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My fastest WordPress theme picks after 7 years of building websites – for developers and also beginners. Free & Premium

Disclosure: This post may contain links to affiliate partners and products, that I have selected manually and would or have bought myself. I will get a commission if you decide to purchase anything after clicking on these links – at no cost to you.

Read on if you want to find out which themes I use after 7 years of trial and error for speed and reliability and to streamline my work and achieve a great work/life balance, whilst working with many happy clients.

I learned how to build websites by creating my first blog on WordPress.com. Then I started building small business websites for my friends and their friends around 2014. Today, it’s my main source of income and I work with clients from New York and other US cities, through Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal to Slovakia (where I’m from). My hourly rate is $90 – €80 and it allows me a great work/life balance. All that is also thanks to a couple of WordPress themes and plugins, which this post is about – my top picks for the fastest WordPress themes.

This post contains affiliate links to products I use and recommend. I earn a commission when you purchase using these links. I wouldn’t recommend something just for the commission, that’s just wrong.

What makes a great WordPress theme for a developer?

Fast hosting update November 2022:
I have moved my biggest website – nimblecamper.com to Rocket.net, here’s why:

TLDR; – WPX was great to get my blog off the ground, I am happy I chose them. They helped me with some setup issues, their support was always great. But, I guess, my website outgrew their hardware setup possibilities and it’s time to move on. I tested Cloudways, but it wasn’t good enough for my 25K visits/month, Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic website, Kinsta let me down with their monthly visits counting in bad traffic (bots, crawlers) which made it too expensive. I chose Rocket.net in the end and couldn’t be happier – super fast backend and frontend, their support is very good and much more knowledgeable in WordPress ways than Cloudways, and monthly limits are generous.

  • backend slowness with heavier traffic – as my traffic (0 to 30K per month in 2 years) and website complexity grew (I’ve added Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic ads), the backend was becoming slower and slower – until it was costing me valuable time in waiting for each admin page (dashboard, product or post editing page etc) to load + it was a pain in the ass to watch the screen load for 20s each time on WPX.net hosting. This hosting is better for sites with traffic below 25K or lower complexity plugins.
    • note that the frontend was running fine as it was on Ezoic’s CDN and cached
  • too strict limits on concurrent operations – when I edit products in bulk, I open up to 10 WP product (or post) editor tabs. I kept being banned by WPX security system for too many operations (queries). Had to wait for 10 minutes, then start again. This was too annoying. I spoke to WPX support several times and there’s nothing they could do – that’s how their security is set up.
  • future scalability – if I’m experiencing slowness with 30K monthly visitors and my site is growing steadily each month, this was a necessary step in the evolution of nimblecamper.com. More traffic requires better hardware. First, I moved to Cloudways, where I can quickly scale up the hardware should my traffic spike faster – plenty of room to grow. But… my site was too much for an AWS 2cpu 2GB plan at 36 per month (when I worked on admin, say a product or a post update, the server went down with the entire site). And one level higher (2cpu, 4GB plan) was 86 USD per month – too much for what it was (I tested it, admin was still taxing it too much). So I tested Kinsta and it was good at the start – at 30 USD per month (25K visits limit though…) the website and admin is the fastest ever, their support is AMAZING and everything runs very smoothly. Plus, their hosting is geared towards WordPress websites, so their support knows everything you need for WordPress – all the tricks can be easily implemented and they offer incredible tools to monitor your usage, block countries you are not targetting (so that traffic doesn’t eat up your plan + blocks brute force attacks from those countries).
  • BUT – Kinsta’s 25K visits per month also count in all bad traffic – bots, crawlers etc. So my 30K website visits per month turned out to be 90K visits per month and I would have to pay triple for bad bot traffic. I tried all possible ways to limit bad bot traffic, but it’s impossible. Hence, I moved over to Rocket.net and couldn’t be happier.
  • price – at 26 USD per month I got 5 domains with WPX, which is great, but the hardware was shared with others, hence, I’m presuming, the admin slowness. At Cloudways, I tried starting with the 2GB DigitalOcean package, also at 26 USD per month, but that didn’t cut it. At Kinsta’s 30 USD / month, I get one website, but that’s for a very low-traffic website if you count in bad traffic and crawlers, so not for me. With Rocket.net, I pay 25 USD per month, my website is the fastest ever – including the admin (I still can’t believe how fast the admin is, considering it took 15-20s to load on WPX servers). And I don’t have to worry about the bad bot traffic like with Kinsta.

If your website is approaching higher traffic and a more complex setup – go for Rocket.net too.

  • good coding practices (reliability, speed, compatibility)
  • good support, documentation and customisation help – time proven – long time support and development
  • good theme features that cover what my customers need

BTW, by a developer, I mean someone who utilises a theme to optimise his/her work and avoid having to code core features from scratch and then develops the resulting website using either theme features or CSS/PHP changes.

