Skyrocket Your Store with 2024’s Fastest E-Commerce Themes

Everybody loves fast-loading websites. Do you know that one in four visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. The longer it takes for a website to load, the higher the rate of users leaving your site will be. In the context of WordPress e-commerce sites, themes play an important role in determining your site’s speed. Therefore, in this blog, we have compiled some of the best and fastest e-commerce themes so that you can greatly boost your online store.

Not only the user’s experience, but the site’s speed also directly impacts the SEO of your online shop. When your website is slow, it takes ages to load. This hurts your search engine ranking, meaning fewer people find you. Less traffic means fewer customers.

 So, we will help you to make sure that you choose a theme that is the right fit for your ever-growing e-commerce site settings.

According to WordPress.org, there are around 11,776 themes, and they are growing substantially as time passes. One of the major issues any consumer faces is the long overdue process of choosing the best theme that fits their site’s style.

Choosing the right e-commerce theme for your WordPress website can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. With so many options in the directory, it’s hard to know where to start.

Besides choosing the theme, users can face lots of problems when they are choosing a fast theme for their e-commerce store.

Common Pitfalls Site to Look Out for When Choosing E-commerce Themes

Limited Customizations

Some themes have very limited customization freedom to preserve their design layouts and other features. This restricts your ability to fully customize your site as per your preferences.

Without the freedom to tailor every aspect of your brand identity, you might feel limited in expressing your individuality and establishing a distinct online presence. 

Compatibility Concerns

Some themes can have compatibility issues with WordPress plugins. This will create conflict among the website’s resources and negatively affect your site’s form, and elements. This would be pretty noticeable and also hamper the user experience.

Most of the themes that are specifically designed for speed may not go well with the plugins. Therefore, choosing one that is properly compatible with the plugin is a necessary step.

Technical Knowledge Requirements

If you are a beginner, speed optimization can be quite daunting. You will have to learn about caching, server settings, configurations, plugin settings, and even themes. Choosing a theme user-friendly environments and resources to help beginners with it is a crucial aspect when choosing a fast WordPress theme

Limited Support

This might be one of the issues that is not related to the speed of the themes but is dedicated to all of the themes in general. Many theme development companies cannot provide their customers with full support, which can create issues.

Therefore, it is very important to choose a theme with proper support and timely updates.

Security Concerns

A theme can be fast, but is it secure? A fast theme may not be able to protect your sites from malware, hackers or any type of data breach. The users should be able to check the quality of the theme’s code, update frequency, and compatibility with security plugins. 

Payment Gateway Integrations

Sales are the basic revenue source of any online store. Therefore, any e-commerce theme must be able to support various types of payment options that users want to offer their customers. The user needs to find a theme that is compatible with their payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, or WooCommerce.

Scalability and Customization Options

Some of the fastest themes in WordPress have not been able to accommodate the user’s growing needs and preferences. Many themes may even allow those changes, but doing so might compromise the speed or design of the site.

On the other hand, many sites don’t offer proper customizations for their consumers. This often limits the user’s creativity and best practices. Hence, there is a growing problem of choosing a theme that supports the scalability of the users’ online businesses and customizations of their sites.

Likewise, you’ll have to face various different types of problems aside from the problem of choosing a fast e-commerce theme. You just have to make sure that speed is the most important thing, but not the only thing, when it comes to choosing a theme. 

The importance of choosing fast e-commerce themes for your store

We’ve discussed the problems we might face when choosing or using WordPress e-commerce themes. But what is the importance of choosing a fast theme? What are the positive impacts it will have on your store? Let’s discuss that.

Impact on sales of the store

A fast theme will have a positive impact on your sales. Due to the speed of your site, bounce rates will tend to decrease. The decrease in bounce rates means customers will engage more and the chances of sales will be higher.

As per Deloitte, a mere 0.1 second change in the loading speed of the website can influence every step of the user, increasing the conversion rates. The rates were increased by 8% for the retail sites and 10% for the travel sites. The same source also states that consumers tend to spend 10% more on retail sites with the same change in speed.

