The theme you choose can make a big difference with how quickly your site loads, which in turn affects how your site ranks on Google. There are a number of things you can do to speed up your WordPress website. In fact, we did a whole article on the Secrets of WordPress Speed Optimization.
The 10 Fastest Free WordPress Themes Ranked, with Test Data
If you’re interested in how we tested each theme, we’ll explain the methodology at the end of this post. As for choosing which themes to test, we used personal experience and popularity as a starter and then removed themes that didn’t perform well enough to make a list.
Finally, he’s a quick legend for what the abbreviations mean in the results that we’ll share for each theme:
- PSI = PageSpeed Insights mobile test
- GT = GTmetrix desktop test
- WPT = WebPageTest desktop test
We included relevant metrics such as the Largest Contentful Paint and the Cumulative Layout Shift, two of the Core Web Vitals metrics.
Here is an overview of the scores, along with ranking. Please keep in mind that these scores are without our “secret” WordPress speed optimizations, so you may experience even faster results after applying our optimizations.
| Rank | Theme | PSI Mobile Score | PSI LCP | Page Size (WPT) | HTTP Requests (WPT) |
| 1 | Arke | 100% | 1.2 s | 20 KB | 6 |
| 2 | GeneratePress | 100% | 1.2 s | 26 KB | 7 |
| 3 | Neve | 100% | 1.2 s | 32 KB | 8 |
| 4 | Hello Elementor | 100% | 1.3 s | 20 KB | 7 |
| 5 | Kadence | 100% | 1.4 s | 40 KB | 10 |
| 6 | Astra | 100% | 1.4 s | 44 KB | 9 |
| 7 | Blocksy | 99% | 1.6 s | 86 KB | 10 |
| 8 | Zakra | 99% | 1.7 s | 40 KB | 12 |
| 9 | Page Builder Framework | 97% | 2.1 s | 69 KB | 12 |
| 10 | Sydney | 96% | 2.4 s | 88 KB | 10 |
1. Arke
- PSI Speed Index: 2.2 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.2 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.49 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 20 KB
- HTTP Requests: 6
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
Arke is a super minimalist theme, so it’s not so much of surprise that it shows up at the top of our list of the fastest free WordPress themes. It’s pretty much just white space and text. No sidebars, no widgets, no settings, just empty writing space.
If you’re a writer, Arke might make a great empty canvas for your content, but also it could work well for some page builder.
2. GeneratePress
- PSI Speed Index: 1.9 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.2 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.47 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 26 KB
- HTTP Requests: 7
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
GeneratePress is one of the fastest WordPress themes you’ll find. Period.
Tom Usborne, the developer, puts a ton of focus on clean, lightweight code. It’s under 30kb, has no dependencies (and yes, that includes jQuery), and is just generally built to perform really well.
Beyond good performance, it’s also super versatile. Using its many WordPress Customizer options, you can pretty much adapt GeneratePress to any niche. And if you’re willing to pay for the premium version, you’ll also get access to a lot of pre-built demo sites that you can easily import.
3. Neve
- PSI Speed Index: 2.0 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.2 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.7 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 32 KB
- HTTP Requests: 8
- GT Performance Score: 99%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
Neve is a lightweight WordPress theme from ThemeIsle that was specifically built to coincide with the release of the new WordPress block editor known as Gutenberg.
It comes with built-in mega menu support, lots of WordPress Customizer options, and some importable starter templates.
4. Hello Elementor
- PSI Speed Index: 1.9 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.3 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.5 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 20 KB
- HTTP Requests: 7
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
Hello Elemetor is kind of an oddball on our list because it’s not a full-featured theme like the other options on this list, but we included it anyway. Instead, it’s the most lightweight foundation possible to use with Elementor (or even with another page builder if you prefer). You need to keep in mind that you cannot use it by itself – you need to pair it with a page builder.
If you are using a page builder or theme builder, though, it should definitely be one of your top options. Also note though, that some themes have mostly empty pages which you can use in a similar way.
5. Kadence
- PSI Speed Index: 2.1 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.4 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.47 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 40 KB
- HTTP Requests: 10
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
Kadence is a newer WordPress theme that has gotten a lot of buzz. It fits similar use cases as Astra and Blocksy (a later entrant on this list) in that it’s a highly customizable theme that you can use for literally any niche.
One of Kadence’s strong points is its many options in the WordPress Customizer, even in the free version at WordPress.org. One of the unique things about it it’s Global Palette of colors that allow you to modify multiple colors across your site simultaneously.
6. Astra
- PSI Speed Index: 2.1 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.4 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.5
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 44 KB
- HTTP Requests: 9
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 100%
Astra is another super popular option in a similar vein to GeneratePress, in that it’s heavy on features and customizability, but low on weight.
If you want to kickstart your content, you can import one of the many free demo websites, built with either:
- Elementor
- Beaver Builder
- Gutenberg (the WordPress block editor)
- Brizy
Also, you can tweak things yourself using many of the options in the real-time WordPress Customizer.
7. Blocksy
- PSI Speed Index: 2.1 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.6 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.7 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 86 KB
- HTTP Requests: 10
- GT Performance Score: 99%
- PSI Performance Score: 99%
Blocksy is a modern theme built with the Gutenberg editor in mind, which when it was released took the WordPress community by storm with its header builder, modern layouts, and general customizability. It “works like a charm” with popular WordPress page builders, including Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer and Brizy.
It has an added benefits of a Webpack build pipeline which ensures clean code and the backend options are built with React, which overall creates a speedy customization experience. This theme happens to be one of our favorites for it’s depth of features and slick interface, like a Global Color Palette, even including a dark skin for the admin Customizer!
