These are the fastest & best WordPress themes in 2014. I scanned all the best premium & responsive WordPress themes with GTmetrix and if they had a Page Speed Grade of B (80%) or higher they made the cut for fastest. This indicates that they were built with care, ensuring that they were built efficiently. If you want a fast loading, responsive WordPress website, any of these themes will serve you well.
The best WordPress themes were hand-picked because they were deemed the most flexible, clean, elegant, efficient & professional of them all.
Fastest WordPress Themes in 2014
Skadi
Page Speed Grade: A (96%)
Thesis
Page Speed Grade: A (96%)
Haven
Page Speed Grade: A (95%)
Renad
Page Speed Grade: A (93%)
Codilight
Page Speed Grade: B (88%)
Meth
Page Speed Grade: B (88%)
Sidious
Page Speed Grade: B (85%)
Divi
Page Speed Grade: B (83%)
Zancudo
Page Speed Grade: B (82%)
Carino
Page Speed Grade: B (80%)
Sweet Sunday
Page Speed Grade: B (80%)
Best WordPress Themes in 2014
Divi
Angle
Buzz
Venus
Carino
Fastest WordPress Themes in 2013
Vertex
Page Speed Grade: A (97%)
GoodWork
Page Speed Grade: A (95%)
3Clicks
Page Speed Grade: A (94%)
Lucid
Page Speed Grade: A (94%)
Pravda
Page Speed Grade: A (94%)
Charitas
Page Speed Grade: A (93%)
Fable
Page Speed Grade: A (92%)
Scroller
Page Speed Grade: A (91%)
Enfold
Page Speed Grade: A (90%)
Foxy
Page Speed Grade: B (89%)
Nimble
Page Speed Grade: B (89%)
YellowProject
Page Speed Grade: B (89%)
STARDUST
Page Speed Grade: B (88%)
CoWorker
Page Speed Grade: B (87%)
Reversal
Page Speed Grade: B (87%)
Fusion
Page Speed Grade: B (86%)
Gravity
Page Speed Grade: B (83%)
HalfCreative
Page Speed Grade: B (82%)
SmartBox
Page Speed Grade: B (82%)
Bretheon
Page Speed Grade: B (81%)
FEARLESS
Page Speed Grade: B (81%)
Dixit
Page Speed Grade: B (80%)
FICTION
Page Speed Grade: B (80%)
Best WordPress Themes in 2013
Enfold
System
3Clicks
4ALL
ThemeTastic
Sistina
The7
GridStack
Bliss
Thunder
Flat
Newspaper
Limitless
Doctype
Visia
FEARLESS
FICTION
Kickstart
Vertex
Lucid
Fable
Foxy
Nimble
Fusion
Avada
Reversal
Goodnex
SimpleMag
World Wide
Coffee & Cream
Glider
Webpaint
Tisson
Scroller
Flavor
BookCard
Dixit
EWA
Maxima
Hot Topix
CoWorker
GoodWork
Pravda
HalfCreative
Charitas
Cluster
SmartBox
Gravity
Avamys
Evermore
Sirens
Nevia
KALLYAS
YellowProject
Lotus
Bretheon
Super Spark
Inovado
Nollie
Pinpoint
Did I miss any of the fastest or best WordPress themes?
If so, feel free to share any of the fastest or best WordPress themes I missed in the comments down below!
Also, keep in mind that even if you have the fastest WordPress theme there is, your load time can still be terrible if you don’t use one of the best WordPress hosting options.
I would like to add another responsive theme that was born in 2013 (it was born a couple of minutes ago, actually); the Nexus Twenty Eleven v3. Its based on the GPL Nexus Framework, and thus features front-end editing (including page builder, multi header, sidebar and footer), its responsive and has an advanced (LESS-like) color theme based on CSS variables and its free forever free for everyone! http://nexusthemes.com/twenty-eleven-wordpress-theme/
Hi, it is really good to find such post, I hope in later days we might be able to see more such good posts, thanks for sharing.
Manoj karmocha
http://www.manoj.com.np
Many of interesting wordpress designs I found on http://bestforwebs.com/ … must see!
I like the idea, love to see some commentary on the themes.
What kind of commentary would you like to see exactly?
Thanks Andy Forsberg really good job wow awesome collection
there are also an awesome free responsive wordpress themes people can learn from
http://metuts.com/blog/top-free-responsive-wordpress-themes.html
This is an awesome collection of free responsive WordPress themes! Thanks for sharing.
nice collection, ty
None of the links work – can’t see templates. Error says: Image cannot be loaded. Make sure the path is correct and image exist.
