10 fastest WordPress themes – Improve page speed & SEO

13th July 2017

WordPress Maintenance Package UK Point WordPress Theme

Improve the speed and SEO of your WordPress website

Why do you need the fastest WordPress theme?

It’s all about user experience, the faster your site runs the more visitors you will get, simples! Choosing one of the below fastest WordPress themes will no doubt help in your sites overall speed. You can also check out our best SEO themes posts here.

If you have a theme or framework that is well coded and super-fast loading, that will translate to great user experience on your WordPress website. This will also have a positive knock-on effect on your SEO, yes website loading speed is a ranking factor!

We have tested 10 of the very best and fastest WordPress themes out there today.

ThriveWP has tested them on both Google Pagespeed insights and Pingdom; you can view the themes and scores below. It is also worth noting that Google is now taking a mobile-first approach, so the importance of a mobile-ready website is huge!

Note that the scores are a rough guide only as these scores depend on many variables.

We used the demo sites of these themes so you may have varying results. Aside from themes, you can learn more here on how to speed up your WordPress site

Need more help Choosing a WordPress Theme?

10 fastest wordpress themes

1. Point

Point WordPress Theme

Point is a FREE fluid responsive theme that is multipurpose and flexible. Through the advanced options panel, you can choose from multiple site layouts, backgrounds, and colour schemes, as well as control specific features of the theme.

Scores:

Pingdom: 82

Google Pagespeed: 85

2. Socially Viral

Socially Viral

SociallyViral is a beautifully designed WordPress theme that is built to be engaging, fast, and most importantly, boost viral traffic. With features to help increase social sharing, you’ll get more traffic from the web’s top social media websites and also boost your search engine rankings.

Scores:

Pingdom: 80

Google Pagespeed: 83

3. MH Elegance

MH Elegance

MH Elegance WordPress Theme is an exclusive, unique and beautiful WordPress theme for all kinds of purposes.

This WordPress theme is suitable for business websites, high-class blogs, unique portfolios or creative websites. Showcase and present your content in an elegant and sophisticated way and benefit from a sleek and clear-cut design.

Scores:

Pingdom: 84

Google Pagespeed: 77

4. One

One WordPress Theme

The Creative Multipurpose Portfolio theme.

PAGE BUILDER Built on top of our latest framework, the new page builder allows you to create unlimited layout combinations.

EASY LAYOUTS Tonnes of options for simple background/overlay management, with boxed or extended appearance.

A SLIDESHOW ON EVERY PAGE Full support for full-width slideshows, and captions.

PHOTO ALBUMS Create albums and photo galleries like a breeze and display them in the best way possible.

WOOCOMMERCE INTEGRATION Sell anything you want thanks to the full support for the WooCommerce plugin (2.1.x and up).

Scores:

Pingdom: 71

Google Pagespeed: 62

5. WP SEO Theme

WP SEO WordPress Theme


Fully customizable, drag & drop WP theme
No other premium theme on the market is as flexible and powerful as SEO WP:
Unlimited header styles, unlimited page designs, unlimited footer layouts.

All drag & drop, perfectly user-friendly with super quick live appearance customisation.
Best SEO WordPress theme 2015 with drag & drop content creator included SEO WP theme based on the Live Composer page builder (premium plugin included with our theme for free).

You create and edit pages in the front-end using a drag and drop interface. No messy shortcodes needed/included. No other page builders (like Visual Composer) supported.

Scores:

Pingdom: 93

Google Pagespeed: 84

6. Schema

Shema

Schema is the fastest loading, ultra-SEO friendly WordPress theme. Featuring all the best MyThemeShop features, including our custom options panel, all our shortcodes and widgets, and a pixel-perfect design, Schema also includes rich snippets in order to help search engines your site and rank you higher.

Scores:

Pingdom: 83

Google Pagespeed: 84

7. Newsmag

Newsmag

Newsmag is a modern WordPress theme that lets you write articles and blog posts with ease. We offer great support and friendly help!

The Newsmag template is excellent for a news, newspaper, magazine, publishing or review site.

It also supports videos from YouTube and features a rating system. It uses the best clean SEO practices, and on top of that, it’s fast, simple, and easy to use. In addition, News mag supports Responsive Google Ads and AdSense.

Scores:

Pingdom: 91

Google Pagespeed: 90

8. Genesis Framework

Genesis Framework

The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress.

Whether you’re a novice or advanced developer, Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimised foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.

ONE-COLUMN TWO-COLUMNS THREE-COLUMNS LEFT-SIDEBAR RIGHT-SIDEBAR FIXED-WIDTH
CUSTOM-BACKGROUND CUSTOM-HEADER CUSTOM-MENU FULL-WIDTH-TEMPLATE THEME-OPTIONS

Scores:

Pingdom: 79

Google Pagespeed: 68

9. Best

Best

Best is a responsive WordPress theme that features an engaging design that is fully fluid responsive, loads incredibly fast is fully customizable, and optimised both for search engines and advertisers. It also includes an awesome review system and support for our new MegaMenu plugin!

Scores:

Pingdom: 80

Google Pagespeed: 83

10. Nexus

Nexus

Nexus is a versatile magazine theme packed full of custom widgets and content modules that give you control over your page.

The challenge of any magazine theme is to take massive amounts of content and present it to the reader in a clear and structured manner. Nexus achieves this through a strict grid, typographical hierarchy and a clean layout that gives each element just enough room to breathe.

Scores:

Pingdom: 82

Google Pagespeed: 79

 

Gavin Pedley

Gavin Pedley

Gavin is the guy behind the award-winning ThriveWP. He has over 18 years of experience creating, developing, hosting and managing WordPress websites.

Gavin regularly shares his expertise via the ThriveWP blog and Youtube channel, where he creates informative and helpful WordPress tutorial videos.

Connect with Gavin on FacebookLinkedin or Twitter.

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