The 8 Fastest WoooCommerce Themes (2023)

Are you looking for a fast WooCommerce WordPress theme? We’ve compiled a list of 8 themes you can use for your next e-commerce project! An online shop often means a lot of images, text, videos, reviews, and payment gateways which can, unfortunately, impact the performance. Your clients will not like a slow WordPress site and may be reluctant to complete any purchase if the page takes forever to load. Actually, Portent ran some studies about the impact of site speed on the conversion rate, and you can see the correlation on the graph below. The more it takes for the page to load, the lower the conversion rate is. 

In this article, you’ll find 8 WooCommerce themes you can use for your next project. As a bonus – to prevent you from losing sales and customers on the way – we’re sharing some tips on optimizing your WooCommerce site and making your online store faster than ever. 

Let’s dive in. 

The 8 Fastest WordPress Themes + Test Data

We have selected the most popular WooCommerce themes on the market, and here’s the shortlist we come up with: 

1. Storefront
2. Botiga
3. Astra (+ The Pro WooCommerce add-on)
4. Flatsome (+ The UX theme builder)
5. Avada (Fusion WooCommerce builder)
6. Divi (Divi WooCommerceBuilder)
7. BeTheme (BeBuilder)
8. The 7 (Elementor page builder)

We’ve run some fair performance tests for each theme which should help you choose. 

Let’s get to the data! 

1. Storefront

A very basic free theme developed by WooCommerce themselves. The theme is built and maintained by WooCommerce core developers, which avoids compatibility issues. The customization options are limited, but if you want to launch a simple online store, it does the job. 

Performance results for the Storefront theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 85/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.8s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 1.3s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.1s
• Total page size: 990 KB
• HTTP requests: 18

2. Botiga

Botiga is a free, lightweight WooCommerce theme from aThemes. All of the demo content is built with the native WordPress block editor which gives the theme a minimalistic look-and-feel. You also get access to many useful eCommerce design features, such as multiple layouts for product galleries, the shopping cart, and the checkout page, along with off-canvas product filters, product recommendations, user-friendly product search, and more.

Performance results for the Botiga theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 83/100
• First Contentful Paint: 1.5s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.9s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 0s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 1.1s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.4s
• Total page size: 425 KB
• HTTP requests: 12

3. Astra

Astra is one of the best WooCommerce WordPress themes due to its lightweight code, user-friendly interface, and thousands of starter templates for your next shop. The premium add-ons for WooCommerce allow you to create a custom payment page, add an advanced product gallery, filters, and unlimited scrolling to create a site like Pinterest. 

Performance results for the Astra theme (and the WooCommerce add-ons):

• PageSpeed mobile score: 83/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.2s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.1s
• Speed Index: 1.1s
• Time To Interactive: 1.3s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.5s
• Total page size: 990 KB
• HTTP requests: 16

4. Flatsome

The #1 selling WooCommerce theme on Themeforest is multipurpose and responsive for WooCommerce. It comes with the UX builder and some interesting options for your online store, such as the live search, add to wishlist, sale bubble options, change the number of products per row, or the catalog mode options if you don’t want to display any prices. 

Performance results for the Flatsome theme:

1. PageSpeed mobile score: 81/100
2. First Contentful Paint: 2.5s
3. Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7s
4. Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.6s
5. Speed Index: 1.3s
6. Time To Interactive: 2.5s
7. Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
8. Total Loading time: 2.7s
9. Total page size: 997 KB
10. HTTP requests: 18

5. Avada (+ Fusion Woo Builder)

It’s the #1 selling theme on Envato for years, with many thousands of easy-to-customize templates in the library. Avada comes with the Fusion Builder, allowing you to build your site from the header to the footer. It also has powerful WooCommerce widgets allowing users to build customized online stores. You can also use their builder to build custom product and shop pages. 

Performance results for the Avada theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 78/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.9s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.8s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.6s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 2.6s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.8s
• Total page size: 998 KB
• HTTP requests: 17

6. Divi (+ Divi WooCommerce Builder)

Divi is a powerful WooCommerce theme thanks to its visual WooCommerce builder. Elegant Themes was among the first companies to bring the WYSIWYG to WordPress. The promise is that you can build everything visually using the Divi framework without touching a single line of code. The WooCommerce builder and modules allow you to create your custom product and shop page quickly. 

Performance results for the Divi theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 75/100
• First Contentful Paint: 4.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.5s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.8s
• Speed Index: 2.4s
• Time To Interactive: 1.2s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.1 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.1s
• Total page size: 1.2 MB
• HTTP requests: 19

7. BeTheme (+ BeBuilder)

BeTheme is a multipurpose website builder and best-selling WordPress theme with 650+ pre-built websites (with a modern design). Their BeBuilder is also compatible with WooCommerce, and they even launched a query builder to build loops and dynamic websites. The promise is that you can build the WooCommerce site you want and design versatile shops & single-product layouts that convert. You can either use a ready-to-use template or create your own. 

Performance results for the BeTheme theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 72/100
• First Contentful Paint: 4.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 3.9s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.8s
• Speed Index: 1.9s
• Time To Interactive: 1.7s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.5 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.6s
• Total page size: 1.3 MB
• HTTP requests: 21

8. The7 

It’s the #1 selling Elementor theme that offers a lot of customization for WooCommerce. The7 has 60+ prebuilt dummy websites with exclusive templates that can help launch an online store easily. You can build attractive templates for the storefront, product pages and lists, checkout, cart, and more with the advanced WooCommerce Theme Builder. The highlight is that you can easily modify any WooCommerce page and add advanced filters to improve the user experience. 

