Have you ever wondered what the difference between a highly successful site and your website is?
A successful website is profitable, visible and the visitors are happy with their experience. If your website theme endowed similar qualities to your site, your online presence would have been valuable too.
A colossal webpage can compromise the future of an online business by lowering its customer satisfaction rate.
The theme of a website largely determines its loading speed and bounce rate. That is why a lot of amateur WordPress sites initially enjoy significantly high click-through rates (CTRs), but they also experience a staggering bounce rate.
Soon the trickle of traffic reduces, and the owners realize that the site has become a source of the cash drain. Keeping people on your website is going to be tricky if your theme is not attractive yet light.
Here’s why speed matters
Extensive research shows that if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, over 40% of your visitors will skedaddle and never turn back. When visitors bounce off, you don’t just lose revenue. You lose reliability, traffic, and potential Google Ranking. Google keeps a close track on how visitors are treating your website now, to decide your rank for tomorrow.
You need a theme that is simple, elegant and fast. Loading speed decides user experience (UX) and satisfaction rate considerably. Before selecting a heavy theme because it is feature-loaded and good looking, you need to give this a serious thought.
Why is it difficult to chance upon a speed-optimized WordPress theme?
Most free WordPress themes are great looking, and they pack an impressive number of functionalities, but are they fast?
Poor coding causes the majority of the fastest WordPress themes (free and premium) to bloat and slows down. You will hardly find one that follows the WordPress Community Coding Standards. To keep the themes cheap and to encourage amateur coders, this opensource platform has to compromise on speed.
How can you predict the speed of a theme you choose?
If you are looking at the loading time of the theme during the demo, you are doing it wrong. The speed depends on the hosting qualities, and you will most likely use a different web host than the developer.
You will also include additional snippets of code and add new plug-ins to load few features. Using speed testing tools like GTMetrix to check the loading speed is a good idea. However, if the results churn out a loading time of 4 seconds, do not be impressed.
Once your website is ready, it will add a couple more seconds to this time!
Why do you need to pay attention to hosting?
Web hosting is the only other factor that will take care of your site’s loading speed. If you are using the most basic plan of a random web host, you might experience several snags during loading.
Too many websites on limited resources can never result in fast loading speeds. For a speedier site, you need a web host that can deliver the promised resources. Always check reviews before making your decision. Remember that the physical location of the server will determine the final speed of your site. The closer the data center is to you, faster the loading will be.
Here is our list of the top 5 fastest WordPress themes (free and premium) of 2018
1. Javelin
What do you want your WP theme to be? Wholesome, modern, light, tech-savvy, intuitive, responsive and flexible are all terms that describe Javelin accurately. It is a professional-looking theme from professionals that can impart a sophisticated look to your site irrespective of the niche.
Each page has singular domain possibilities and graphical customization options. It has over 40 custom animations. It uses Parallax to make the content of each page noticeable and captivating.
2. Soledad
If you want a powerful, yet lightweight theme that will give your website an avant-garde touch, then Soledad is your final destination. It is ideal for blogs, magazines and review sites.
Soledad has multiple visual choices that you can customize without editing a single string of code. You can explore over 250 customization options and 250 homepage demo. Experts especially recommend it for slower connections.
3. MagPlus
MagPlus is a nifty, light-weight and good-looking magazine cum blog theme for WordPress users. It gives you the access to over 40 demo sites.
It comes with one-click installation options and 150 custom elements for customizing your site. It is one of the quickest loading themes in the market. In fact, it allows you to pack exclusive premium features on each page without increasing the server load significantly.
4. Divi
It is one of the most powerful themes for WordPress in 2018. It comes with 18 pre-designed customizable layouts. It gives you access to the Divi builder that helps you create new snippets of code, adds them or edits the original code for customization.
Several pre-made layouts increase the speed of development including pricing tables, blurbs, contact forms, CTAs, and sidebars. It spoils the user for choice with great color palates, blog options, and multiple header styles.
5. CheerUp
CheerUp is responsive, light, modern and highly customizable – everything a WordPress developer could ever ask for. However, that’s not the end of it. This theme has six demo websites with unending design flexibility that stems from over 200 layout variations.
CheerUp offers a collection of handy widgets, the latest news and trending posts to the developers with just one click. One of the biggest pros of working is with this theme is its extensive scalability. From small startups to large corporations, any company can leverage CheerUp for establishing their online front. In fact, this theme comes with WooCommerce plug-in for easy e-commerce integration.
The last word
No matter which WordPress theme you pick, do not forget to check the loading speed with either GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools for measuring the possible speed of the themes.
Always remember to count in about 2-3 extra seconds since setting a website up will require the addition of several plug-ins, shortcodes and additional code snippets that can add a few seconds to the loading time.
