WooCommerce Themes and Why This Should Matter to You
Picking a WooCommerce theme goes way beyond how your website will look. You also need to know what stands behind it and whether it’s built with SEO and web performance in mind. A poorly optimized theme can make your website run 2x-10x slower.
The right Woo theme will ensure that your store is fast and reliable at all times, and at the same time provide an exceptional shopping experience. When selecting a great Woo theme, you want to find a theme that checks all the boxes by offering a user-friendly, good-looking, lightning-fast, and SEO-optimized design.
WooCommerce Themes and ManageMore Requirements
DISCLAIMER: Deviating from the WooCommerce Themes recommended to use in this article are at your own risk!
A WooCommerce Theme may be the most important selection you make when it comes to visual impact and performance of your shopping cart system. There are hundreds of WooCommerce Themes in the market and many are NOT adequate performers for a B2B shopping cart that experiences large orders (i.e. retail stores placing orders that can often have 100+ items in a cart). Woo Theme developers do not often test website performance for very large cart orders which sometimes leads to a WooCommerce site that is extremely slow and an uninviting customer experience (even when there only a dozen or less users logged in and browsing your shopping cart site).
Since a WooCommerce Theme makes the largest amount of change to the physical appearance and performance of your shopping cart system, it should be carefully selected. When hiring a WooCommerce designer team to build your shopping cart system, you should be requesting them to select one of our recommended themes below as the basis for their design work to avoid any unforeseen performance and plug-in conflict related issues. Many hired WooCommerce consultants will believe their favorite Woo Theme will be fine for the job, but often lack experience with high traffic sites or dealing with large B2B orders. It is no surprise that many ManageMore Technical support calls regarding ecommerce performance and misbehaving shopping carts stem from the use of untested WooCommerce Themes.
Due to the difficulty of in-house testing for performance failures in a WooCommerce Theme, you often won’t know you have a performance problem until you go live with your ecommerce site. It bares mentioning again that ManageMore Technical support will not be able to provide in-depth technical assistance in troubleshooting WooCommerce issues if an unknown Theme is used on your site.
Our WooCommerce Theme Recommendations (as of 2025)
Since WordPress (the maker of WooCommerce) is continuously improving their web-based application, the WooCommerce Themes we recommend to use may change periodically if they do not keep up with the latest WordPress version or begin to underperform in comparison to other faster and more efficient themes.
Astra by Brainstorm Force
Astra is a fast, highly customizable, and super clean theme that is a rock-solid foundation for your store’s success. It has been on the top charts of the fastest and leanest WP theme for years now and offers hundreds of templates to choose from.
(Astra Pro Essential Toolkit- $79)
Shoptimizer by by CommerceGurus
Shoptimizer is a fast WooCommerce theme that comes with a ton of features. A theme built specifically for WooCommerce and focused on speed and conversions.
(Shoptimizer – $99)
Neve by ThemeIsle
Neve is a super fast, easily customizable, multi-purpose theme. With a page size under 33 KB, Neve is a very lightweight fast loading WordPress theme. It loads in just a second with a performance score of 98% on GTMetrix. Neve also has a mobile-first design that should make your WooCommerce store very easy to browse on smaller screen devices. A fully AMP optimized and responsive theme, Neve will load quickly and adapts perfectly on any viewing device. Its lightweight and minimalist design is highly extendable and has a highly SEO optimized code, resulting in top rankings in Google search results.
(Neve Personal- $69)
Botiga by aThemes
Botiga is a non-nonsense theme that is highly customizable and integrates well with Gutenburg and Elementor.
Blocksy by CreativeThemes
Blocksy is a lightning fast and super charged WordPress theme that is extremely light weight and customizable without any code.
Zakra by Themegrill is a high-performance WordPress theme that loads in less than a second. It is considered one of the fastest WooCommerce themes and thus is a great base for a quick-loading eCommerce store.
XStore by 8theme
XStore is a one-stop shop of powerful features that are optimized for performance and flexibility. This theme is considered by most web designers to be highly customizable and feature-rich theme on the market today and offers over 100+ prebuilt website designs. XStore is not considered a lightning fast loading theme, but is noteworthy for most users who do not have a performance issue and want many built-in options without the need for additional plug-ins. NOTE: ManageMore provides direct support for the use of product brands with this theme (replaces WooCommerce Brand plug-in).