Performance results for The7 theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 70/100
• First Contentful Paint: 4.4s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 4.3s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.9s
• Speed Index: 1.2s
• Time To Interactive: 1.5s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 4.1s
• Total page size: 1.5 MB 
• HTTP requests: 25

Summary Table of the Performance Results

Below we’ve put together the summary of the performance results for each WooCommerce theme. We used Lighthouse’s global “PageSpeed mobile score” to rank them. 

Key Takeaways:

• None of the themes are in the red on mobile, they all lie between the orange and the green regarding the global performance. 
• Storefront, Botiga, and Astra seem to be the top 3 fastest. 
• The7 seems to be the “slowest” which makes sense with all the advanced customization available. The performance is still acceptable, though, and in the last section, we will show how to put all the KPIs in green! 

How We Tested the Themes 

The selection was based on popularity, high numbers of downloads or sales, library templates, and quality reviews. The performance tests were made using the following performance tools:  

• PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix

Both tools are powered by Lighthouse. They analyze the performance and the user experience of your website. Here are the 10 KPIs we’ve used in our tests – measured on mobile: 

From PageSpeed Insights:

• PageSpeed mobile score 
• First Contentful Paint
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Cumulative Layout Shift
• Speed Index
• Time To Interactive
• Total Blocking Time

From GTmetrix:

• Total Loading time
• HTTP requests
• Total page size 

Then, we chose 7 themes that define themselves as WooCommerce friendly because they come with add-ons or specific customization related to online stores: product page or checkout process customization, advanced galleries, personal account page, etc. 

The Test Site

We built a realistic WooCommerce site for each theme. In all cases, the homepage has a hero banner with a button, 1 call to action, 4 icons with texts, 3 customer reviews, 1 ad, and 12 products. Of course, we used the same image and products for each test, we simply swapped the themes between the round of tests. 

We did a fresh installation for each theme and used the same server for each theme’s speed testing (servers are in London).

Give an Extra Performance Boost with WP Rocket

WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins to optimize any WooCommerce theme, including the ones on our list. Your online store’s performance and Core Web Vitals score will drastically improve upon its activation. 

To understand the impact of WP Rocket on speed, let’s see it in action with the7, which was one of the most complete themes we tested in terms of features and customizations. 

Below are the performance issues flagged by Lighthouse, listed under the “Opportunities” tab: 

Lighthouse suggests using caching, enabling text compression, reducing unused CSS/JS, and deferring offscreen images (image optimization with lazy loading). 

After using WP Rocket on the test site, we noticed that our issues were moved to the “passed audits” section:

But there is more to come. All our performance KPIs improved thanks to WP Rocket, including the mobile score on PageSpeed Insights. The performance score got a 99/100.

WP Rocket also boosted the Core Web Vitals scores (all in green) and decreased the total loading time (from 4.1s to 1.9s). It also reduced the page size and the number of HTTP requests, as you can see in our table below: 

*Core Web Vitals

To address all the PageSpeed Insights warnings and boost the performance, we used the following WP Rocket features:

• Text compression and caching – both features are automatically activated right upon activation of the plugin. You don’t need to do anything. 

You can also set your own options from the advanced cache tab in the WordPress admin:

• CSS code optimization – from the file optimization tab, we selected the optimize CSS delivery button (using the handy remove unused CSS option). We also minified and combined the CSS code to help the browser download and process these files faster.

• JavaScript code optimization – from the files optimization tab, there are also some options to optimize the JavaScript of your WordPress site. In our case, we minified JS files, loaded JS deferred, and delayed the JS execution: 

• Lazyload – to defer offscreen images (and prioritize the loading of the images located in the viewport):

What’s the Best WooCommerce Themes For You?

While we can’t advise you on a specific theme as it highly relies on your design and technical specifications, here are a few pieces of advice: 

• If you need a simple online store with the WooCommerce look and feel by default, without any advanced design or options, then go with Storefront. 
• If you are looking for a free theme with a clean and minimalistic design and advanced WooCommerce features, you should go for Botiga. 
• If you are a freelancer looking for a theme with many demos that you can show to your clients for different industries, then Divi, BeTheme, and the7 may be your best options. 
• If you are an Elementor’s fervent user, then Astra and The7 may be your best bet. 
• If you want to use the WPBakery Page Builder, the 7 theme is the way to go. 
• If you plan to upload thousands of products, a lightweight theme like Astra or OceanWP may be wiser. They both come with advanced WooCommerce features so you can create your own store in minutes. 
• If you need to create your own single product layouts and shop pages and add dynamic data to your website, then take a theme that works well with any other WooCommerce builders.
• If you want to get your theme from Themeforest, then pick Avada, which has been #1 on Themeforest for years. 
• If you are hesitating between two themes, check their demos and remember to look at them on several devices. Many sales happened on mobile!

Finally, our last recommendation would be to choose a theme that is safe with recent updates, fast support, accurate documentation, and in-depth tutorials. You can also check some popular YouTubers that review all those themes and record their screen while they build an online store from scratch. 

Wrapping Up

Now, you should be able to choose the right WooCommerce theme for your next project! 

 In any case, no matter which theme you pick, WP Rocket is the easiest way to improve your WordPress site’s speed, optimize Core Web Vitals, and fix the performance audits on PageSpeed Insights. Plus, you don’t take any risks with the 30-day money-back guarantee.