10 Lightning-Fast Free and Premium Themes

Having a fast website is usually one of the most important things webmasters rate as important to them. They will pay hundreds (or even thousands of dollars) on VPS web hosting packages that promise super-quick server response times. They will pay hundreds per year to a Content Delivery Network (like MaxCDN or CloudFlare) to create a super-quick cached-version of your website.

And then they will install a beautiful looking WordPress theme that–while looking amazing–is bloated and slows the entire website down. If the theme itself isn’t coded well, or quite simply has too many features, then no CDN or server response time will make a difference in your website’s load time.

We tested out some WordPress themes, and added a few plugins that are known to conflict and slow-down a low-quality WordPress theme: w3 Total Cache, Ewww Image Optimizer, Plugin Performance Profiler, and Recent Posts with Thumbnails.

1. Avada WordPress Theme

Avada is the ‘king of the mountain’ when it comes to WordPress themes. Why? It can be any kind of website: a news blog, e-commerce store, photography portfolio, fitness website…pretty much anything you can imagine.

With such versatility, you might think that the website is big, bloated and slow. But in our theme tests, we actually found Avada to be the fastest WordPress theme we could find.

Here is a screencap from our test with GTMetrix:

As you can see it scored a 90% with GTMetrix. And why did it lose points? It appears that on the demo, the images aren’t compressed. But if you install something like the Eww Image optimizer that we mentioned before, you’re Avada-installed website will likely score even higher.

Bottom Line: This is as good as it gets for lightning-quick WordPress themes. … Read the rest