Top 10 Fast WordPress Themes You Need to Know

We invited WordPress designers and developers on Themeforest to share their fastest performing themes. We ran each theme through Pingdom, recorded all the results, and in the article below we’ve shared some of the best performing themes we discovered.

With over nine thousand WordPress themes on ThemeForest, it can sometimes be daunting to find the perfect theme. Sure, customers can look at the number of sales and ratings of each item, or the reputation of each author, but other than looking purely at the aesthetics of each design, are there any other ways to determine which is the best theme to invest in? The answer is yes – how fast a theme performs.

Theme speed can be optimized in numerous ways such as selecting a solid hosting platform, the use of a good framework, optimizing images effectively and so forth. We may deep dive into these areas in a future blog post, but for the purposes of this article all we need to embrace is the fact that an effectively optimized WordPress site can significantly improve how fast your website loads, improve SEO ranking, and thus help retain users and customers on your site. Subjectivity although WordPress performance can be subjective and therefore complex to make comparisons between themes with many variables at play, we wanted to help expose some of the better, well-configured WordPress themes that load quickly and perform well.

It’s important to note that our tests are not trying to be scientific in any way. We only recorded scores for themes voluntarily submitted by authors, for example, and have not included every theme on ThemeForest, or any free WordPress themes. Even within the sample of themes we ran tests on, there are still many variables out of our control that should be taken into consideration such as hosting, location, and time of day reports were run; that can all affect results.

One of the biggest challenges in making comparisons is obviously the wide difference in page size and number of requests between themes, so it’s important to keep these issues and variances in mind. For the purpose of this article, however, we’ve given precedence to themes with an ‘A’-rated performance grade where 100 is the highest attainable score. The ranking also takes into consideration load time (where lower values are best) and the “faster than” metric (where higher values are best).

Our overall intention is to give some exposure to themes that have been built, and optimized with speed in mind for the end user, and if in doubt, users can always run their own tests/reports for themes they are interested in purchasing. So, formalities over and done with, let’s jump in and take a look at all those juicy, optimized WordPress themes!

Foto has a simplistic, and clean design to allow images to take centre stage. This template is incredibly easy to implement, and equally as simple for the audience to navigate. The sleek design has been crafted specifically for the optimum display for photography, and includes fifteen different album options. The Foto WordPress template for photographers is easy to use, and allows you to customize the look and feel of your photography website. It also uses up to date, and best practice SEO techniques, and has been designed to be responsive across all devices.

Check out the full demo here.

This photography theme is perfect not only for photographers but for all types of creative people. In the latest version, unique features include password protected galleries for clients, smart photo protection to minimize the chance of getting your work stolen, multiple layouts, an innovative media manager, appointment booking, downloadable image galleries and so much more!

Check out the full demo here.

If you’re looking for a news/magazine style theme, Top-News may be the theme you’ve been looking for! It’s feature-rich, yet user friendly, and has the advantage of being fast-loading, and very customizable. The flexible and powerful options allow you to customize the theme easily, and the drag & drop page builder makes it easy to create unique and creative homepages. TopNews is SEO-ready and provides a great platform to achieve super high search engine rankings for your website.

Check out the full demo here.

Mango is high quality creative theme with unique style and clean code. It can be used for many types of creative portfolios from agencies to freelancers and beyond. The super clean and minimal design is powered by fast, smooth, and optimized pages. Even under the hood, code and CSS is clearly commented and easy to understand.

Check out the full demo here.

Glossy’s main selling point is its ability to embed affiliate links virtually anywhere in the theme in order to monetize your blog. Greatly influenced by fashion, and couture, the stylish design is modern, clean, and engaging. Seven total layouts and 12 shortcodes make this an eye-catching and quick performing theme.

Check out the full demo here.

Travelista is a blog theme designed and developed for travel bloggers. Due to its simplicity however, it can be used for any kind of blog. Supporting 9 post formats (Standard, Gallery, Link, Quote, Video, Image, Status Audio and Aside,) and 8 unique blog layouts, Travelista comes with an advanced admin panel providing an easy interface to customize and style each page. Retina and responsive has never performed so rapidly!

Check out the full demo here.

Marco is a modern, unique and highly functional WordPress theme suitable for any restaurant, cafe, winery, sushi bar, bistro, bar, pub, or other food-related business. With its professional and beautiful design, the theme offers all essential restaurant features, such as a menu, gallery, blog, contact, team and an online reservation system. With a top performance score of A-100, this theme gives a whole new meaning to “fast food”!

Check out the full demo here.

Blueberry is a lightweight & responsive WordPress Theme for personal blogs, with a lot of features. The clean, modern, and minimal design helps fans and readers focus on what really matters – your content, and every word you write.

Check out the full demo here.

Electro is a robust, and flexible WordPress theme, helping you to make the most out of using WooCommerce to power your online store. The design is very well suited for electronics products, vendor based marketplaces, and affiliate websites. It comes bundled with most of the advanced features available in most popular eCommerce websites like Amazon, FlipKart, SnapDeal, WalMart, Alibaba, and so forth. The theme is built on top of the Underscores framework, and the code is lean, and extensible. This allows developers to easily add additional functionality via child theme, and/or custom plugin(s). With speed of product discovery and the checkout process being essential to online shopping, the optmized performance of Electro will satisfy both your business, and your customers.

Check out the full demo here.

Paperio is a visually appealing, clean and uncluttered, multi-purpose WordPress blog theme that is SEO, and speed optimized. Fully responsive and modern, the ability to customize this theme means that it has multi-use potential for industries such as interior and home decor, food and restaurants, art and photography, travel and adventure, fashion and lifestyle, news and magazine, and much more.. The polished design provides a sophisticated, user friendly, and easy-to-read blog style. This optimized theme has given special attention to ensuring highly visible search engine results, and lightning-fast page loading.

Check out the full demo here.

For more WordPress themes, visit Envato Elements.

New to WordPress? Check out this article with 10 free tutorials to help you learn WordPress.