Are the 50 most sold WordPress themes fast enough?

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The theme of your website or your blog is essential to assure its success. Indeed, the graphic look but also the navigational structure allow you to distinguish yourself from your competition and to offer a quality experience to your visitors. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to realize or to have someone realize a tailor-made theme, whether it is for time or budget restraints.

However, a costless alternative exists: you can buy an existing theme that you will be able to customize (if necessary) thanks to a multitude of options or a technical work.

Themes are available on plenty of marketplaces for a few dozen euros. It is quite easy to find an interesting theme thanks to different search criteria and the possibility to access to a demo version, enabling to see how the theme works.

We approached the 50 most sold PrestaShop themes a few weeks ago and drew our attention on the necessity to audit a theme before buying it, to make sure of its technical quality, and avoid unpleasant surprises.

What about quality and performance of WordPress themes?

performance-themes-wordpress

This time we focused on the famous WordPress CMS, by selecting the 50 most sold themes on the Themeforest marketplace, leader of this field.

For each of these 50 themes, the homepage of the demonstration area was audited with the service dareboost.com, checking dozens of technical quality points, and calculating an overall score according to the importance of the issues detected.

Results are really disparate with scores going from 55 to 83 out of 100. We notice for example a first paint that varies from a few hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds, which also impacts, by the way, the quality perception.

We can already conclude that the price of the theme doesn’t guarantee the technical quality.
If you want a fast theme with a technical quality construction, you should then pay a particular attention to it before any purchase.

On numerous demonstration areas, the basic configuration that would significantly enhance the loading time of the page is missing. You can expect better results by working on the server configuration (gzip, cache policy, etc.) and by adding plugins dedicated to the loading time (WP Super cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, etc.). However, this won’t solve all of the issues and often, it will be necessary to go further, or even to chose another theme in order to avoid a technical adaptation work too important.

Performance and quality ranking of WordPress themes

ThemeScoreWeightLoadtimePrice
Stockholm 1693.34 MB6.85 sec$58.00
Story Full-width Page751.70 MB4.64 sec$58.00
SEO WP820.94 MB1.23 sec$48.00
ROSA703.00 MB3.98 sec$58.00
hemlock714.67 MB8.74 sec$38.00
BuildPress790.95 MB1.77 sec$58.00
Hazel1557.48 MB14.86 sec$58.00
Listify773.70 MB8.08 sec$63.00
wpresidence642.04 MB4.70 sec$53.00
Newsmag761.17 MB2.46 sec$48.00
Royal ecommerce544.94 MB10.03 sec$58.00
JAVO DIRECTORY V2.0 demo 1632.48 MB9.95 sec$58.00
JKREATIV Wedding Photography741.92 MB4.85 sec$58.00
The shopkeeper691.98 MB4.26 sec$58.00
Oshin main demo573.71 MB5.87 sec$58.00
Oyster light skin761.04 MB1.54 sec$58.00
Florence762.71 MB3.79 sec$43.00
Morpheus example 1623.25 MB5.93 sec$48.00
Voice681.67 MB3.92 sec$58.00
Multinews662.21 MB5.69 sec$58.00
Automotive car dealer593.45 MB10.18 sec$58.00
KON/CEPT740.90 MB2.53 sec$58.00
North v1 (veented)573.67 MB8.03 sec$58.00
Venedor default712.16 MB7.78 sec$58.00
Throne632.22 MB5.50 sec$43.00
Constructo classic651.54 MB7.76 sec$58.00
Specular default643.30 MB7.04 sec$58.00
Cardinal655.74 MB9.81 sec$63.00
Spa Lab614.02 MB7.83 sec$58.00
Construction default home683.21 MB4.83 sec$58.00
University demo v1631.80 MB29.89 sec$58.00
Lawyer Attorney651.31 MB3.65 sec$48.00
Realty741.73 MB3.34 sec$53.00
Dunamis653.07 MB5.22 sec$58.00
Rosemary702.76 MB5.34 sec$38.00
North692.15 MB2.42 sec$63.00
Oxygen Full width menu626.50 MB12.82 sec$58.00
Edition682.91 MB4.12 sec$58.00
Vega portfolio gallery646.47 MB9.85 sec$58.00
Pluto Clean Personal811.41 MB3.03 sec$43.00
Logistic682.80 MB4.48 sec$48.00
Minding691.48 MB6.53 sec$63.00
Zephyr722.71 MB3.77 sec$58.00
Unik712.03 MB7.26 sec$58.00
Clever Course602.09 MB4.89 sec$58.00
Eco nature default694.93 MB7.81 sec$58.00
WooPress Boxed variant581.42 MB6.55 sec$58.00
Bi-Shop713.40 MB7.84 sec$63.00
LMS614.02 MB6.19 sec$58.00
NUVO Modern565.97 MB8.07 sec$58.00

 

Do you have any doubts about the speed of the theme you’re about to purchase? Go right now on dareboost.com, test it out and comment your results below !


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