WooCommerce: What Are The Fastest Themes?

Speed is an essential factor that directly impacts the conversion rates, business revenue, sales, and customer experience.

Akamai’s research suggests that even a 100-millisecond delay in the page speed impacts conversion rates by 7%, while a 2-second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. Thus, even a few milliseconds of delay can cost your store thousands of dollars – let alone dissatisfied customers, poor SEO ranking, and bad online reputation.  

Hence, page loading speed is the essence of an excellent customer experience and building a successful online presence.

Where possible, you want to eliminate unnecessary page loads, especially when it comes to the checkout process. Otherwise, you risk cart abandonment. That is the main reason you should use a checkout window, accessible straight from product and cart pages.

While the speed of your WooCommerce store depends on multiple facets – such as your web host, image, media files, and the code of your store, the theme you choose also plays a significant role in ensuring faster store speed. 

Calculating your store’s page speed and making sure you choose the right WooCommerce theme that checks all the boxes can get frustrating and overwhelming considering the plethora of options you can choose from – especially 1300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest. 

So, in this article, we share the top WooCommerce themes you can use, along with a few factors to look for when picking a suitable theme for your store. But first, let’s understand what makes a WooCommerce theme slow or fast and how to calculate the speed. 

What makes a WooCommerce theme fast or slow?

A theme’s speed depends on many factors – including its size, CSS, and code. 

Here are some critical attributes of a faster WooCommerce theme: 

• Smaller file size – making it faster and easier to download because of lesser data. 
• Cleaner CSS and inline CSS where necessary – making it faster for your store to render the data. 
• Less code – so the theme processes faster on the server. 
• Relies less on JavaScript and the Jquery JavaScript library –  so the device CPU has less work to do. 

Together, these factors facilitate faster download from the server and data rendering, making it easier for the browser to assemble the page’s content and display the entire page quickly.

On the other hand, slower WooCommerce themes have a lot of JavaScript to download, come with poor optimization, and use off-the-shelf APIs and libraries – including Google Fonts and Google Maps APIs. 

Here are a few beneficial tools you can use to calculate the speed of your WooCommerce store: 

• Google PageSpeed Insights      
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• GTmetrix Speed Test
• Bytecheck Website Speed Test

Now that we’ve seen what makes a theme load faster let’s look at some factors you should check when choosing the right WooCommerce theme. 

Tips for picking the best WooCommerce theme

Here are some critical considerations you need to look into when choosing the best WooCommerce theme for your store: 

• Ease of use: Choosing a theme that’s easy to use and comes with detailed documentation to help whenever you get stuck is important – especially if you’re a new WooCommerce store owner. 
• Compatibility: Choose a theme that’s compatible with the WooCommerce extensions, add-ons, and plugins to help add more features to your store. 
• Flexibility: Choose a theme that’s easy to tweak to meet your store’s requirements and seamlessly integrates with drag-and-drop page builders to help customize your site. 
• Speed: Ensure you choose a speed-optimized theme to deliver a quality customer experience. 
• Responsive: Choose a highly-responsive theme that looks great on all screens and devices – as 64% of mobile users expect the requested pages to load under 4 seconds. 
• SEO-friendly: SEO-optimized WooCommerce themes help get more website traffic – resulting in more conversions and sales. 

Hence, these are some basic yet essential factors you need to consider when picking the right WooCommerce theme. Now let’s explore the top six options to find the perfect theme for your online store. 

Fastest WooCommerce themes in 2022

Shoptimizer

Shoptimizer is a super-fast, premium, and performance-optimized WooCommerce theme.

Besides offering competitive speed, high conversions, and better SEO rankings – Shoptimizer creates minified and critical CSS automatically to eliminate wait times and make your store load almost instantly. Additionally, its Elementor page builder lets you edit and customize your core pages with an intuitive drag-and-drop feature without any coding. 

Moreover, it also offers features such as distraction-free checkout, adding additional product information, displaying trust badges on the cart and checkout, and adding a sticky bar with product details. 

It also provides a mega menu support option to present featured products and subcategories directly within the menu to draw customers’ attention. 

Overall – Shoptimizer is a highly accessible, featured-packed, compatible, WooCommerce-focused, SEO-friendly, and highly customizable theme with beautiful pre-designed pages to get your store running quickly. 

Top feature: Its request for a call-back feature allows your customers to learn more about the complex and high-value products and gain more relevant information before buying.

Pricing: Costs $99, but you can also find it at a discounted rate of $49. 

Astra 

Astra is a super-light theme that doesn’t rely on jQuery and is particularly suitable for WooCommerce. Its clean and performance-optimized code boosts your WooCommerce store’s speed – ensuring more sales. 

It provides over 150 pre-made templates with popular page builders like Beaver Builder, Gutenberg, and Elementor. In addition, it’s one of the highly flexible themes – allowing you to combine designs, colors, and combinations with high compatibility and greater ease. 

Other critical features include responsive grid layout, customizable grid settings, multiple gallery options, plenty of checkout options, quick view to let customers view products in detail without clicking on them, and sales bubble style to grab customers’ attention. 