Must have been a temporary server issue or something, I can’t seem to reproduce the issue…
Looks like it was a strange JavaScript issue with Internet Explorer only, it has been fixed. Thanks for pointing that out!
I am viewing on Chrome, not Explorer. Working now. Thanks for reply.
Strange, it wasn’t an issue for me in Chrome. Oh well, glad it’s working for you now.
Nice collection… i found cleanspace on Themering.com so.. how can i get it?
We have also started doing nice themes and have added a nice collection here:
http://www.sktthemes.com/themes/
Do let us know if you like/dislike any?
Perhaps you have not seen my pagespeed wordpress theme, its page speed score is 96 along with all the ads and plugins. 🙂 Waiting for your kind attention
Perhaps you could link to it?
Thank for this post.
Hi; this is interesting but i don’t understand how do you get those statistics. Charitas got 95% ! I doubt because i test it in Google PageSpeed Insights, and i get : 57% for mobile and 81% for desktop. So it is so far from 98%. So how or where do you get 98% ?
When I wrote this post it was at 95% per a GTmetrix report I ran, I just re-ran it now and it’s scoring an 86%: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/demo.wplook.com/nBkTIej4
Hi,
The right url for Charitas is http://themes.wplook.com/charitas/ and the test shows 93%. http://gtmetrix.com/reports/themes.wplook.com/DHyZLJ1x
I’m seeing that now as well, I’ve updated the post to reflect this.
Thanks!
Wow these are so nice !!!!!! Check out the top wordpress music themes – http://www.realpcgeeks.com/wordpress-music-themes/
Entertain us novices: what makes a theme fast-loading?
A ton of things can impact it, but what is the most important for a theme would be primarily: optimized images w/ specified dimensions (that match the actual dimensions of the image), utilizing CSS sprites (several commonly used images stored as a single image, chopped up and displayed as individual images using CSS), efficient stylesheets, efficient javascript (that’s loaded in the footer) and avoiding external file requests.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for compiling this list!
I tired woo themes but I noticed even the best of themes there run a little slower than these ones.
Yeah I’m surprised by how poorly optimized some of them are for speed. Case in point their newest theme named Canvas (http://demo.woothemes.com/canvas/) scores a D (69%), no bueno.
these are premium theme, have you free theme with good pagespeed?
You do not state the circumstances of your testing. For example, was it by using the theme’s on your own servers, or merely putting the theme demo URLs into GTMetrix? I suspect the latter, due to the very high scores.
Looking around the web for people already using these themes on their own sites, and then placing those URLs into GTMetrix I received MUCH lower page loading spped scores.
Your hypothesis is correct, it was merely putting the theme demo URLs into GTMetrix. I did not purchase and install them all on my server for testing. So the scores are influenced by the quality of the server the demos are running on, but I feel that any theme developer who does quality work would ensure that they host their theme demos on a quality server. It is likely that many of the users of their themes are not ensuring their web servers are optimized for performance, so this discovery you’ve made makes sense to me. I’d be very curious to see how they scored all running on the same server, but it isn’t financially viable for me to perform such a test.
So it was an exercise in getting 24 affiliate links onto one page? LOL Never mind, I can’t blame you for that. We all have to earn a living. More power to you.
Andy – thanks for your really useful WordPress related posts. Iove the look & feel of this blog. Would you share what theme it is?
Tony
Agreed, Avada should be and is now on the list. It wasn’t originally because it wasn’t born in 2013, but since it is maintained so well I have made an exception.
This is a good theme, but I purposely left out themes that are aimed at very specific use cases / audiences.
Looks good! Have you tried pingdom to test the speeds on different sites?
The irony is that this page takes forever to load. Great information, though. Thanks.
I don’t know how they do it. But if installing to a brand new wordpress site results show much lower.
I think it’s because the theme demo pages are actually iframed (in most cases) and tools like GTMetrix are basing theri results on the container page.
Bottom line is that most themes don’t defer javascript/css, use sprites, add etags etc which are all dcontributing factors for both page speed and site ranking relating to that speed. Pose that question to the theme developers and they all run for cover right now. Hopefuly, things will change (soon) for the better.
Hi
I saw many TF demos using layersliders with tons of pics/animations and yet score good on pagespeed. However, when I tried them on my sites, the result was not even half as good. One theme “Senna” scores marvellously well, and averages above 75. Surprised you omitted it.
