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There are 10,500+ free themes available in the WordPress repository.
And the number keeps growing by the day.
So how could you pinpoint the best ones? Are you supposed to test every theme you like and compare all the performance metrics, scores, and milliseconds?
Let’s be honest - it doesn’t sound like a task you want to spend your entire day doing.
Especially when we did it for you!
So instead of wasting time activating, deactivating, testing, writing down results, and comparing, read on to find out the 7 WordPress themes that stood out after our thorough research and testing.
Note: The best way to approximate a theme’s performance in the real world without generating traffic was to rely on lab-based Core Web Vitals. Our experience shows that themes that pass LCP, CLS, and TBT in the lab have higher chances of reproducing the same good results in the field.
We began our research by collecting a large pool of themes that our WordPress developers’ worked with in the past, along with themes based on their popularity in the WP repository.
Then, we started the long speed testing process:
We’ve decided to use three testing tools because each has varying standards and metrics. We wanted to ensure one tool wasn’t giving better or worse results than another.
In each tool, we’ve decided to monitor specific metrics:
Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is the go-to tool for testing a theme for speed and Core Web Vitals. Considering that we didn’t have real-world traffic, we focused on the Performance Score, and its metrics on both mobile and desktop.
Here are the metrics we focused on:
GTmetrix analyzes the speed and optimization of a website, making it a valuable tool for identifying performance issues and determining whether a theme contains an excessive number of unnecessary files.
The metrics we zoned in on were:
Although Pingdom shares similarities with GTmetrix, we prefer to use both tools concurrently as they provide different metrics. Also, Pingdom offers an easy way to test a web page from different locations.
All themes have been tested from North America - USA - Washington D.C.
Metrics we’ve monitored:
Before we dive deeper into each theme, its features, pricing, and performance scores, here’s a summary of our tests.
Note: The following ranking is based on Pingdom results and, more specifically - page size and load time. Later in the article, we review each theme and its CWV results.
Features, pricing, performance results - let’s get started with a detailed overview of each contender.
The default Twenty Twenty-Three theme has been developed to use the latest design tools introduced in WordPress 6.1.
The theme utilizes a simple and uncluttered foundation and provides ten distinct style variations contributed by the WordPress community.
Twenty Twenty-Three allows you to easily create a website of any level of complexity, either by utilizing the pre-designed styles or by taking a more hands-on approach and customizing it to your liking.
What is striking about the latest default WordPress theme is its simplicity and lightness. Twenty Twenty-Three is flexible and perfectly suited to Gutenberg’s site editing features, such as template editing, style variations, typography, and block patterns.
Price: Free
Active installations: 800,000+
Best features: Minimalist design, lightweight, pre-designed styles
Suitable for: Testing environment and building a variety of websites
What our tests showed
Twenty Twenty-Three achieved remarkable results on all three tests. More importantly, its lab-based Core Web Vitals were in the green, a prerequisite for an excellent real-world performance.
In PSI, it scored perfectly on mobile and desktop, achieving 100/100 on both tests. It also scored an A grade in GTmetrix (98% performance score, 100% structure score) with 1.4s in load time.
Our Pingdom tests confirmed the “lightweight” label of Twenty Twenty-Three. With just 26.3KB Page Size, this theme was the clear winner from all we tested.
Elementor is used by 8.0% of all websites, which is no surprise considering how easy it is to build a web page. Well, the same developers responsible for creating one of the most popular page builders have produced a fast and lightweight theme called Hello Elementor.
The theme is advertised to be speedy and flexible. As you might expect, it integrates seamlessly with Elementor and numerous other plugins such as WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast, and others.
Furthermore, it offers 100+ ready-made designs, which allows you to create a perfectly functional website from scratch.
Price: Free
Active installations: 1+ million
Best features: Lightweight, 100+ ready-made designs, customizable
Suitable for: Building a website from scratch
What our tests showed
Like Twenty Twenty-Three, Hello Elementor got excellent CWV results both on desktop and mobile.
It scored perfectly on GTmetrix and Pingdom. In fact, our Pingdom tests ranked it the second-lightest theme, with a load time of 520ms, the same as the WordPress default theme.
You should be aware that although it’s marketed as lightweight, Hello Elementor isn’t customizable by itself. You will need to add Elementor as a page-building solution, which might affect your website's performance.
GeneratePress is a WordPress theme designed to prioritize speed, usability, and accessibility.
Its utilization of Gutenberg guarantees you freedom when creating your content. If you use page builders, you’d love to hear that GeneratePress is fully compatible with all the major ones, including Beaver Builder and Elementor.
GeneratePress is fully responsive and has been translated into over 25 languages. Furthermore, it includes 60+ color controls, powerful dynamic typography, 5 navigation locations, 5 sidebar layouts, dropdown menus, and 9 widget areas.
Price: Free; $59/yearly, $249/lifetime
Active installations: 500,000+
Best features: Speed-oriented, responsive, compatible with page builders
Suitable for: All kinds of websites
What our tests showed
One thing that caught our attention when searching for themes was GeneratePress’ statement “100% Page Scores”. So we were eager to test that out.
We can say that GeneratePress talked the talk and walked the walk. It got nearly perfect performance scores on all three tests:
When it comes to page size, we were surprised by the results. Running our website through Pingdom, the page size came at 37.7KB, slightly different from the “7.5KB” they promise on their website.
