When developing a new WordPress Website, we tend to take in consideration several aspects for choosing the best WordPress Template. Things like built-in functionalities, periodic upgrades and a clean code are important things to analyze before making your choice.
But the way users interact with websites is changing, and changing fast. Since 2015, searches from Mobile devices surpassed searches from desktops computers. This year, you can expect that nearly half of your visitors will come from mobile devices.
This means that maybe the two most important factors to take in consideration this year when choosing a WordPress Template are Speed and Mobile Friendliness. Speed has become an important factor. Decreasing your website loading time will dramatically increase the time visitors interact with your content.
According to a recent survey, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
If you are just starting a new WordPress Website you have a huge advantage to older pages. This gives you the opportunity to design your new Website thinking of Mobile Users first. If you make your information easily accessible for mobile users, you will get a huge boost in SEO too. Choosing a lightweight WordPress Theme will improve your websites speed and also the mobile user experience.
How we measured the WordPress Theme speed
For this list, we measured the templates performance using Google Pagespeed Insights. The interesting thing about this tool is that it grades a website’s performance giving two different scores, one for mobile devices and other for desktop computers.
In this article, we took in consideration only the Mobile Analysis Score. As a rule, you can say that if a responsive theme is fast on mobile, it will be faster on Desktop, but not the other way around. This is because PageSpeed Insights not only measures how fast the webpage loads, but also in what order it loads, the correct loading of javascript and css files, the lazy loading of images, and how “mobile friendly” the user experience is.
If you want to know exactly what an acceptable mobile user experience is for Google, think about how the Apps you have installed in your mobile phone work. Apps load information extremely fast, and they are easy to interact with in mobile devices. Your Website’s Design should follow the same principles.
LIST – the Fastest WordPress Themes in 2017
Take in consideration that most of the themes listed bellow wont achieve the highest scores in PageSpeed Mobile performance, but can be further improved implementing caching plugins and optimizing images. For a Theme to achieve “out of the box” a score above 70 can be considered really good. This means that the theme can easily be optimize to score above 90.
Based on their mobile performance “out of the box”, we have shortlisted 10 of the fastest, lightweight and mobile friendly WordPress themes below (in no particular order).
*Update*: We added a the button “Speed Test” so you can verify the actual speed of your preferred theme. This will help us keep this list objective and updated.
Newsmag
Newsmag is a clean and polished WordPress theme designed to let you write and publish your articles and blog posts on the internet with ease. This versatile news magazine theme is powered by WordPress Booster framework, which is very clean and fast. This theme is perfect for news, newspaper, magazine, publishing or review site.
This theme comes available with six unique stacks (default, fashion, tech, video, sport and classic blog), which are very easy to install and customize to suit your needs. The theme is bundled with Visual Composer, that allows you to create unlimited pages without difficulty.
Newsmag comes with 22 custom widgets, 17 widgets for content and 5 are for general UI. The custom content widgets display posts in different styles and support custom colors, advanced filters (by tag, category, author, post type), ajax pagination, ajax filtering and infinite load.
This theme also includes other valuable theme features such as custom made lightbox, powerful shortcodes, Live Search with Ajax, smart sidebar, Youtube/ Vimeo video playlist, an advanced sticky menu, intelligent ad system, social counter and many more. This theme also provides support for WooCommerce, TypeKit, Google Fonts, font stacks and WOFF font files.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 72
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 86
X WordPress
The theme has been purchased by more than 158,000+ customers from all over the world. It has been the top selling WordPress theme a long time, and has sold more than $2 million worth of items on themeforest.
The stats are incredible, and are a testimonial to the quality and success of X Theme. So what does it makes it different to the rest?
The Theme answers the needs of it’s large user base by providing a flexible solution that can be used with any kind of website. It has so many features, that most users will probably not even use half the features of the theme.
It’s customization is based on stacks, which are completely unique layouts that you can use to create your own unique design. Think of stacks as themes within a theme. They work out of box, but they are also very easy to customize. Each stack gives you different layout and design choices to begin with. You can adjust all of them to meet your own requirements.
This is an excellent WordPress theme which is powerful enough for advanced users, and easy for beginners. Their easy customization and fast loading makes it a great option for users
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 71
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 83
Flatsome
Flatsome is a highly customizable theme designed primarily for eCommerce sites using the WooCommerce plugin. It includes a user-friendly visual editor that lets you design your pages and posts from the front end of your site. Find out if this popular WordPress theme is right for your online shop in our Flatsome review.
While it’s designed to integrate easily with WooCommerce for eCommerce sites, it can also be used as a multipurpose theme for any type of site.
Flatsome is designed and developed by UX Themes, and is one of the most popular and highly rated themes on Themeforest with over 30,000 sales. The goal of UX Themes is to design themes that are easy to use and customize even if you don’t know any code.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 78
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 74
Bridge
When it comes to variety, Bridge is hard to beat. With over 200 website demos to choose from, no matter what type of project you’re working on, Bridge should have a design to help you build a professional site with WordPress. From agency websites and ecommerce stores to creative portfolios and travel blog templates, Bridge has a demo for every eventuality.
If you can’t find a demo that matches your vision, then Bridge still has plenty to offer. With the premium Visual Composer page builder included, you’ll be able to create your own custom designs using the drag and drop interface. Bridge also gives you the ability to mix the components of the different demos, so you can construct your own custom designs.
Whether you’re looking for a fast loading WordPress theme for your own projects or you want a tool to help you create sites for your clients, Bridge and its huge library of demos could be a good option.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 78
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 76
Bimber
Bimber is a Viral WordPress theme that take inspiration from popular sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy. In a few pushes of the button, it lets you launch the website instantly. The theme is lightweight and is easy to use.
