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?
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
| Theme | Score | Weight | Loadtime | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stockholm 1 | 69 | 3.34 MB | 6.85 sec | $58.00 |
| Story Full-width Page | 75 | 1.70 MB | 4.64 sec | $58.00 |
| SEO WP | 82 | 0.94 MB | 1.23 sec | $48.00 |
| ROSA | 70 | 3.00 MB | 3.98 sec | $58.00 |
| hemlock | 71 | 4.67 MB | 8.74 sec | $38.00 |
| BuildPress | 79 | 0.95 MB | 1.77 sec | $58.00 |
| Hazel1 | 55 | 7.48 MB | 14.86 sec | $58.00 |
| Listify | 77 | 3.70 MB | 8.08 sec | $63.00 |
| wpresidence | 64 | 2.04 MB | 4.70 sec | $53.00 |
| Newsmag | 76 | 1.17 MB | 2.46 sec | $48.00 |
| Royal ecommerce | 54 | 4.94 MB | 10.03 sec | $58.00 |
| JAVO DIRECTORY V2.0 demo 1 | 63 | 2.48 MB | 9.95 sec | $58.00 |
| JKREATIV Wedding Photography | 74 | 1.92 MB | 4.85 sec | $58.00 |
| The shopkeeper | 69 | 1.98 MB | 4.26 sec | $58.00 |
| Oshin main demo | 57 | 3.71 MB | 5.87 sec | $58.00 |
| Oyster light skin | 76 | 1.04 MB | 1.54 sec | $58.00 |
| Florence | 76 | 2.71 MB | 3.79 sec | $43.00 |
| Morpheus example 1 | 62 | 3.25 MB | 5.93 sec | $48.00 |
| Voice | 68 | 1.67 MB | 3.92 sec | $58.00 |
| Multinews | 66 | 2.21 MB | 5.69 sec | $58.00 |
| Automotive car dealer | 59 | 3.45 MB | 10.18 sec | $58.00 |
| KON/CEPT | 74 | 0.90 MB | 2.53 sec | $58.00 |
| North v1 (veented) | 57 | 3.67 MB | 8.03 sec | $58.00 |
| Venedor default | 71 | 2.16 MB | 7.78 sec | $58.00 |
| Throne | 63 | 2.22 MB | 5.50 sec | $43.00 |
| Constructo classic | 65 | 1.54 MB | 7.76 sec | $58.00 |
| Specular default | 64 | 3.30 MB | 7.04 sec | $58.00 |
| Cardinal | 65 | 5.74 MB | 9.81 sec | $63.00 |
| Spa Lab | 61 | 4.02 MB | 7.83 sec | $58.00 |
| Construction default home | 68 | 3.21 MB | 4.83 sec | $58.00 |
| University demo v1 | 63 | 1.80 MB | 29.89 sec | $58.00 |
| Lawyer Attorney | 65 | 1.31 MB | 3.65 sec | $48.00 |
| Realty | 74 | 1.73 MB | 3.34 sec | $53.00 |
| Dunamis | 65 | 3.07 MB | 5.22 sec | $58.00 |
| Rosemary | 70 | 2.76 MB | 5.34 sec | $38.00 |
| North | 69 | 2.15 MB | 2.42 sec | $63.00 |
| Oxygen Full width menu | 62 | 6.50 MB | 12.82 sec | $58.00 |
| Edition | 68 | 2.91 MB | 4.12 sec | $58.00 |
| Vega portfolio gallery | 64 | 6.47 MB | 9.85 sec | $58.00 |
| Pluto Clean Personal | 81 | 1.41 MB | 3.03 sec | $43.00 |
| Logistic | 68 | 2.80 MB | 4.48 sec | $48.00 |
| Minding | 69 | 1.48 MB | 6.53 sec | $63.00 |
| Zephyr | 72 | 2.71 MB | 3.77 sec | $58.00 |
| Unik | 71 | 2.03 MB | 7.26 sec | $58.00 |
| Clever Course | 60 | 2.09 MB | 4.89 sec | $58.00 |
| Eco nature default | 69 | 4.93 MB | 7.81 sec | $58.00 |
| WooPress Boxed variant | 58 | 1.42 MB | 6.55 sec | $58.00 |
| Bi-Shop | 71 | 3.40 MB | 7.84 sec | $63.00 |
| LMS | 61 | 4.02 MB | 6.19 sec | $58.00 |
| NUVO Modern | 56 | 5.97 MB | 8.07 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 !