7 Best Fastest Loading WordPress Themes (Free Included)

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When it comes to SEO and website optimization, Speed is the most important aspects to consider. Nobody likes to visit a slow loading website and usually, most people leave the site if it doesn’t load within a few seconds.

Even Google is encouraging website owners to make their sites as fast as possible. If you’re a WordPress user, there are many ways to increase your site speed and one of them is choosing an SEO friendly and Fast Loading WordPress Theme.

So in this article, I’ve listed out some of the best fastest loading WordPress themes to boost your SEO rankings.

Note: A fast loading WordPress theme alone won’t speed up your website. It’s very essential to have a highly optimized WordPress hosting to boost your server performance. Personally, I use and recommend WPX hosting; which comes with its very own custom built CDN and many other performance features.

Best Fastest Loading WordPress Themes

Astra

Astra is one of the best free and premium fastest loading WordPress themes that comes with responsive design and light-weight code.

Astra theme is so light-weight that it takes less than 50 KB of resources. The theme can be customized with pre-built website library.

You can get the free version of Astra theme here.

Features:

• Uses less than 50 KB of resources
• No jQuery
• Pre-Built website Libraries
• SEO friendly
• Supports page builders

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GeneratePress

GeneratePress is another fast loading lightweight free responsive WordPress theme that is less than 30kb in size.

GeneratePress is quite popular with over 45000 customers and running 100k active websites.

This theme is highly optimized for search engines with lightweight code.

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Genesis Framework

Genesis is one of the most popular WordPress theme frameworks that is used by many professional bloggers around the web.

Genesis framework is known for its light-weight SEO friendly features. I’ve been using Genesis for the last 5 years and I highly recommend it. You can read my full review here.

On this blog, I have been using Genesis child theme Monochrome Pro since a year and I must say it loads very fast.

Features:

• Responsive design
• light-weight code
• SEO friendly
• Gutenberg ready
• one-click demo import

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Schema

Schema is one of the Fastest Loading WordPress Theme by MyThemeShop, MyThemeShop is known to produce high-quality premium WordPress Themes.

This theme is specially built for Speed and SEO purpose, MyThemeshop claims it is the fastest theme in the World.

The schema has quality code, built-in reviews, rich-snippet support, Lightweight, Mobile-friendly, easily accessible content, etc.

Schema also has a free version called Schema Lite.

Features:

• Fast loading
• SEO Friendly Design and Code
• Google Algorithm Friendliness
• Clearly Identifiable Content and Media
• Builds Trust and Security in Google’s Eyes
• Built-in Reviews
• Social Media Voting Functionality

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SEO WP

The SEO WP theme, as the name suggests is specially designed for SEO performance and speed. This theme suits most for SEO companies, Social Media specialists, and Digital Marketing Agencies.

SEO WP comes with a complete solution, it’s fast loading, fully responsive, easily customizable, mobile-friendly, icons, Mega Menu, etc.

Features:

• Fast loading
• Fully Responsive
• Proven code
• Mobile Friendly
• Front-end content creator
• Mega Menu
• Icons

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Nova

Nova is the fastest WordPress theme and is perfect for bloggers. The theme is very lightweight and loads in under 1 second.

With design and speed being the focus of the theme, Nova delivers absolutely amazing performance and great user experience.

The theme is SEO friendly, free of unnecessary junk that would make your website slow, and free. You can use Nova theme on your website for free. Unlike other WordPress themes, it doesn’t require any paid add-ons or plugins. It’s a complete plug-and-play theme that comes preconfigured.

Features:

• Loads under 1 second
• Has no JavaScript file
• Plug-and-play
• Smart image serving
• Custom recent posts widget
• SEO friendly
• Responsive
• Translation ready

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Reco

Reco is one of the fastest themes in Themeforest and is one of the very few themes that can claim 100% Page Insight score on Desktop and Mobile. 

Its fast load time (just 737ms) check the results here and minimal design, makes this blog perfect for any kind of personal project, especially freebies or digital resources. 

The developers also highly optimized SEO so it is a pretty good combination to reduce bounce rate and increase your users visit time.

Features:

• Fast loading time (700ms).
• Fully Responsive
• SEO optimized.
• Multiple Home layouts and posts.
• Multilanguage: English, Spanish, French, Turkish and Russian.
• Woocommerce Compatibility.
• Menu icons.
• Premium Support.
• And more…

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Conclusion:

Above I’ve listed out some of the best fastest loading WordPress themes that can boost your SEO results. Even though a WordPress theme plays a major role in site speed, there are some other factors like page size, HTTP Requests, images, server, and cache settings also affect the performance.

So make sure to choose a high-quality server that’s optimized for WordPress websites, I recommend you to check out some of the Managed WordPress Hosting providers to host your WP sites.