There are lots of key features created with Bimber to ensure that your content is ready to go viral. Listicles can be created in minutes with images, gifs and videos.
Getting your content shared is what creating a viral site is all about. Powerful social sharing buttons can be created using the MashShare button. Build custom share buttons with share count. Display share buttons before and after your content, make them sticky. Fake share counts are available to help jumpstart your count.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 72
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 86
The Gem
TheGem is a newly released multi-purpose WordPress theme from CodexThemes, an experienced development team. In our TheGem theme review, we’ll be testing this multi-purpose theme to see exactly what it can do. By the end of this article, you’ll know whether this theme lives up to its marketing materials.
If you’re looking for a theme that can be used to build a wide range of websites, from agency sites and creative portfolios, to ecommerce stores and landing pages, read on to find out if this is the right option in our TheGem theme review.
The Gem has been built to help website owners who wouldn’t consider themselves coders or developers, but still want to make a high quality, modern WordPress website. It is also a good choice for experienced developers who are looking for a faster way to produce professional websites for their clients.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 70
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 86
Demo: http://codex-themes.com/thegem/splash-creative-dark/
Impreza
Impreza is a popular and high rated premium theme that gives you lots of customization options to make your site unique. Developed by UpSolution, it also includes Visual Composer and Slider Revolution premium plugins.
Impreza is a well designed, modern-looking theme with plenty of options for customization. It’s easy to use with a user-friendly interface. The demo content feature makes it easier to get started with designing your site.
As of today, it remains as one of the most popular items in ThemeForest. The reason is because it is extremely easy to install, just two required plugins for the slider and the page builder and then the demo content import tool workes flawlessly.
It’s also very intuitive to use, simply picking a homepage to use and then using the Visual Composer to make changes in realtime is something that most people should be able to do with no problems. The theme options panel is simple to use and very clear what each option does.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 69
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 83
Salient
Salient is a great looking theme aimed at creative websites with a range of different homepage options which will let you create a business site, a portfolio, an eCommerce shop, a one page landing site and more. It has sold a staggering 65,000 copies so far so is one of the most popular themes on the site, appearing on their popular page.
It includes page building functionality with a customized version of the Visual Composer, their own options panel and a copy of the Nectar slider. If you wish to build an eCommerce site with it, it works along side WooCommerce with some extra features such as an Ajax shopping cart.
This is a very polished and modern theme that will let you create beautiful looking websites. The backend is well constructed. The options panel contains a huge amount of settings and you can tweak most aspects of the site without additional css.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 69
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 83
Publisher
Publisher is a multi-purpose WordPress theme for creating blogs, news, magazine, and review websites.
Thanks to the built-in reviews functionality, you can easily rate any of the items you write about on your website. This can help your audience make informed decisions about their purchases. Also, it gives your website an extra feature to separate it from the competition.
When it comes to monetizing your website, Publisher gives you a few different built-in options. One option is to use pay per click adverts, provided by a service like Google AdSense. By using the built-in ad manager, you can simply paste in your ad code once, and let Publisher handle displaying your adverts.
Another option is to use the ecommerce functionality of this theme to add products to your store using the WooCommerce plugin. Adding affiliate links to your reviews is another monetization option.
If you’re creating a content-rich website with WordPress, then the fast loading Publisher could be a great option.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 68
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 85
The 7
The7 is a popular multipurpose WordPress theme that has the potential to suit anybody creating any type of website.
It includes a selection of pre-built layouts and templates to create different types of websites. With this layouts you can easily create online shops, business websites, creative portfolios and blog or news websites.
Additionally to all the possible uses and configurations, The7 theme includes two design styles to choose from: minimal and iOS 7. The Theme comes with 12 skins and four header layouts options included. You can also choose from an unlimited number of backgrounds and colors.
The theme includes Visual Composer drag and drop page builder; Slider Revolution, LayerSlider and the Go Responsive Pricing and Compare Tables builder plugin. These are all useful plugins that make this a truly multipurpose theme without an extra cost.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 68
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 85
Rosa
Rosa is an incredibly fast Restaurant WordPress theme. It features high end Parallax scrolling, OpenTable reservations, beautifully designed meals menu and more. You just need your OpenTable restaurant ID and you can implement the reservation system online!
It features a live customizer which lets you change the fonts, colors, and layout and preview the changes before saving them. It is SEO-friendly, Translation Ready and features Shortcodes and Google Fonts.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 68
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 77
SEO WP
SEO WP theme is a modern and fast loading theme, carefully crafted for Digital Marketing Agencies and SEO companies. This theme is feature-packed, flexible and very powerful. This theme is 100% responsive, and gives you the capability to control any element presentation on mobile devices.
In addition, it offers unlimited header styles, different footer layouts via drag & drop footer builder, infinite color options, advanced typography settings, 20+ custom widgets, unlimited sidebars and many more.
It comes with an amazing mega menu plugin that allows you to create responsive dropdown menus and increase user engagement. The theme also includes an off-canvas mobile menu to increase the mobile friendliness of your website.
This SEO theme is fully optimized for speed and yields high scores in GTMetrix and Pingdom tests.
PageSpeed Mobile Score: 69
PageSpeed Desktop Score: 85
Bottom Line
All the WordPress Themes included in the list are lightweight and well coded. Also, they can easily optimized to achieve the highest scores in PageSpeed Insights. Implementing a cache plugin, optimizing and lazy loading images and javascript async will dramatically increase the performance of your site.
But, while these WordPress themes are fast and lightweight, they are not enough to make your website fast. Additionally to a fast Theme, you also need a fast hosting provider. For more information on which WordPress hosting is the best you can read this detailed guide.
If you are seeking professional help to develop or optimize your website, contact us so we can help you with your project.
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