I’ve been on a quest to find the fastest responsive WordPress theme that supports child themes. After running Motionbuzz.com on Drupal 5 and 6 for over four years, I switched to WordPress in early 2012. Why? Great question, but the answer deserves its own post. The short answer is I was impressed by all of the responsive WordPress themes, and most of them were much faster than my custom Drupal theme. Plus, I wanted to learn more about WordPress 3.
In 2011, I tested Skeleton by SimpleThemes. I loved its simplicity and speed. After using SimpleTheme’s, Element to build a site for my wife, I decided to use it as the parent theme for Motionbuzz.com. I tweaked a child theme to suite my needs.
Since then, we’ve used it as a parent theme for other projects. This approach has allowed us to spend less time coding and more time creating content. Our small-business clients get the best website for their budget since photography, video production, and search marketing are now included as part of our website packages.
In the past few years, I’ve also become obsessed with page speed. In my opinion, page speed is the cornerstone of good UX. If your site is slow, then most people won’t bother to look at it.
Lately, I’ve been testing other WordPress theme frameworks. Some of them have an incredible amount of features, but the bloat seems to negatively affect page speed. Of course web hosting has a lot to do with speed, but some themes are simply more optimized than others.
In order to be as objective as possible, I tested the themes’ demo sites using Pingdom Tools and Google PageSpeed Insights. Granted, each demo has unique content, but this test will still help me decide whether or not I want to try a different theme framework.
I welcome your feedback. Also, I’ll probably add to this list as I test more frameworks. Please let me know if you have any recommendations.
Please note: the following results are not from a scientific test. I simply tested each theme author’s demo site in Google PageSpeed Insights. Results may vary based on the theme authors’ server, WordPress configuration, and content. Also, Google PageSpeed Insights may test different criteria over time. Keep all of these things in mind when you are choosing your responsive WordPress theme.
Retested May 14, 2013:
| WordPress Theme | Test Date | Price | Google PageSpeed (out of 100) | ||
| SimpleThemes Skeleton | 5/14/13 | Free | 23 | ||
| SimpleThemes Synapse | 5/14/13 | $79 | 80 | ||
| Genesis | 5/14/13 | $59.95 | 84 | ||
| Standard Theme | 5/14/13 | from $49 | 44 | ||
| PageLines | 5/14/13 | from $97 | 84 | ||
| WooThemes Canvas | 5/14/13 | from $70 | 60 | ||
| Theme Blvd Jump Start | 5/14/13 | $65 | 87 |
First test, January 24, 2013:
| WordPress Theme | Test Date | Price | Pingdom grade (out of 100) | Google PageSpeed (out of 100) | Avg. Grade (out of 100) |
| SimpleThemes Skeleton | 1/24/13 | Free | 85 | 92 | 88.5 |
| SimpleThemes Synapse | 1/24/13 | $79 | 85 | 88 | 86.5 |
| Genesis | 1/24/13 | $59.95 | 90 | 77 | 83.5 |
| Standard Theme | 1/24/13 | from $49 | 88 | 74 | 81 |
| PageLines | 1/24/13 | from $97 | 77 | 84 | 80.5 |
| WooThemes Canvas | 1/24/13 | from $70 | 81 | 78 | 79.5 |
| Theme Blvd Jump Start | 1/24/13 | $65 | 85 | 37 | 61 |
For more information on this topic, check out my screencast, How design elements influence website load speed and optimization:
By Thomas & Sonja G. February 6, 2013 - 9:46 pm
Great job Thomas. ♥ S
By Bryan Chalker February 10, 2013 - 1:49 am
Loved it and tweeted it, Thomas. 🙂
By motionbuzz February 11, 2013 - 3:36 pm
Thanks Bryan!
By Colleen D. Gjefle March 1, 2013 - 4:21 am
Designed my website with Skeleton as well – love it for a bunch of reasons! Mine is a photography website (http://gjfoto.com), so even though its overloaded with images, it’s still surprisingly fast. Very easy to customize and make it unique. It gets my thumbs up!!
