The faster your website runs, the more visitors you get. Simple. People just don’t have much patience, so if your site is not loading quickly, they will leave and never come back. By today’s standards, a second is a lot. That is why you should only use the fastest WordPress themes on your website.
A fast WordPress theme is an essential asset, and especially if your website is meant to serve a business purpose. To help you out, here’s a selection of the fastest WordPress themes on the market in 2023.
How was this list of fastest WordPress themes compiled?
We took the most popular themes out there and put them through rigorous testing with the help of GTmetrix.
Each theme was installed on a blank site → we imported the demo design on top of it → removed all demo posts and pages → imported a standardized set of demo posts → did the tests on the main blog listing page of the site.
Then, we ranked the themes based on their performance. The results is what you can see below.
In a hurry and can’t read the whole list? Here are the fastest WordPress themes in 2023:| Theme | PageSpeed Score | YSlow Score | Fully Loaded Time (s) | Total Page Size (KB) | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeneratePress | A (99%) | A (94%) | 1.1 | 39.8 | 10 |
| Neve | A (99%) | A (93%) | 0.9 | 57.6 | 12 |
| Astra | A (99%) | A (92%) | 0.9 | 107 | 15 |
| Zakra | A (98%) | B (87%) | 0.6 | 97.1 | 16 |
| Customify | A (98%) | A (90%) | 1.5 | 381 | 19 |
| Twenty Nineteen | A (98%) | A (94%) | 1 | 127 | 14 |
| Mesmerize | A (98%) | B (84%) | 1.1 | 415 | 24 |
| X | A (98%) | A (91%) | 1.2 | 122 | 12 |
| Blocksy | A (98%) | B (86%) | 1.1 | 118 | 25 |
| OceanWP | A (97%) | B (85%) | 1.9 | 356 | 29 |
| Hestia | A (97%) | B (87%) | 0.9 | 201 | 21 |
| Divi | A (97%) | A (88%) | 1.9 | 328 | 20 |
| Twenty Twenty | A (95%) | A (93%) | 1.9 | 594 | 16 |
| Genesis | A (95%) | B (84%) | 1.1 | 259 | 30 |
| Color Mag | A (93%) | B (84%) | 0.8 | 365 | 30 |
| Avada | A (91%) | A (93%) | 1.8 | 467 | 15 |
The fastest WordPress themes on the market
GeneratePress
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (99%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (94%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.1s
📐 Total Page Size: 39.8KB
✉️ Requests: 10
GeneratePress is a lightweight, fast WordPress theme that will help with your website performance a lot. This multipurpose theme is less than 30KB and comes packed with all of the important features, layout controls, and more.
Features:
- Multiple demos
- Fully responsive
- Search engine optimized
- No render blocking issues
- Tiny footprint
- Accessibility ready
- Translation and RTL ready
- 30 day refund policy
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (99%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (93%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 0.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 57.6KB
✉️ Requests: 12
Neve is an elegant theme, quite colorful and catchy. This makes it perfect if you want to create an attractive business site or present your projects in a high-class manner. The theme is one of the fastest WordPress themes out there, has clean code and appropriate sizes for all the images it’s using. It is optimized for Google AMP as well.
Features:
- AMP ready
- Compatibility with Elementor and Gutenberg
- No jQuery loading
- One-page/multi-page layout
- Multiple demos
- WooCommerce and blog booster
- Parallax and lazy loading effects
- Header and footer builder
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (99%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (92%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 0.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 107KB
✉️ Requests: 15
Astra is a flexible WordPress theme that is highly optimized for performance. It requires less than 50KB of resources, follows the best coding standards, loads very quickly (in half a second), and uses Vanilla JavaScript instead of jQuery, which results in a better speed for your WordPress site.
Features:
- Optimized for high performance
- Responsive design
- Site and blog layouts
- WooCommerce settings
- Lots of multi-purpose starter sites
- Advanced typography options
- Custom colors and background
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (87%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 0.6s
📐 Total Page Size: 97.1KB
✉️ Requests: 16
Zakra is a high-performance WordPress theme that loads in less than a second. In addition to regular sites, it also integrates with WooCommerce, it is considered one of the fastest WooCommerce themes and thus is a great base for a quick-loading eCommerce store.