Overall, Astra is a mobile-optimized, SEO-optimized, accessible, and translation-ready theme that offers beautiful typography options with a conversion-ready checkout solution for your WooCommerce store. 

Top feature: The Astra Pro’s infinite scroll feature dynamically scrolls all the page’s products as the user scrolls down to deliver a seamless product showcase experience.       

Pricing: Free and comes in three premium pricing options – Astra Pro, Essential Bundle, and Growth Bundle that costs $49, $169, and $249, respectively. 

GeneratePress Premium

GeneratePress is an excellent WooCommerce theme that helps your store look modern and attractive and provides impressive speed – being lightweight and not relying on jQuery. 

It provides an extensive library with professionally designed starter sites, easy styling controls and options, an advanced layout system, infinite scroll using vanilla JavaScript, and secondary navigation. 

Some of the unique traits of this theme include displaying blog archives posts in a masonry layout and column layout, sticky navigation for a better user experience, and a lightweight off-canvas panel for all the devices. Moreover, its advanced hook system lets you add any element or section anywhere in the theme as needed. 

Overall, it’s a performance-optimized and versatile theme that offers excellent page loading speed for your WooCommerce store to ensure a high customer experience. 

Top feature: It claims to be the first-ever block-based theme builder that provides Dynamic Block Elements – offering endless options and complete design control to create whatever you require. 

Pricing: The yearly plan costs $59/year, while the Lifetime plan costs $249 (one-time payment). 

Neve 

Neve is a lightweight, fast, and multipurpose WooCommerce theme that offers over 100+ starter sites – allowing you to take your WooCommerce store online with a ready-made design instantly. 

It comes with an intuitive and customizable blog layout with flexible controls to increase user experience. Plus, you can easily create custom headers and footers and leverage custom backgrounds. 

Its Elementor Booster module, live customizer, mega responsive menus, and AMP compatibility are its notable features. Overall, Neve is SEO-friendly, speed-optimized, translation and RTL ready that loads in a second and provides video tutorials – allowing you to seek guidance through the entire process of building your store. 

Top feature: Its white-label feature allows you to present the theme as your own as a developer or an agency owner while building websites and WooCommerce stores for your clients. 

Pricing: Free and comes in three pro versions – Personal, Business, and Agency plans that cost $81.42, $175.82, and $305.62, respectively. 

OceanWP

OceanWP is a WooCommerce-ready, powerful, fast, multipurpose theme – known for customization and multipurpose options. 

It makes it easy to create beautiful custom pages, sections like headers and footers, and page layouts. Further, it provides global styles, typography, and style layouts – allowing you to create a unique and outstanding WooCommerce store with zero coding. 

In addition, OceanWP seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce and lets you choose the shop and product styling options, add an off-canvas filter to offer an uninterrupted shopping experience, and enable the multi-checkout option to increase conversions. 

Its pre-built WooCommerce demo sites, floating add-to-cart buttons, and quick installation make it convenient for WooCommerce store owners. Overall, OceanWP is an accessible, flexible, beginner-friendly, and responsive theme for your online store. 

Top feature: Comes in multiple header options – allowing you to choose from 7 customizable header styles, enable the top bar section to add additional menus and features, and pick from three different mobile menu styles, regardless of the main header style. 

Pricing: Free and comes in three pricing options – Personal, Business, and Agency plan that costs $43, $71, and $171/year, respectively. 

Divi

Divi is a powerful, flexible, and multipurpose WooCommerce theme that comes with its own drag-and-drop page builder with intuitive and customizable settings and controls. 

It comes with over 800+ pre-made website layouts and designs that let you build your store with faster speed and maximum efficiency. Furthermore, you can take complete control over your store’s customization – including hover state styling, shape dividers to add stunning transition effects between sections on your site, font and text styling, border options, animations, and advanced code editing. 

Thus, Divi isn’t just a beginner-friendly theme – but its advanced design lets you take complete control over your store and bring your imagination to life. 

Moreover, it provides WooBuilder to build your WooCommerce store – making it easy to showcase and sell unlimited products and design and customize product layouts using Divi’s WooCommerce Modules. 

Thus, Divi is a fully-responsive theme that offers numerous customization options, translates into 32 languages, provides 100s of extensions, and makes styling your WooCommerce store super-fun, creative, and a breeze. 

Top feature: Provides a fluid and intuitive interface that lets you move the interface elements on your page and reposition your tools – allowing you to create a workspace that matches your needs and adapts to your screen. 

Pricing: The yearly access plan costs $89/year, while the Lifetime Access plan costs $249 (1-time). 

Conclusion

Besides factors like a web host, hosting location, and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for website speed – the WooCommerce theme you choose also plays a significant role in boosting the speed and performance of your entire store. 

Faster site speed helps deliver an excellent customer experience and helps your store rank higher and perform well on the search engines. 

Check out the best WooCommerce themes mentioned in this article for your WooCommerce store and choose a suitable option that best meets your specific needs and budget. 

And even with the fastest theme, make sure you’re not forcing your customers to make unnecessary page loads, especially when it comes to the checkout process. In today’s age, you need a window checkout.