Your WordPress theme is your website foundation, which means it plays a significant role in how quickly your site is loading. So, there are a hundred tactics that you can apply to speed up your WordPress website after the fact. But your installed theme is always going to act as a tailback.

When I was doing some experiments on my blog website, I got an almost 60% reduction in page load times by switching to one of the lightweight WordPress themes on this list.

So yeah, whenever possible, everyone always wants to choose a lightweight WordPress theme. But – how do you find a lightweight theme? I didn’t find any developer advertises their theme as “slow loading,” so how do you get beyond the marketing copy and pick something that will load fast?

To make that more accessible, we’ve put together this list of the best free, lightweight WordPress website theme. All the themes will give you a fast-loading experience without costing you a cent. And to prove it – I’ll install each one of these themes on my test site and show you the data when it comes to file size and HTTP requests. Now we are going to discuss a few fast-loading WordPress themes that you need to know if you are going to start a website or if you already have one.

OceanWP:

How could you determine a theme is popular? At Least when you see a theme is downloaded 2000+ a day for more than 12 months and never go down below 2000 and get a 5-star rating of almost 4700. This stat Is enough to call that theme popular. OceanWP is one of the fastest loading themes with a 40.2kb page size and only 9 HTTP requests. So now the question is which theme is best? Or not. Let’s look at the features. 

OceanWP Feature:

• Page Size: 243 KB
• HTTP Requests: 19
• Suit for any website; blog, personal portfolio, business website, and WooCommerce storefront.
• Design is simple, User friendly & professional looking.
• Responsive design, which makes the theme most popular on the list.
• Friendly with WordPress third Party Plugin
• WPML Supported and 150+ languages
• Easily Customize with Drag & Drop Page Builder
• SEO friendly and suits all of the popular page builders
• Very fast, RTL & Translation ready

More than 700,000+ users actively use the theme, which makes the OceanWP theme the topper of the list.

Astra:

With 1M+ active users and an average 6k+ download per day, Astra theme is second on the list. A lightweight theme with only a 50KB, HTTP Requests: 9 frontend pages with a high loading speed, a theme one can imagine. With a simple design that is perfect for an e-commerce website but it can be used for various purposes.

Astra Feature:

• Page Size: 40.2 KB
• HTTP Requests: 9
• Suit for any type of website; personal portfolio, business website, and WooCommerce storefront, etc.
• UI and UX are much smoother as the front page is very lightweight, having only 50kb.
• It is integrated with Schema.org to make it more SEO-friendly.
• Fully customizable theme
• Extendable with premium ad-dons and regular updates available. 
• WooCommerce Supported
• Friendly with WordPress third Party Plugin
• WPML Supported
• Easily Customize with Drag & Drop Page Builder

A team is working on updating the themes feature and making it User friendly for the benefit of the active theme user.

Neve:

Neve, a pure multipurpose theme with a Page Size: 29.9 KB HTTP Requests: 7, can be used in all sorts of projects. From personal portfolio projects to Ecommerce to blog, A theme of all kinds of projects with simple, lightweight, load in mere seconds. A theme with highly extendable features. Neve is also SEO friendly and can work in WordPress Gutenberg editor as well as elementor, Divi, SiteOrigin, and Visual Composer, and other page builders. Simply you can say a theme with everything packed.

Neve Feature:

• Page Size: 29.9 KB
• HTTP Requests: 7
• Suit for all kinds of projects.
• Highly User friendly with good user experience.
• Lightweight, Fast loading speed, and responsive so that it can load according to devices.
• SEO friendly and help to rank in SERP.

The theme is downloading on an average of 1600+ daily overall in the world, with 200k+ active users. The developer team worked to develop the theme, made it more User-friendly, and gave a good experience to both users and webmasters.

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a highly recommended theme by everyone with just 28.9 KB and 9 HTTP requests. GeneratePress is a responsive multipurpose theme that you can adapt to pretty much any kind of website, newspaper, blog, Travelo WordPress theme blog, and many more.

GeneratePress Feature:

• Page Size: 28.9 KB
• HTTP Requests: 9
• Suit for all kinds of websites.
• User friendly with good user experience.
• Lightweight, Fast loading speed, and responsive
• SEO friendly

Zakra

Zakra is another lightweight multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with a dozen of importable demo sites. Like the previous themes, it also makes a great option to combine with a WordPress page builder plugin. The page speed of zakra theme is only 37.2 and HTTP request is 9.

ZakraFeature:

• Page Size: 37.2 KB
• HTTP Requests: 9
• Suit for all kinds of websites.
• Woo-commerce supported
• WPML ready & 150+ google fonts
• User friendly with good user experience.
• Lightweight, Fast loading speed, and responsive
• SEO friendly

Sydney

Sydney is a popular multipurpose theme. The page speed of the Sydney theme is only 88 KB, and the HTTP request is 10. The latest version is quite faster than the previous one.

SydneyFeature:

• Page Size: 88 KB
• HTTP Requests: 10
• Multipurpose WordPress theme
• Woo-commerce supported
• WPML ready
• User-friendly with good user experience.
• Lightweight, Fast loading speed, and responsive
• SEO friendly
• Drag & Drop Page Builder
• Support Contact Form 7 and YOAST SEO

Final Thought

Loading speed is equal to your website traffic because if your web page is ranking on SERP, but your webpage speed is slow that means you are going to lose your SERP position. Use a cache plugin, remove unwanted files and optimize images to load your website fast.

FAQ

How can I tell what speed my theme is?

To test your themes speed, there are many options like GTMetrix, Google Page Speed, Pingdom. You may try all of them to test your website speed, but I recommend you to use GTMetrix to get a proper result with quality suggestions.

What is the fastest theme?

GeneratePress is most popular for its web page speed. Here are few faster themes like customify, Mesmerize, x-theme, and many more themes that have less than 9 HTTP requests and a good page site which are less than 30kb.