There is no doubt that the speed of any website is an important factor for the site and the brand. It is useful in improving the experience of site users, increasing the conversion rate, improving SEO and getting the site a high rank in search engines.
There are, of course, several factors that affect the speed of the site, the most important of which is good hosting, the number and size of the media used and the content in general, the use of the CDN service, activating the cache, in addition to the template installed on the site and other things.
For example, if you host your website on a bad web hosting service, you will get poor results in terms of site speed, which is why web hosting is the most important factor in site speed.
The template you use will also have a big impact on the speed of your site. In this article, we will focus on the factor of choosing a fast WordPress template for your site in order to speed it up and improve the loading time of its pages. We will also show you the things that affect a WordPress template, how to test the speed of a template, and we will also suggest a group of the fastest WordPress templates.
The importance of choosing a fast WordPress theme
The WordPress theme you install and activate on your site has a significant impact on the loading speed of your website as a whole. There is no doubt that a fast website indicates the quality of your site, helps the site rank at the top of search engine results, provides a good user experience, and increases the conversion rate, whether for the purpose of selling or subscribing.
Because if you activate a slow WordPress template, this will negatively affect the speed of your site, and will cause most of your site’s visitors to leave it quickly, and thus the conversion rate will decrease and the bounce rate of your site will increase significantly.
If you want to have a fast WordPress website, one of the most important things that you will need to pay attention to in order to achieve this is choosing a fast WordPress template so that you do not lose visitors to your site in the first place.
When is my site considered fast?
In general, a website should load as quickly as possible. But on average, a website is considered fast if the loading time for each page is between two to three seconds maximum.
Therefore, if your website takes more than three or four seconds to load, it is a slow website, and this website will lose about 40% of its visitors, and the site’s conversion rate will decrease for every additional second of delay.
What are the specifications of the Fast WordPress template?
If a WordPress theme is full of features and is written with large and complex code, it will definitely affect the speed of your WordPress site , and your attempts to improve the speed of a website that uses slow templates will not succeed.
Therefore, it is necessary to choose your website template carefully, and there are several factors that contribute to making a WordPress template fast, the most important of which are:
1. Simple template
There is no doubt that a template full of high-quality, large images and many artistic effects that require a lot of code to achieve will slow down the performance of your site and make it slower.
On the other hand, a simple template that only includes the basic and necessary features for your site will be smaller in size and will ensure that your site loads quickly.
2. Written in clean code
Clean code is a programming approach that makes writing, reading, and maintaining your code easier. Writing clean, understandable, and maintainable code is a necessary skill that every developer must master.
But sometimes novice developers write template code just to work according to certain requirements, without paying attention to the cleanliness of the code and writing it with the best practices, and this may result in long, redundant, and confusing code, which affects the size of the template files and its speed.
3. Delays loading of scripts
Having too many CSS and JavaScript files and codes can slow down a website. However, these codes are essential in every template to format the pages in an elegant way and give them dynamic and interactive effects.
The best practice for improving site speed is usually to combine code from multiple pages into a single script that can then load asynchronously.
JavaScript requests are also one of the main reasons for slow loading of pages because all <script> elements must be loaded before other page elements. Therefore, some templates load these files in a delayed manner (their loading is postponed until necessary) to increase speed instead of loading them by default, one by one, completely in order. that appears on the web page.
4. It has a mobile responsive design
Most of the fast templates with responsive design for mobile screens are highly recommended by Google. The responsive design of the template will help your website load properly and change sizes dynamically based on the screen size of the device on which the site is being browsed.
Also, the site’s responsive design means that Google’s crawler only has to pass through your site once. If you have a separate mobile version of your site, all your website resources will have to be duplicated for the mobile version, which can increase bandwidth.
Read also: An explanation of AMP to speed up your website pages on mobile
5.Compress files
Compressing template files can reduce the size of template files and make transferring them from the server to the browser faster. The smaller the amount of data required to be transferred to the customer, the faster the website pages will be displayed and loaded in his browser.
The GNU zip algorithm, or Gzip for short, is considered the most popular and widely used data compression method. It allows you to compress data without losing it. It also allows you to reduce the size of HTML pages, CSS files, and site texts by up to 70 percent. Therefore, templates that rely on compression will definitely be faster than templates. Which doesn’t do that.
Read also: How to compress the size of your website images without losing quality
6.Uses few HTTP requests
Did you know that every HTTP request a customer makes from your site, whether for text, images, fonts, or other resources, will add to the overall loading time of your site? The number and size of files transferred also affects how long the page loads.