(XStore – $59)
Using Your Own WooCommerce Theme… What You Should Know
So you still want to consider a different WooCommerce Theme as the foundation of your ecommerce site?
ManageMore acknowledges there are dozens of other great WooCommerce themes in the global marketplace. You may have your reasons why you want to use a different custom WooCommerce Theme than the ones we mention (e.g. existing ecommerce site already in place, hired ecommerce consultants are experts with their own custom theme, features you are looking for are not in any other themes, etc.)
If you have confidence that you and/or your hired website experts are capable of selecting and/or adjusting your theme to get the job done, then the rest of this article is meant for you.
Custom WP Theme Performance vs Features
A custom WP theme can provide you many built-in tools to make your site look great. Putting aside performance, the feature set offered by a custom WP theme is typically what sets one WP theme apart from another. However, you must be careful with what is under the hood of your custom WP theme. Some themes are not well optimized and rely on background tasks (referred to as PHP workers) to handle their requests. Fast themes tend to utilize less PHP workers to get the job done when a visitor is on your site.
A good strategy when it comes to a specific functionality you are after is to look at standalone plug-ins if your WP theme is underperforming in certain areas. You are not always required to use the tools that a theme provides and may find that a standalone plug-in handles the job more efficiently than the same feature found inside your WP theme.
Page Builder Themes vs Light Weight Themes
Much has changed with WordPress and WooCommerce in recent years. There was a time when building a WordPress site was a tedious and lengthy process. It was difficult to keep pages consistent with fonts, colors, tables, etc. In comes Page Builders and the themes that work with these plug-ins.
Often referred to collectively as a page builder theme, it is a combination of a WordPress theme that works in tandem with a page builder plug-in function. These themes provide a website building platform that integrates look and feel functionality while replacing the standard WordPress post editor at the same time with a better visual editor that helps you build a site in a much quicker and consistent manner.
The typical light weight theme mostly focuses on the overall look and feel of your site and does not try to interfere with the actual WordPress editing functions. That said, WordPress recognized that a better page building editor was needed and a “Gutenberg” page block editor was introduced in WordPress 5. The Gutenberg block editor integration with WP now provides better integration for themes without the need to fully replace the WP built-in editor.
In our opinion, If you want to build the absolute fastest WooCommerce store, a custom page builder theme is probably not the best route to go. The themes that work with these custom page builders are often light weight enough, but they still require and advanced page builder plug-in to do anything useful.
If your ecommerce building expertise is based on the use of a custom page builder theme, then please consider one of the following custom page builder themes known for there flexibility and minimal performance impact on the overall shopping cart system performance.
Avada (+ FusionBuilder)
Avada is Envato’s best selling theme for years. This theme utilizes the FusionBuilder plug-in to provides thousands of easy-to-customize templates in the library which allows you to build your site from the header to the footer.
Divi (+ Divi Builder)
Divi is a powerful theme thanks to its visual page builder. You can build everything visually using the Divi framework without ever touching a single line of code (and without installing and configuring any plugins to bring additional features).
GeneratePress (+ GeneratePress Page Builder)
GeneratePress is a lightweight WooCommerce theme that focuses on speed, stability, and accessibility. The basic GeneratePress theme serves as a framework with page builder integrations and plenty of hooks and filters for developers. There are tons of customization options with full layout control and plug-in compatibilities.
Hello Elementor (+Elementor)
Hello Elementor is a lightweight and minimalist WordPress theme that was built specifically to work seamlessly with the Elementor site builder plugin. The theme is free, open-source, and designed for users who want a flexible, easy-to-use, and customizable website. The theme, which is optimized for performance, provides a solid foundation for users to build their own unique designs using the Elementor drag-and-drop site builder.
WP Theme Performance — Other Factors To Consider
We would be negligent to suggest that all ecommerce performance is due to your selection of the WooCommerce Theme alone. A WP theme is a big factor and the cause of many of our technical support calls we receive. That said, ecommerce performance is also affected by your hosting provider, adequate web server plan, Cache Optimization, CDN’s, PWA’s, etc.
For more information regarding ecommerce performance, please read the article on Best Practices for a Successful FAST WooCommerce Site.
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