Want your WordPress site loading faster, though you are not a developer? Then, themes can support you well. How to know about it before buying any theme? You will explore ideas here to know how speedy any particular theme is. This article can help you in choosing a fast loading WordPress theme for your site.
Perhaps, having fewer options, it’s easy to stick to one promptly. But, WordPress gets you thousands of free and premium themes that every website and webmasters need. So, it will be slightly overwhelming to select a theme for the WordPress site. Each theme will have its own features and looks better than others.
Is Your Website Loading Faster?
Are you sure that your pages are loading within 3 seconds against the search query? If not, then you are leaving away the way to your competitors. If your page takes much time to load, then users will abandon your site and switch to the next. Your efforts in gettings your pages ranking top in the search engine results page will go useless.
The WordPress theme on which you built your site or blog has a greater impact on your page loading speed. So, check the page loading speed today with Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom Tools or GTmetrix or web.dev.
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Be Specific Before Buying A WordPress Theme
To make your investment smarter, you must buy only what you want. So, before planning to buy a theme, plan your content and site goals. Without which, buying a multipurpose theme doesn’t make sense. For specific needs, you have to install more plug-ins. It won’t be faster then.
Basically, the desired theme must be so light. Hence, installing plug-ins won’t increase the loading time, significantly.
Anyways, decide upon your niche, what type of content you present, your target audience, monetizing sources, etc. before landing on a theme market place. And, your theme choice must be more specific to be fast serving.
How To Choose The Fast Loading WordPress Theme?
Now and then, changing the theme would impact your website’s user experience and it might be bothering your existing customers or regular visitors. Above all, it claims your time and investment to renovate your designs all the way. So, spend as much as time (not money) to research in finding the best themes in all aspects, especially speed, and performance.
A plethora of articles talk about the site loading speed and tactics to optimize. It’s highly sensational if you want your website to have remarkable space online. You have 3sec to load. If your website exceeds it, then you are losing your audience. Otherwise, you are giving them away to your competitors.
And, as a matter of interest that themes have a greater role in deciding your site loading speed. Is it possible to check how speedy the theme is, before buying?
Perform The Speed Test Before Purchasing
Fortunately, there are plenty of reliable theme developers and theme market hubs out there. Almost, all the premium WordPress themes have demanding features. Above all, it all comes with well-framed documentation. Still, all these can’t help you to identify how fast the particular theme is. Hence, testing the speed of the demo themes will do.
Make a list of all the WordPress themes that meets all your other expectations. Every WordPress theme has a demo site (the site that runs on that particular theme). Test the speed performance of the demo site to examine how speedy the theme is.
You may use tools like Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, GTMetrix, etc to run the speed test.
Strategic Speed Test On A Demo Site
The home page may the index of your website. Still, it doesn’t mean that the loading speed and performance of all the pages will be like the home page. The website is something more than that of a home page.
So, it is obvious to perform speed tests on various inner pages. Consider, you are about to build a basic business website or informational site.
Then it is enough to test the home page speed and a few inner pages randomly.
In the case of blogs, then make sure to test the main blog page and individual posts having different content types.
Things To Consider From The Speed Test Results
Running through a speed test on the theme demo site can get you various results. Among which, let me highlight some of the crucial aspects that impact the loading speed of the theme.
#1 How Fast the Theme Should?
Basically, the site loading speed must be 3 seconds or even less. Maybe the homepage with content might load within 3 sec.
Also, the speed test results will be different based on the location for testing, where the demo site is hosted, using CDN, caching, etc. So, there are no hard rules to follow.
Doing multiple tests for a theme, comparing the results can get you an approximate idea about how fast the theme is. Similarly, perform multiple speed tests on your different choices of themes and know which gives the speed advantage.
#2 Number of HTTP Requests
HTTP requests are the number of time the browsers requests the server to render images, files, etc. Higher the number of HTTP requests, longer the time to serve. Also, the response time depends on the size of those requests.
Anyways, the server can handle multiple requests at a time and the browser can also carry multiple at a time. Still, something around 60 or less than that is appreciable. 80+ around requests will result in backlogging.
Check the number of HTTP requests and the server response time to evaluate the speediness of your desired theme.
Here comes the CDN into the picture. If the site is using CDN, then it can promptly serve the requests delivering data at a faster rate.
To test the speed of a theme specifically, make sure you are testing a demo site that doesn’t have CDN. So, the results will be much helpful to decide upon.
#3 Total Page Size
More data like images, infographics, videos, that a page has, longer the time it takes to load. The page size is measured in terms of KB’s & MB’s. The fast-loading pages have ideally less than 1 MB of data.
Using magazine themes having several home page grids, thumbnails, showcasing more stories might increase the page size beyond 2 MB. In such cases, you will need to have high-performance hosting and caching to keep-up the page loading faster.
So, small the page size, faster it loads. Hence, the theme you are choosing must be simple, sleek, and light-weight (i.e clean coded). Use minimal JavaScripts, & CSS in case of customizing your themes.
Sample Real-time Speed Test
To be diligent in your research for a fast loading WordPress theme, here is a sample speed test run on a demo site. Meanwhile, test multiple times choosing different server locations.
The speed results are optimal as we have seen above in terms of loading time, the number of https requests, page size, etc.
You may also run through the speed test in Pingdom Tools and Google Page Speed Insights to compare results. It gets you more insights about the JavaScript and CSS files loaded. These JS & CSS files are inherited to the theme for some special functionality like displaying related posts, etc. You cannot ignore such features. Be more conscious that your desired theme has these elements minimal.
Also, look at the overall size of the images in the page. You have control over it as you use own images. Compress the images as much as possible without losing the quality, to be less than 100 KB each.
Final Take Away: Choosing A Fast Loading WordPress Theme
I hope this article would be helpful to choose your fast loading WordPress theme. Run through the speed test on the demo sites selecting multiple server locations. Perform tests using different speed analysis tools and compare the results. Make sure the loading time, page size, and HTTP requests are at a lower minimum end.
Once you have chosen your fast loading WordPress theme, it’s up to your choice to install necessary plug-ins for additional functionalities.
But a few plug-ins like for caching, image compression, etc. are recommendable for a fast loading site performance.