Looking for Fast WordPress Themes? Here’s Three!
Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash
The tortoise may have beaten the hare in a foot race, but it wouldn’t last long in the world of web development. Speed is the name of the game in today’s digital industries; not only do users expect sites to load quickly (and bounce if they don’t), but loading speeds also factor into Google search rankings — including mobile.
With that in mind, we were curious about which WordPress themes performed best when it came to loading times. Drawing on Pingdom research conducted by Athemes, we picked out 3 of the fastest WordPress themes to give your WP site a head start right out of the blocks.
H-Code
- Load Time: 1.14 s
- Page Size: 2.6 MB
- Price: $60
- Performance Grade: 99 (A)
A Swiss-army theme for virtually any type of site, H-Code is a good theme to start with. Earning an near perfect performance score on Pingdom and a hasty loading time of just over a second, H-Code matches its impressive speed with equally impressive options for site building.
You can select your ideal setup from over 50 homepage demos, including both multi-page demos and even some single-page ones. Tons of pre-built content templates make this as fast to design as it is to load. The theme also supports your favorite WP plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, WPML, and Total Cache — an ideal theme for beginners and experts alike.
SociallyViral
- Load Time: 0.68 s
- Page Size: 402.7 kB
- Price: $59 (sale)
- Performance Grade: 100 (A)
Viral content waits for no one, which is why having a quick-loading page is no less than essential for widespread content consumption. That’s the heart of SociallyViral, a simple and speedy WordPress theme designed for digital marketing. With a perfect Pingdom score and a loading time easily under a second, this theme is perfect for shareability.
Don’t expect much depth with SociallyViral; it’s best for landing pages and smaller, targeted sites as opposed to mammoth enterprises. Still, for what it aims to do, it’s one of the best: it prioritizes its social sharing buttons, integrates easily with AdSense to take advantage of clickthrough rates, encourages email signups with nice opt-in forms, and lets you advertise your trending/popular posts with special widgets.
Pillar
- Load Time: 1.4 s
- Page Size: 2.7 MB
- Price: $59
- Performance Grade: 98 (A)
Last, we have another multi-purpose theme that assists a variety of industries. Pillar is incredibly malleable, with homepage demos for agencies, businesses, ecommerce, portfolios, landing pages — pretty much everything.
The theme comes with 110 ready-made templates for conventional and niche pages alike. You have your regulars like About and Contact, but also specialized pages like product pages or case studies. Over 140 content blocks let you further hand-tailor your site as you like with options for pricing tables, people profiles, testimonials, etc. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also eight site headers and four site footers to choose from.
All these options make Pillar one of the strongest choices for a robust WordPress site that’s not weighed down for speed.