By a beginner, I mean someone who knows how to install WordPress and wants a reliable and fast website, can tweak its settings but doesn’t have to do any CSS/PHP changes.

Let’s dig into each one of these in more detail:

Good coding practices in a Theme (reliability, speed)

There are a plethora of themes that look good on the outside – ThemeForest is full of them. Some might be good, but it’s hard to know – the vast majority of the reviews are created shortly after purchase, not months or years after using the theme.

In my experience, such themes last about a year or two, then the developers move on and you’re stuck with a theme that will slowly fall apart. Their demos look super cool (because the developers spent a lot of time making them like that, including some customisation or photoshop images you don’t have), but inside, they are rotten – many third-party plugins, a gazillion of components that will clutter your admin menu and very likely a “licence not included” visual builder as the base.

A theme shouldn’t try to do everything…

And most of all – all this clutter makes them very slow.

Such themes might not be compatible with most commonly used plugins, they will be slower (loading plenty of external scripts, fonts, icons) or not using the latest WordPress recommendations.

The result will be a slow website that is prone to errors each time you update a plugin or the theme.

A good theme will be the opposite of this – it will be coded following the latest practices and WP recommendations (like Gutenberg, Blocks). It will be faster than most – because the code is clean and the theme authors know this is important for every website. This will also make it reliable – good code updates easier, is more compatible with other plugins and is less prone to errors when the WordPress core updates.

Good support, documentation and customisation help

Support doesn’t end a few months after the purchase. It’s also fast – same-day responses because most problems you write to customer support about are time-sensitive. They also don’t shy away from helping you with smaller customisation requests – as they already have some snippets and functions or can quickly modify them for you.

You also want a theme and its development company to be time-proven – around for at least several years. That way, even if they are good at the beginning and then things change and the quality of their services starts falling behind – you will see that in their reviews. A new company will likely have great reviews at the beginning, but the real test is to be able to deliver good services time and time again over several years.

Good theme features, that cover what the customers need

A theme needs to strike a good balance between the number of features and reliability/speed. Too many features might make it slower and less reliable (and I’ve hardly ever used all the features for a single project). You don’t want a theme that tries to be a directory theme, but also an e-commerce theme, but also a small business theme, but also a portfolio theme etc.

You want a theme that does the core features (what every website needs) really good, but doesn’t sacrifice speed and reliability because of that. It should work well for e-commerce, blogging, it should allow you some central customisation options (fonts, colours) and it should be easily extendable/compatible with other common plugins.

What theme fits the bill?

I’ve seen this time and time again with all KadenceWP themes and plugins. I first started using their Ascend / Virtue themes and in the last few years moved on to the new and super fast Kadence Theme. I’ve been paying for their full PRO membership since 2017 and it’s well worth it.

Get 10% off

any Kadence product: Theme, Plugins, Cloud or full Bundle

  • great customer service & support
  • super header & footer builder
  • performance optimised
  • Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Woocommerce, LearnDash, The Events Calendar & more integrations
  • Supercharge your website development with Hooked Elements (Premium)

Use this code at checkout:

nimble10

Their themes were always faster and better coded and the latest Kadence Theme is a powerhouse. It’s super-fast, it’s well coded, it packs a lot of features and it’s built with WordPress 5 – Gutenberg & Blocks in mind.

Kadence theme features I use the most are:

  • Header and footer builder (PRO) – no need to have a visual builder plugin to build custom headers and footers. It’s drag and drop and I still can’t believe how fast it is.
  • Hooked elements (PRO) – create any design using Gutenberg (or Kadence) blocks and stick it anywhere into the website using hooks – under the header for posts only? Just after the post body? Replace the sidebar for a specific post type? Cart notices? This gives you incredible flexibility – f.e. to show advert banners anywhere on the website. You needed at least two plugins to do that before (to show stuff on the cart and f.e. below all posts). This feature makes the theme much more suited for developers (but won’t get in the way for beginners).
  • Kadence Blocks (FREE and PRO) – one of the most stable extensions for Gutenberg – very powerful blocks, especially the row block – if you use Elementor, this is very close to that – you can easily build amazing layout, move them eround, copy over to other parts of your website. Copy & paste styles too!
  • Page, Blog, Woocommerce predefined layouts – because they offer great level of customisation, but also look great out of the box
  • Custom scripts (for the entire website or by page/post) – great for affiliate websites, google analytics and similar, custom page conversion tracking
  • Ready made demos and blocks – they keep adding new demos and there’s plenty of blocks you can easilyl import and style further, saving a ton of work

Plus the entire Kadence Membership (bundle) is well worth it – the support is always good, the plugins & extensions are good and moving with the technology and market. All are Core Web Vitals ready, Elementor & Woocommerce ready.