Neve is a versatile and speedy theme that can be customized for various purposes. It is ideal for bloggers, small businesses, startups, agencies, firms, and e-commerce shops using the WooCommerce storefront, personal portfolio sites, and various other projects.
It is optimized for AMP and responsiveness, ensuring quick loading times and optimal display on any device. Although it has a minimalist design, Neve can be easily extended and features highly SEO-optimized code that can result in top Google search rankings.
Neve is also compatible with Gutenberg and popular page builders such as Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, and Divi.
Price: Free; $69/year; $149/year; $249/year
Active installations: 300,000+
Best features: Responsive, SEO-optimized, minimalist design
Suitable for: A wide range of purposes and sites
What our tests showed
Regarding Core Web Vitals and performance scores, Neve is as good as the previous options.
The reason it comes fourth on our list is the page size and load time, but that shouldn’t stop you from testing it.
One of the benefits of Neve is that it employs vanilla JS rather than a framework such as JQuery. This contributes to an improvement in performance and results in a more responsive website.
Sydney is a robust theme that allows businesses or freelancers to quickly establish a remarkable online presence.
This theme is fully compatible with Elementor and offers various customization options, including access to all Google Fonts, complete color control, layout control, logo upload, full-screen slider, header image, sticky navigation, and many other features.
Additionally, Sydney provides all the necessary building blocks to promptly create an appealing page.
Price: Free; $69/yearly, $99/year; $199/lifetime
Active installations: 100,000+
Best features: Access to Google Fonts, color control
Suitable for: Business websites
What our tests showed
After completing a fresh install of Sydney, we tested the theme's performance.
The results:
It has all the ingredients to build a website that will satisfy your visitors and search engines.
In terms of speed and Core Web Vitals, Sydney ranks the same as the other themes. However, the total page size is twice bigger (48.1KB) than Twenty Twenty-Three.
Astra is the most popular WordPress theme. It is fast, fully customizable, and visually appealing, making it a suitable choice for various purposes, such as blogging, personal portfolios, business websites, and WooCommerce storefronts.
Astra is also designed to be lightweight, with a frontend size of less than 50KB, contributing to its unparalleled speed. The theme is built with SEO in mind, integrating Schema.org code and Native AMP support to enhance your site's search engine visibility.
Furthermore, Astra offers unique features and templates compatible with popular page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, and Divi, ensuring seamless integration with your preferred page builder.
Price: Free; $47/yearly, $137/year; $187/year; lifetime options available
Active installations: 1+ million
Best features: Pre-built websites, multiple customizable options, fast
Suitable for: Every website
What our tests showed
Contrary to our expectations, Astra didn’t perform as well as we thought. Yes, the PSI mobile scores were excellent, but it showed sub-par results on desktop.
Also, it was surprising that it got only an 85% performance score on GTmetrix. Nevertheless, all the other metrics were similar to the leaders in our ranking.
Kadence is a WordPress theme that is both lightweight and packed with features, enabling you to create beautiful, fast-loading, and accessible websites with ease.
One of its notable features is an intuitive drag-and-drop header and footer builder that enables you to construct any type of header in a matter of minutes. The theme also boasts a comprehensive library of stunning starter templates that can be easily customized with the help of intelligent global font and color controls.
Moreover, the Kadence Theme is highly compatible with the most popular third-party plugins, allowing you to swiftly develop impressive eCommerce websites, course websites, business websites, and other types of sites.
Price: Free; $129/first year, $199/first year
Active installations: 200,000+
Best features: Intuitive drag-and-drop, starter templates, performance-minded
Suitable for: All kinds of websites
What our tests showed
Kadence has a default page size of 54.8KB. While it’s the largest of the group, it still managed to excel in both PSI tests and score an A on GTmetrix.
Considering how much this theme packs in, that could be drastically improved with some optimization and a good site speed optimization plugin.
All of them.
Yes, you’ve read that right.
We narrowed down our list to just 7 themes because we wanted to provide you with a small pool of options that you can test on your own.
It’s much faster and easier to go through seven themes yourself instead of overwhelming you with a massive list of 50+ themes.
We believe the ones that were included in this article offer the best foundation to build on and have a well-performing website.
And we emphasize on foundation.
In our research, we tested the themes without any content or plugins added on top of them.
So we recommend trying all of them, playing with their customization features, adding some content, and installing a couple of plugins.
Then, test and see what provides the best results based on your specific needs and requirements.
Building on a speed-optimized theme will give you a head start in your Core Web Vitals journey and save you from warnings like "Avoid an excessive DOM size."
However, in many cases, relying solely on a fast theme isn’t enough to get your scores over the line.
That’s why we’ve prepared a quick checklist of good practices you can follow to optimize each CWV metric:
Although it may seem like a lot of work, the benefits of applying all these best practices will eventually lead to excellent real-world business results.
All you have to do is optimize one thing at a time.
Or…
Niko has 5+ years of experience turning those “it’s too technical for me” topics into “I can’t believe I get it” content pieces. He specializes in dissecting nuanced topics like Core Web Vitals, web performance metrics, and site speed optimization techniques. When he’s taking a breather from researching his next content piece, you’ll find him deep into the latest performance news.
