quickest.
Swift is fast, lightweight with speed its ultimate goal. The developers have created this theme with PageSpeed Insights in mind and it does perform well, also scoring highly on GTmetrix with 96 per cent.
Raelene Morey Raelene is the Founder of Words By Birds, a digital writing agency that works with startups, SaaS, B2B, and WordPress businesses on turning tech speak into words that convert. She was formerly the managing editor at WPMU DEV. A computer science grad turned newspaper journalist, when she’s not taming browser tabs, she likes brunching and bushwalking.