Features:
- Well designed
- Easy to customize
- 40+ awesome demos
- Lightweight
- Page builder compatibility
- Multilingual theme
- Responsive layout
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (90%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.5s
📐 Total Page Size: 381KB
✉️ Requests: 19
With a simplistic design, Customify is one of the fastest WordPress themes in the WordPress repository. This theme is developed to offer both usability and good looks, all while keeping the load time to a minimum. Use it to create a simple yet beautiful website.
Features:
- Multipurpose theme
- Simple design
- Flexible header
- Top page builders compatible
- Sticky posts
- Left/right sidebars
- Works well with BuddyPress
- Responsive structure
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (94%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.0s
📐 Total Page Size: 127KB
✉️ Requests: 14
Twenty Nineteen is the former default theme in WordPress and still one of the fastest WordPress themes available. It’s a reliable theme that we can certainly recommend for 2023 and beyond. Design-wise, it looks modern and stylish, has a lot of white space and good content clarity.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Modern design
- Accessibility ready
- Optimized for Gutenberg
- Optimized for mobile
- SEO-friendly
- RTL support
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (84%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.1s
📐 Total Page Size: 415KB
✉️ Requests: 24
Mesmerize is a WordPress theme that comes with some good-looking demos while also giving you wide customization options – you can tweak any detail you wish and/or design your pages from scratch. At the same time, the theme delivers good performance.
Features:
- Highly flexible
- 100+ pre-designed blocks
- Page builder ready theme
- Extensive layout options
- Mobile friendly
- Awesome icons
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (91%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.2s
📐 Total Page Size: 122KB
✉️ Requests: 12
X is a modern WordPress theme that comes with lots of complex features. It has five different demos, and it’s fully customizable, which means that you can change almost everything you want. X is multipurpose, and despite all its features, it still loads really fast.
Features:
- Endlessly customizable
- Shortcodes
- Drag-and-drop page builder included
- Layout options
- Navigation options
- Responsive and Retina ready
- WooCommerce integration
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (98%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (86%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.1s
📐 Total Page Size: 118KB
✉️ Requests: 25
Blocksy is a fresh, free WordPress theme that integrates with the Gutenberg editor seamlessly. It offers a smooth user experience on both the front as well as backend, giving you multiple customization options and an overall great-looking design.
Features:
- Lightning-fast speed
- Clean code
- Block editor styles
- Translation ready
- Fully customizable
- Responsive and SEO ready
- eCommerce ready
- Compatible with Elementor and other page builders
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (97%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (85%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 356KB
✉️ Requests: 29
OceanWP is a minimalistic theme built with usability and good design practices in mind. Feature-wise, it’s similar to what you’ll find in Astra and other multipurpose themes on the market. The performance is also great and nothing to complain about.
Features:
- Sleek design
- Search engine friendly
- Tablet & mobile ready
- Custom colors
- Extensible codebase
- Elementor and WooCommerce ready
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (97%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (87%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 0.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 201KB
✉️ Requests: 21
Hestia is a modern and simple WordPress theme, built on a one-page layout and providing a multipurpose design. You can use it for both corporate and creative purposes. It offers full flexibility as it is compatible with the most popular drag-and-drop page builders.
Features:
- Custom colors
- Full compatibility with Elementor, Beaver Builder and more
- WordPress Customizer integration
- Newsletter subscription call-to-action
- Responsive material design
- WooCommerce ready
- Portfolio integrated with Jetpack
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (97%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (88%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 328KB
✉️ Requests: 20
A great all-purpose WordPress theme that’s also one of the fastest WordPress themes out there. Originally created to be a one-page theme. Despite being really feature-rich, it still manages to load fast and deliver good user experience.