I was going to recommend Frank, but it looks like Iconic and Frank and essentially one in the same: http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/16/frank-a-wordpress-theme-designed-for-speed/ – I’m not aware of any other super fast loading, mobile-friendly WordPress themes that are free. At least, not that come close to the speed of Frank or Iconic. Sorry I can’t be of more help here. I plan to make a post on the best free WordPress themes, but there aren’t that many great ones so I’ve attempted and then gave up a couple of times already on such a post. One day I’ll get around to it though, cheers and good luck with your search. If you do find such a theme, please share the name of it with me.
Nice list Andy
I notice lots of Elegant Themes and StudioPress Genesis themes in there.
Fortunately those are the two frameworks that I use.
Also impresses with the number of A ratings that Elegant Themes have.
Solid! So how about a best WordPress parallax theme list?
Great post! Question for you…
I am attempting to optimize the speed and SEO of my blog. The current theme on my wordpress blog is quailfire, which is suppose to be awesome for SEO optimization but isn’t very fast in loading. Would it behoove me to switch to a faster loading theme and loose quailfire?
Thanks for any insight!
yeah, how did Avada and X fair?
How did AVADA fair?
Andy,
Thanks! Such a huge premium on theme speed these days. You are quick or dead in the eyes of Google….and the average web visitor.
used more than 6 from above they are superb
While PageSpeed grades are important, simply having a good PageSpeed number does not mean your theme is fast to render. It means the code that finally made it to the person browser is, in theory, ‘efficient’. PageSpeed does not factor in how long the server took to compile said code, which is where a theme’s speed is truly measured.
How fast is fast? I have researched and I cannot find any data that will be clear for me. My sites are so slow right now. I need to move out from SEOhosting. Pinging gives me 2.6, 3.5 and even 23.ms :O
I am testing different hosting companies. How many ms for load per wp site are ACCEPTaBLE?
So what is fast? I use Udesign.
Thanks
Well if you look at my Fastest WordPress Hosting in 2014 post: https://penguininitiatives.com/fastest-wordpress-hosting-2014/ – it shows the fastest WordPress Hosting options and their average load times.
I would say anything that loads under one second is “fast”. I shoot for under half a second myself =P
Nice list.
Can’t believe you missed Swift, which helps you get page speed score as high as 97.
They are so confident that they are offering a free trial of their premium version
http://swiftthemes.com
Btw, what ever you are doing to alter the scrolling behaviour, it sucks.
Agreed! You are not the first person to say that so I have removed the annoying smooth scrolling that seems to have been causing more harm than good =)
Nice collection of fastest loading wordpress themes, Thanks for the great list
I have used few from above they are nice.
Thanks for that list! So a B (88%) would have made it to your list. Correct? I am using the free ‘Responsive’ by Cyberchimp and got that score.
Great write-up!
What an awesome list of themes! Cool to see thesis on this list.
If your theme is not on this list and you want to track it’s page load speed, the best recommendation I can make is WP Performance Profiler (not P3) to test the load speed of your theme (in milliseconds): https://slocumthemes.com/2015/01/wp-performance-profiler/
I put together a post on my blog about how I got my GTMetrix score to 98/97. I Thought that it may be of interest to you an your readers.
Wow Very Nice themes!
Haven is quite frankly more like HEAVEN – it’s by far my most favorable one pager! I think everybody who use WP should take a deeper look on their speed score as most built-in themes are not that supportive when you have a bit more content or gadgets and in the end your site will fall far behind in Google search ranks. Well, I got some tips on what exactly to do from colorlib: https://colorlib.com/wp/how-to-speed-up-wordpress-site/ – as actually there are quite many things you can improve, besides theme. Of course, changing the theme is the easiest one and I did that as the first thing. After trying multiple ones, I stayed true to Newsmag that I sourced from here: https://ttfbtest.com/ – they have literally thousands of fast WP themes! I suggest to take a look as I doubt you can’t find your favorite there.
Awesome themes collection man 🙂
I like Carino Theme, I think it’s perfect WP theme for blogs.
HI ,
Thanks for Sharing Great List … Awesome
I don’t think you can just run GTMetrix tests on a bunch themes and then run a blog about it. Case in point is Avada – I notice it made the page. What GTMetrix won’t show you is the optimizations that Avada is doing to make the demo run fast that aren’t going to be affordable for most websites. 10.6 megs loading in 1.8ms? Really? Do you think the average hosting account is going to perform like this? They leave this part out. They also use CDN services on the demo for the massive amount of scripts that need to load even for the simplest pages. We’re looking at getting off Avada for these reasons. Not a fan. My $0.02
Hi. very nice list of fastest wordpress themes. Thanks for sharing.