8. Zakra
- PSI Speed Index: 2.5 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.7 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 40 KB
- HTTP Requests: 12
- GT Performance Score: 99%
- PSI Performance Score: 99%
Zakra is a very lightweight WordPress theme option from ThemeGrill, which comes with 50 different site demos you can import. These demos cover different niches (like construction, education, yoga, etc.) and are built with the native block editor, Elementor, and Brizy.
Beyond that, you get plenty of WordPress Customizer controls that let you switch up colors and layouts styles for your site.
9. Page Builder Framework
- PSI Speed Index: 3.1 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 2.1 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.6 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 69 KB
- HTTP Requests: 12
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 97%
Though it has the word “framework” in it, Page Builder Framework is actually a lightweight, customizable base theme that’s designed to be paired with the page builder plugin of your choice. You can also use Page Builder Framework to handle your header, footer, templates, and other theme-specific areas. Then, you can leverage your favorite page builder to design your content itself.
10. Sydney
- PSI Speed Index: 2.7 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 2.4 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.8 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 88 KB
- HTTP Requests: 10
- GT Performance Score: 99%
- PSI Performance Score: 96%
Sydney is a nice business or general purpose theme, which recently got a lot faster by getting a facelift and removing all it’s jQuery dependencies.
Like a lot of other themes on this list, Sydney works with page builders, but works especially well with Elementor, as it also includes a number of optional pre-built Elementor-based demo sites.
The Runners Up
OK, so we had to throw in a few runners up, just for fun.
Runner Up 1: OceanWP
- PSI Speed Index: 4.0 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 2.9 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.6 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
- Page Weight: 166 KB
- HTTP Requests: 18
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 88%
OceanWP is a highly popular option, which has lots of customization options, so we had to include it. Similar to Astra, OceanWP also offers some free pre-built demo sites which you can import if you don’t want to start your site from scratch.
Overall though, OceanWP is not quite as lightweight as some of the other themes on this list, but it’s still well-optimized and the upside is that you get a lot of features and customization options for a lot of different niches. It’s especially strong for WooCommerce stores, because of it’s commerce related features.
Runner Up 2: BuddyX
- PSI Speed Index: 4.5 s
- Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 3.1 s
- Desktop Largest Contentful Paint: 0.6 s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.425
- Page Weight: 230 KB
- HTTP Requests: 34
- GT Performance Score: 100%
- PSI Performance Score: 82%
BuddyX is a free WordPress theme built especially for community and membership websites. It is especially good for this because of its built-in BuddyPress integration so that you’re able to use the free BuddyPress plugin to power your site’s community functionality (such as member profiles, private messages, groups, and more).
It also has good support for building with Elementor and other page builder plugins, along with support for other popular plugins such as WooCommerce for building your own e-commerce site and LearnDash for building online courses.
All in all, give this one a look if you need a fast theme to build your membership community.
How Fastest Free WordPress Themes Were Tested
In order to eliminate as many third-party variables as possible, we tested each theme using its default settings and some basic paragraph text/headings from Bacon Ipsum (a place-holder text generator, often used by designers).
No changes beyond those defaults were made, nor were any plugins installed or make any performance improvements. What would have made them even faster would be to follow our optimization secrets, which you’re welcome to follow yourself.
Because of these basic setups without much real content, these load times don’t approximate a “real WordPress site”. In the real world, you might like to import one of the theme’s demo sites or otherwise add “weight” to the page. However, this approach might not provide the fairest way to compare different themes against one another, as there would be too many variables to get an accurate comparison if they were tested in another way.
To collect the test data itself, we used three different tools, which we encourage you to test your own site with:
- PageSpeed Insights – these results are based on Lighthouse from Google. We’re only including data from the mobile test (not the desktop).
- GTmetrix – Their new test is also powered by Lighthouse, but it includes some more metrics so we also wanted to include it. It was tested on a desktop computer.
- WebPageTest – this test was configured to run nine separate instances and take the median value. It was tested on a desktop with a FIOS throttled connection.
If you’d like to tune your own site for speed and make it faster, please check out our article on the Secrets of WordPress Speed optimization.
So Which is the Best Theme for You?
All of these free WordPress themes load fast, so there shouldn’t be any question about the performance of each theme. So instead, let’s consider the best options from a design, usability, and use case perspective.
Arke is the absolute fastest theme we tested, though it is a little bit bare bones in it’s features. If you want a more full featured general multipurpose theme you can use for absolutely anything, GeneratePress, Astra, OceanWP, and Blocksy are four of the most popular options out there, and you’ll probably be happy with any of them. Of those three high featured themes, GeneratePress and Astra are the absolute fastest, though OceanWP is still pretty optimized.
Beyond that, Zakra and Neve also give you a lot of flexibility and come with pre-built demo sites to get you started quickly. Kadence and Blocksy are some newer entrants on the list that have been getting a lot of attention because of their performance and customizability. And the new version of Sydney is a very fast business theme.
On the other hand, if you’re planning to use Elementor to design your site, you’ll definitely want to try the Hello Elementor theme as it’s one of the most lightweight foundations possible, in large part because by default it has zero features of its own. It relies on you to build it out with the free Elementor page builder.
So what’s our personal favorite? We have to admit that we’re really impressed by Blocksy! We especially like the UI components of Blocksy, and how customizable it is. It’s Customizer even has a dark theme! It’s font selector shows a preview of the actual fonts as you’re scrolling through them, and (unlike some others in this list) it even has a sticky header in the free version!
Finally, no matter which WordPress theme you choose, AccelerHosting with it’s fast WordPress hosting is the easiest way to make your website really fly. If you have any questions about our fastest free WordPress themes or any of our optimization techniques, then please ask away in the comments!