Features:
- Fully responsive
- Drag-and-drop page builder
- Parallax and video backgrounds
- Pre-made layouts
- Fully customizable
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (95%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (93%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.9s
📐 Total Page Size: 594KB
✉️ Requests: 16
Twenty Twenty is the current default theme in WordPress. It’s fast-loading, and highly optimized to work with the Gutenberg block editor. The design is modern, clear, and it puts content first, making it the focus of the page. Overall, a great solution for a blog or business site.
Features:
- Simple and fast
- Eye-catching color contrast
- Full-width templates
- Custom background
- Complete editor styles
- Attractive typography
- Accessibility ready
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (95%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (84%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.1s
📐 Total Page Size: 259KB
✉️ Requests: 30
Genesis is one of the most popular WordPress theme frameworks out there and one of our personal favorites. Genesis has a range of child themes available and comes with a clear codebase that’s easy to work with and extend. You can either use Genesis as a standalone theme or put your own code on top of it. It’s a solid option to choose from this list of fastest WordPress themes.
Features:
- Minimal style
- Multiple layout options
- Custom page templates
- Mobile responsive
- One-click install
- Gutenberg ready
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (93%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: B (84%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 0.8s
📐 Total Page Size: 365KB
✉️ Requests: 30
ColorMag is a WordPress theme built specifically for online magazines and websites with big volumes of content. The theme is optimized for speed and manages to load in less than a second. The design remains modern and puts focus on the main content blocks.
Features:
- Easy to customize
- Multi-niche magazine theme
- 15+ awesome demos
- Performance optimized
- Multiple widget areas
- Page builder integration
⚡ PageSpeed Score: A (91%)
🗜️ YSlow Score: A (93%)
⏲️ Fully Loaded Time: 1.8s
📐 Total Page Size: 467KB
✉️ Requests: 15
Avada is a drag-and-drop theme that loads very fast and comes with easy ways to customize everything in just a few clicks. The theme is multipurpose and gives you lots of different demos. You have complete control over your site’s appearance.
Features:
- 12 demos
- Drag-and-drop Fusion Builder included
- Unlimited designs
- Fully responsive
- Intuitive tools
- Powerful admin panel
- Retina ready
- Shortcode generator
Thanks for sharing these huge list of WordPress themes. Genesis is also one of the fastest loading WordPress theme you can add it in your list.
Excellent collection Adelina.
You can add “Ybrant” WordPress theme in your list. It is especially designed for magazine, news and newspapaer related websites. It is the easiest theme to set look & feel as per your choice. It has stunning features like one click installation, contact form 7 support, translation ready and lots more. It also supports WooCommerce plugin for promoting your business.
You Can Try Iconic One.I Am Using It. Its Really Fast You Can Check My Blog
X theme is definitely not the fastest wordpress theme. I think iconic pro theme can be on the top of the list which is not here anywhere.
However, my experience with Schema and Authority is awesome. I could easily make my site get the 90+ grade on google page speed insights.
Many unknown themes are also here I see. Will check them all.
I have SEOWP and H-Code (as well as a number of others on this list) and can confirm those two are indeed fast (for what I tested at least). The question I am pondering is if AMP pages make sense for mobile (cost/time-to-benefit ratio)
All Are Paid Theme
i like goodlife theme…best theme for blogging
Avada is very slow. Yes, the demo is fast, but its heavy optimized. If you want to make your own Avada fast, you need a lot of work. Out of the box its a very slow theme. With Avada its fun to build a website, because so much options and a nice page builder. But if you want a fast and clean theme, Avada is not the right choise.
I installed my website on a normal Webspace (7 € / month) with W3 Total Cache and i got 40/100 mobile and 65/100 desktop (Google). After i switchted to better hoster (15 € / month) and did some improvements (better caching, smaller pictures, deativating some functions of Avada, work on the .htaccess,..) i have now 70/100 mobile and 88/100 desktop. Much better, but far away from a fast theme.
Make sure to enable the JS and CSS compilers for Avada – it vastly lowers the myriad different files down to just a handful, plus does a fairly good job of minifying.
I hope you have tested them. It’s been a long time…
Newsonline very nice theme, thanks for sharing.