Therefore, a template that includes fewer and smaller files will make fewer HTTP requests, and thus helps the site pages load faster.
These were the most important specifications of fast templates, but in reality, if you have not already purchased the template and have experience in the structure of WordPress templates and their working mechanism, or if you are not the developer of the template, then of course you will not be able to check the availability of these things in the template and ensure its actual speed.
Don’t worry, there are several utilities that help you test the speed of the template without having to have the template code available. Follow the next paragraph to learn the most important of these tools.
WordPress template speed checking tools
There are many online tools and sites that you can use to check the loading speed of your WordPress theme easily and without having the theme available.
You can check the template with more than one tool before you judge its speed and decide to install it on your site, because each tool tests different elements in the template and has different servers that it relies on.
These tools will analyze the content of your website pages, and based on this analysis, provide you with performance results and offer a set of suggestions for improving it. Performance results will vary depending on the tool used but most will show you (load time, page size, number of server requests required to load content on the page).
The steps will be almost the same whichever speed testing tool you use. If you already have a WordPress website with a theme installed, you can check the site itself by entering your site URL directly into the speed test tool.
If you want to test the speed of a specific WordPress template before installing it on your site, you can test the loading speed of the template’s test preview site. If the demo site takes more than 4 or 5 seconds to load, this means that the site on which you install this template will take approximately the same time.
But this time is approximate, of course, because there are other factors that will affect the speed, such as where the demo template site is hosted and the performance of the hosting server. But in general, it is not recommended to use a template that takes a long time on your site because it will slow down your website and will not be the best option for you.
Other metrics may help you determine the speed of the template, such as the total size of the page and the number of requests it takes to load the page. These metrics are not related to the hosting provider used by the template owner.
The most popular tools for checking the speed of WordPress templates
WebPageTest .1
Web Page Test is one of the oldest free tools used to test website speed and is still very popular with website designers. The main advantage of this tool is that tests can be run from locations around the world using real browsers with actual connection speeds allowing performance testing from where users are actually located and knowing real loading times.
All you have to do is go to the tool’s website and enter the URL of the website or demo template site you want to test (type only the domain name without www or https), select the test site (choose the site closest to where your users are located) and select the type of device and browser you want.
There are other advanced options, but to perform a simple test you do not need to change them. After selecting all the options, press the Start Test button to start the analysis and testing as shown in the following image.
The tool will need some time to test the location you entered and then it will show you the results. The testing process is done by making three visits to the site, clearing the browser cache between each visit to simulate users visiting your site for the first time. It will then provide you with detailed information that enables you to identify weaknesses in your site’s performance.
2.GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a free tool for analyzing the performance and speed of website pages. It is one of the most popular and widely used speed testing tools because it provides a huge amount of data that shows you why there are problems with the speed of your site.
All you have to do is write the link you want to examine and press the Test Your Site button for the tool to do its job, examine the performance of the link passed to it, and show you the results of the analysis in a clear, easy-to-understand graphical way.
It also has an additional advantage, which is its integration to work with WordPress sites through a custom plugin, GTmetrix for WordPress . This add-on enables you to conduct speed tests and examine the performance of your site to reveal the reason for its slowness and work to improve it from within the control panel of your WordPress site.
3.Pingdom
This tool is paid, but it offers a free trial version for 30 days. You can use it to test your site speed, page speed, and Real User Monitoring. It also helps you identify any problems your website may face and displays them to you in a clear and understandable graphical way.
4.PageSpeed Insights
This free tool provided by Google is an excellent tool for analyzing and improving your website, and it also enables you to test the speed of your site on desktop and mobile devices separately.
By using PageSpeed you’ll get your own page speed score and benefit from the tool’s suggestions to make your website faster on all devices.
5.Google Analytics
You can also use the basic speed testing functionality provided by Google Analytics , which provides you with data about the speeds at which your pages load from the moment a user clicks on your site, and the time it takes for the page to fully load.
The Site Speed Report will allow you to see when your pages are going fast and check to see how speed changes when users use different browsers. You’ll also be able to view speed times across multiple devices around the world.
These were some of the speed checking tools that help you check the speed performance of a particular WordPress theme. Whatever tool you use, you should of course understand the significance of the results returned by this tool, analyze them, and compare them.
Pay special attention to the full load metrics which tell you how many seconds it takes for the page to fully load, and how many individual requests were made to load the page.
It is important to go through the documentation of each tool to understand the metrics and test results that this tool provides when examining a specific WordPress theme well and improving speed based on them.