Fast hosting update November 2022:
I have moved my biggest website – nimblecamper.com to Rocket.net, here’s why:

TLDR; – WPX was great to get my blog off the ground, I am happy I chose them. They helped me with some setup issues, their support was always great. But, I guess, my website outgrew their hardware setup possibilities and it’s time to move on. I tested Cloudways, but it wasn’t good enough for my 25K visits/month, Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic website, Kinsta let me down with their monthly visits counting in bad traffic (bots, crawlers) which made it too expensive. I chose Rocket.net in the end and couldn’t be happier – super fast backend and frontend, their support is very good and much more knowledgeable in WordPress ways than Cloudways, and monthly limits are generous.

  • backend slowness with heavier traffic – as my traffic (0 to 30K per month in 2 years) and website complexity grew (I’ve added Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic ads), the backend was becoming slower and slower – until it was costing me valuable time in waiting for each admin page (dashboard, product or post editing page etc) to load + it was a pain in the ass to watch the screen load for 20s each time on WPX.net hosting. This hosting is better for sites with traffic below 25K or lower complexity plugins.
    • note that the frontend was running fine as it was on Ezoic’s CDN and cached
  • too strict limits on concurrent operations – when I edit products in bulk, I open up to 10 WP product (or post) editor tabs. I kept being banned by WPX security system for too many operations (queries). Had to wait for 10 minutes, then start again. This was too annoying. I spoke to WPX support several times and there’s nothing they could do – that’s how their security is set up.
  • future scalability – if I’m experiencing slowness with 30K monthly visitors and my site is growing steadily each month, this was a necessary step in the evolution of nimblecamper.com. More traffic requires better hardware. First, I moved to Cloudways, where I can quickly scale up the hardware should my traffic spike faster – plenty of room to grow. But… my site was too much for an AWS 2cpu 2GB plan at 36 per month (when I worked on admin, say a product or a post update, the server went down with the entire site). And one level higher (2cpu, 4GB plan) was 86 USD per month – too much for what it was (I tested it, admin was still taxing it too much). So I tested Kinsta and it was good at the start – at 30 USD per month (25K visits limit though…) the website and admin is the fastest ever, their support is AMAZING and everything runs very smoothly. Plus, their hosting is geared towards WordPress websites, so their support knows everything you need for WordPress – all the tricks can be easily implemented and they offer incredible tools to monitor your usage, block countries you are not targetting (so that traffic doesn’t eat up your plan + blocks brute force attacks from those countries).
  • BUT – Kinsta’s 25K visits per month also count in all bad traffic – bots, crawlers etc. So my 30K website visits per month turned out to be 90K visits per month and I would have to pay triple for bad bot traffic. I tried all possible ways to limit bad bot traffic, but it’s impossible. Hence, I moved over to Rocket.net and couldn’t be happier.
  • price – at 26 USD per month I got 5 domains with WPX, which is great, but the hardware was shared with others, hence, I’m presuming, the admin slowness. At Cloudways, I tried starting with the 2GB DigitalOcean package, also at 26 USD per month, but that didn’t cut it. At Kinsta’s 30 USD / month, I get one website, but that’s for a very low-traffic website if you count in bad traffic and crawlers, so not for me. With Rocket.net, I pay 25 USD per month, my website is the fastest ever – including the admin (I still can’t believe how fast the admin is, considering it took 15-20s to load on WPX servers). And I don’t have to worry about the bad bot traffic like with Kinsta.

If your website is approaching higher traffic and a more complex setup – go for Rocket.net too.

A good theme won’t save you if your hosting isn’t fast – I (used to) run my websites on WPX hosting:

  • great & super fast customer support (30seconds response – always!)
  • free malware scan + removal
  • free website migration, setup and speed optimisation
  • 5 domains in the cheapes package
  • 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating – one of the best for a hosting company
WPX Hosting Review

Bionicwp.com hosting is also a good option.

See my BionicWP hosting and WPX hosting comparison here.

Other alternatives to try

If you want to try a few similar alternatives, keep reading – although these offer very similar functionality, I can’t comment about their support. I’ve used their free options for some projects + have read good reviews too.

GeneratePress theme

  • Also very light and fast
  • My second go-to theme
  • Great customisation options and compatibility

Blocksy

Other themes I used to build with, but then moved to Kadence

  • OceanWP theme – was good for a while, but now feels cluttered and not as fast compared to Kadence. Feels more like a Freemium product that tries to sell you more + needs more OceanWP plugins for simple things like a fixed header.
  • Astra theme – very similar to OceanWP, also feels like Freemium where you need to buy bells and whistles to achieve the best result, but has always been known for speed too.
  • Various ThemeForest themes – even if top rated, in my experience they always put design before reliability and speed. Usually come bundled with some page builder that you have to then pay for separately.
  • Acabado theme – not recommended, see my Acabado theme review here

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