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 3x-10x slower. When researching themes, it is important to understand that a WordPress (WP) Theme and WooCommerce (Woo) Theme are not always interchangeable. You must find themes that claim to be optimized specifically for the WooCommerce extension of WordPress.
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 looking for 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. You often get what you pay for when it comes to well optimized themes, so we recommend staying away from any of the free theme and stick with time-tested and proven themes backed by a development team you can rely on.
Theme Performance vs Features
A WP theme provides you many tools to make your site look great. Putting aside performance, the feature set offered by a WP theme is typically what sets one WP theme apart from another. Unfortunately, some themes are not well optimized and rely on background task (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. If there is a particular theme that offers some built-in functionality that you like, then you must weigh this feature against any performance loss a WP theme may bring to the table. One alternative to consider is to evaluate standalone plug-ins that may do a similar function found in your theme, but handle the task in a more efficient manner.
Light Weight Themes vs Page Builder 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.
So, which one is better? A light weight theme or a page builder theme similar to Divi, Fusion Builder or Elementor?
As of 2024, many of the popular page builder themes seem to still have an edge over the built-in WP GutenBerg editor. But if performance is what you are after, you must weigh the benefits that a page builder theme brings versus the better performance that a well-designed light weight theme offers.
Best Performing Light Weight Themes in 2024
Here are our top picks for a fast and reliable theme for your WooCommerce site, in order of independent fastest to slowest performance benchmark tests done in 2024.
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)
Best Performing Page Builder Themes
If you want to build the absolute fastest WooCommerce store, a page builder theme is probably not the best option. The themes that work with the page builders are often light weight enough, but they still require and advanced page builder plug-in to do anything useful. In the end, if you want to access a lot of features and visual design flexibility while still creating a store that’s fast enough, you might want to consider these combination theme and page builders.
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.
