15+ Fastest WordPress Themes: Better Load Times & SEO

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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