By motionbuzz March 1, 2013 - 2:43 pm
Your site looks great! I haven’t seen anyone use Skeleton for a photography portfolio, so thanks for sharing.
By Colleen D. Gjefle March 1, 2013 - 3:46 pm
Just took a look at your wife’s swirlbots site – how totally cute!
By motionbuzz March 5, 2013 - 3:31 pm
Thank you!
By Shane Elmer May 7, 2013 - 4:44 am
dont use pingdom. If you want a to know more visit gtmetrix to get better testing.
By motionbuzz May 14, 2013 - 5:17 pm
Thank you for sharing. I’ll check out gtmetrix.
By Jason May 14, 2013 - 2:34 am
Hello Thomas,
I’m the author of the Jump Start theme framework and I came across this post because a buyer linked me to it in the support forum. It caught my attention because your list actually makes my product look kind of bad. However, I don’t think the way you’re doing this is all that fair to the themes. Let me explain —
The theme has a lot to do with the load time of your site, of course, but there are so many other factors involved here. So many of the things involved in these scores from these tools you’re using to analyze have to do with how the assets of your website are being served and how your WordPress site is optimized overall.
So, your tests are more showing the optimization of the theme’s demo websites sites on their respective servers, opposed to the actual themes themselves.
For example the Genesis demo has W3 Total Cache all setup, while my theme demo does not. (I’d imagine Studio Press pays much for hosting than I do, as well 😉 ) — I generally set each live demo up with all features being utilized, and with the HTML markup and assets all exposed for you to inspect freely.
However, I’ve gone head and setup W3 Total Cache, now, too. You should run your speed tests again and see how they compare to the first time you did it: http://www.themeblvd.com/demo/jumpstart/
On an actual live, real-world site, with any theme you use, you’ll want to optimize your site if speed is a concern. Plugins like W3 Total Cache and Super Cache, and servering assets through a CDN will be the difference between night and day on this.
By motionbuzz May 14, 2013 - 4:49 pm
Hi Jason,
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate you being part of the conversation. In no way did I intend to be unfair to you or any other theme author. A more scientific approach would be to set up each theme on the same server, then configure with the same plugins and content. I ran the test again on http://www.themeblvd.com/demo/jumpstart/ , and the PageSpeed score was 87. Your business homepage, http://www.themeblvd.com/demo/jumpstart/features/layout-builder/sample-layouts/business-homepage-3/ , scored 96. That’s great! I will retest these themes and post an update.
Kind regards,
Thomas Gapinski
By Jason May 14, 2013 - 9:23 pm
No worries, Thomas. Thanks for re-evaluating the themes on your list.
You can really see the difference simply using these simple caching plugins can make in terms of these frontend assets and the load of your site in the client browser. Definitely a valuable lesson for anyone running a site with any theme.
By Scott Blanchard July 19, 2013 - 3:34 pm
Hi Thomas, I’m the creator of ClickBump theme. If you’re as obsessed with speed as I am, I’d love to have you give it a run though. I can guarantee its the fastest theme you’ve ever tested, hands down. You can see my speed challenge vs genesis and thesis here > http://clickbump.com/wordpress-speed-challenge-clickbump-vs-genesis-thesis/
By motionbuzz August 15, 2013 - 12:52 pm
Hi Scott, thanks for your comment. I’ll take a closer look at ClickBump. Is your JumpStart the same as Jason’s http://wpjumpstart.com/ ? What are the terms for ClickBump? Can it be used for unlimited sites?
By rakesh kumar August 14, 2013 - 5:39 am
Though my theme is not a responsive wordpress theme but still it is able to score 97 with all the ads and plugins enabled. waiting for your kind consideration 😉
By motionbuzz August 15, 2013 - 12:52 pm
Hi Rakesh, thanks for commenting. What’s the URL to your theme?
By motionbuzz September 5, 2013 - 8:50 pm
It looks like 8BIT, creator of Standard theme, is going out of business. http://support.8bit.io/entries/25436847-It-s-Been-Swell. I wonder if they’ll sell or open source it?