Anyone looking to pursue a hobby, share information, or follow their entrepreneurial dreams in today’s day and age is likely looking to create their own website.
After deciding on your content, one of the most important things to consider when building a website is ensuring that it loads quickly so that users don’t have the chance to get frustrated and click away.
Weighing down a site with heavy themes or plugins can add seconds to its load time, and that’s a sure way to lose visitors and potential customers alike.
There are all kinds of plugins that will give you the ability to trim down on excess data clogging up your sites, such as WP-Optimize and ShortPixel. Even so, try this lightweight, famously fast WordPress themes to get yourself started in the right direction.
This is the kind of results you want to see from your website:
1) OceanWP
OceanWP is easily one of the most flexible, all-encompassing themes on the market today. It can work in tandem with other themes, a huge assortment of plugins, and all kinds of content without sacrificing anything inefficiency or ability.
This lightweight theme practically specializes in being able to incorporate any other tool you might want, including the best page builders, your favourite plugins, and beautifully crafted layouts that will make your site both visually appealing and wonderfully unique.
It has free and for-sale demos available as well, so even the actual setup of your website can be quick and easy.
This theme is fast, reliable, generous with its free templates and features, and incredibly user-friendly for both beginners and coding experts.
2) GeneratePress
GeneratePress is an up-and-comer that has knocked several other themes out of the way on its rise to popularity.
It takes the core values of a “what you see is what you get” editor to the next level with a Secondary Navigation feature that allows you to see the changes you make in real-time.
Additionally, one of its biggest selling points is that it’s both “fast and accessible.” The creators have put a huge focus on ensuring that anyone who wants to visit a site made with GeneratePress will be able to access any of the information on it without fear of a physical disability or condition hindering their experience.
However, what makes it so fast is the fact that it takes up an absolutely minuscule amount of storage space to download.
At only 30kb, the theme itself is every bit as lightweight as it can help your website to be, though it does recommend implementing an optimization plugin such as Autoptimize to maximize your website speeds.
3) Skin
Though extremely lightweight, Skin is a powerfully visual theme that easily incorporates gradients, GIFs (moving images), and all manner of images without slowing your pages down.
This theme even has animated backgrounds for you to use that aren’t data-heavy or disruptive, which is a highly innovative and effective tool for bloggers and salespeople to make use of.
It has a huge array of integrations available for social media outlets, eCommerce tools, communication plugins, and more.
One of its most lucrative integrations is Google AdSense, which allows you to use and make many off of ads straight from Google.
You can even create your own popup advertisements to grab people’s attention before they leave a page or show them an exciting new offer you’ve just added to the site.
Skin is currently selling for $52 on ThemeForest, which is significantly less than other themes that are much heavier and have less to offer.
4) Hello Elementor
If you’re even remotely familiar with the world of WordPress or website creation, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Elementor.
It’s one of the world’s most famous drag-and-drop page builder themes and has all kinds of child themes both included in the original price and for additional sale.
Hello Elementor is a branch of that popular theme, and currently boasts the title of the fastest WordPress theme ever created. Hello is 100% compatible with all things “Elementor,” and is even the preferred theme used for testing new Elementor features.
Because Hello is such a reliably fast and lightweight theme, it’s the perfect choice for creating landing pages.
When you’re trying to generate leads and convert the traffic to your site into customers, a single millisecond could be the difference between someone sticking around long enough to see what you have to offer and clicking away to find something else that loads faster.
5) Astra
Like all of the above themes, Astra is both lightweight enough to keep your website at optimal loading speeds and versatile enough to be able to create a theme for any kind of website.
Whether you run a cooking blog, share tutorials for how to fix vehicles, or manage a successful online store, Astra has everything you need to make a visually stunning website for your purposes.
Created by BrainForce, this theme was conceived with efficiency, effectiveness, and creative freedom at the top of the priority list.
It promises that your webpages will load in less than half of a second, which is incredibly impressive when you consider that the average load time for web pages is currently around 8.5 seconds, and the recommendation is to keep it under 3 seconds.
For those looking for something that will be both fast and visually appealing, Astra may be the ideal theme.
Conclusion
There are plenty of theme options available for those whose main focuses are loading speeds, so it helps to know what other features are included when making your decision.
Some of these themes are free but would require paid add-ons or integrations, while others have a flat price and tons of helpful features.
Those who are more interested in creating something visually unique and appealing might prefer Skin or Astra. Someone focused on accessibility and ease of use would want GeneratePress.
Anyone who prefers to pick and choose exactly what features they need through plugins and add-ons would benefit most from OceanWP or Elementor Hello.
No matter what you choose, though, it doesn’t hurt to test your load times before going live or downloading an additional optimization plugin to ensure the best response times.
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1 comment
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