Once you have all the data you will be able to make sure that the pages are working well and if there are speed or other issues, you will need to try to solve them and one possible solution is to try another template that achieves faster speed.
Choosing a WordPress theme that loads quickly and gets good metrics in speed testing tools will certainly help you create a fast website, improve user experience, and also improve your site’s ranking in search engines.
We also advise you to read: The best tools to test site speed and solve problems resulting from the test
The fastest WordPress templates
To facilitate the process of choosing the fastest WordPress template for your site, we will suggest to you a group of WordPress templates that received high results in speed testing tools – when testing the demo site for these templates –
All the suggested templates are lightweight templates, written with clean code to speed up your WordPress site, and you can rely on them to speed up your WordPress site and ensure high quality and performance.
1.Astra
The Astra template is a lightweight, easy-to-use, and customizable WordPress template and is considered one of the fastest WordPress templates available on the official WordPress theme store.
The template is available in a free and paid version starting at $49 per year and is compatible with page building plugins such as BeaverBuilder, SiteOrigin, Elements, and Divi, and integrates with WooCommerce to build online stores.
So you’re looking for a fast, elegant, and customizable WordPress theme, and Astra is a perfect fit.
2. OceanWP
OceanWP is an easy-to-use, multi-purpose WordPress theme that lets you create elegant websites and allows you to import demo-ready in one click using a free custom import plugin.
The template is available in a free version, a paid version starting at $9.99, or you can get a premium package starting at $39 for a single site license. This template is considered one of the fastest WordPress templates, with a loading time of about 1.5 seconds and a size of 1.06 MB.
3.GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a multi-purpose, fully customizable WordPress theme that supports page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder to help you achieve higher levels of customization, and can be used to create any type of website. It is available in a free version and a paid version with more features, starting at $59 per year or $249 for life.
This template has a 5-star rating and over 400,000 active downloads in the official WordPress theme directory. It’s super fast (the demo site loads in the testing tools within 1 second), sleek and lightweight, and allows you to disable features you don’t want to use.
4. His name
The Neve template is a fast and lightweight template that supports SEO and supports AMP . It has a simple, flexible and fully customizable design, so you can easily create the perfect fast and lightweight website. This template loads in less than two seconds in speed testing tools and has a version size of The primary has 696 KB.
So a website that installs this template will work quickly even if it contains a lot of images, text and animation effects. The template is available in a free and paid version with three plans starting at $81.42 per year.
5.Hello Elementor
If you are looking for a fast, completely free, lightweight, and cleanly coded WordPress theme, then I suggest you this template that is compatible with the Elementor plugin that uses drag-and-drop technology to create pages. The Elementor Hello template is a perfect fit.
This template is considered a starter theme , meaning it comes without a pre-styled theme, and only includes the basic browser-compatible design. However, he can benefit from the Elementor plugin to create a beautiful and professional WordPress website in the easiest and fastest way possible.
Therefore, you should use the Elementor or Elementor Pro plugin with this template to be able to customize your site according to your requirements. So, if you don’t want to use Elementor Page Builder on your site, this template is not for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a particular WordPress theme faster than another?
A template is faster if it is written with clean, concise code and its files (image files, CSS files, and Java Script files) are smaller in size. Smaller files mean fewer requests are sent by the browser to the server to load the page. WordPress templates also take into account a simple and mobile-responsive design.
How do I test the speed of a WordPress theme?
If you have not already purchased the template to test it on your site directly, or you are not the template developer to check its files, the best way to know if the template achieves the required speed is to use speed testing tools such as WebPageTest, GTmetrix, Pingdom, etc..
What is the most important factor in achieving website speed?
There is no doubt that choosing a fast theme is an important factor in site speed, but the web hosting service you use to host your site has a significant impact on the performance of the theme and your WordPress site as a whole.
Conclusion
When you search for WordPress templates for your site, you will find many templates that look professional and attract you with their wonderful designs, but what you cannot see is the code with which this template was designed and performed on your actual site.
Some WordPress themes may be poorly written and include a lot of resources (images, css and javascript) that can slow down your website. So you should not neglect the speed of the template at the expense of its design because speed is an important and indispensable factor for any successful website.
In this article, we have suggested to you a group of fast, lightweight, responsive, and highly customizable WordPress templates, some of which are free and some of which are paid, to help you choose a fast and appropriate template for your site. All you have to do is try these templates yourself or search for a template that achieves high performance in speed tests, install it on your site, and tell us the results you got.