This shows that a mere change in the speed of the site will make you much more money than you thought it would. Meaning, optimizing and investing in the right themes for your site is never the wrong choice.

User Experience

The experience of the user is directly responsible for the sales and marketing of an online store. The speed of the site doesn’t only mean the initial loading speed of the page; it also means the speed of every page, button and all the other relative interactions. 

Tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights analyze every aspect of your website, like TTFB (Time to First Byte), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shifts) and other vital aspects. These are known as Google’s Core Web Vitals, and they are very important to maintaining your site’s speed.

Core Web Vital’s main agenda is to determine what your user’s or visitors are experiencing with the loading speed of your website. Your user’s experiences are bound to improve with the improvements in your web vitals. This is where your e-commerce theme comes in. Such themes are hugely responsible for improving your site and user’s experiences.

Mobile Responsiveness

According to Statista, the number of mobile users is expected to rise by 1.5 billion between 2024 and 2029. This indicates that by 2029, there will be 6.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

With mobile phone usage reaching nearly all of the world’s population, businesses and brands are working on making their websites adaptable to mobile phone layouts.

One of the most significant challenges to a website’s responsiveness is speed. Many websites are struggling to improve their responsiveness so that their platforms load more quickly on mobile devices. In the context of WordPress, a decent theme should be completely mobile responsive and fast to load.

Impact on SEO/SEA

Perhaps one of the most important factors for any website in the world. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA) are two of the major deciding factors for the revenue, popularity and amount of traffic on the website.

And since speed is one of the biggest ranking factors for search engine rankings, fast WordPress themes will surely help you with that cause.

There are thousands of themes for e-commerce stores that you can choose from. But not all of them will function or have as much impact as you hope. A good, functionable and feature-packed theme may not perform in the context of speed and vice versa.

But before we dive into the wonderful world of the fastest e-commerce themes, let us see what features are or should be in the fastest e-commerce themes.

Features of Fastest E-commerce WordPress themes

Lightweight Codes

Fastest eCommerce WordPress themes use lightweight code, which means they favor efficient coding principles. This entails writing clean, optimized code that eliminates superfluous scripts, stylesheets, and other items that might impede page load speeds.

Proper Image optimization

Images are generally the biggest components on a webpage, and if not correctly optimized, they may have a considerable influence on loading speeds. The fastest e-commerce themes also guarantee that pictures are compressed without sacrificing quality, decreasing file sizes to the absolute minimum required for fast loading.

Caching and Minifications

Caching is the process of keeping static copies of your website’s content in order to provide them to users more rapidly when they request them. Minification is the process of lowering the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by deleting unneeded characters while preserving their functionality.

Fast e-commerce themes use caching and minification techniques to improve website performance.

Mobile-First Design

Given that the vast majority of internet consumers access websites via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, e-commerce themes must prioritize mobile adaptability. A mobile-first design strategy guarantees that the website looks and operates effectively on smaller displays while providing a consistent user experience across all devices.

Integration of Speed Optimization Plugins

WordPress has a number of plugins that aim to improve website speed and functionality. Fast e-commerce themes frequently include or advocate speed optimization plugins, which may include caching, image optimization, lazy loading, and other performance-enhancing features. Using plugins like WP Rocket, Nitropack may improve the speed and responsiveness of their e-commerce websites.

Top Fastest E-commerce Themes to boost your Online Store’s sales

Astra

One of the most popular and probably the fastest all-purpose themes in WordPress. When it comes to speed and lightweightness, Astra is second to none. The theme perfectly works with WooCommerce, providing you with seamless and uninterrupted customization and design for your site.

Being a multipurpose theme, Astra is able to fit on the site of any site, including e-commerce and provide your customers with the fastest shopping experience. Moreover, the theme provides you with multiple starter template options built with popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver or Gutenberg.

The templates are made for various industries, such as e-commerce sites, so that you can get started and create your online store without breaking a sweat.

As we tested Astra’s speed on our test website, we finally realised why it is hailed as the fastest WordPress theme. When testing on Bytecheck, the TTFB (Time to First Byte) of the theme was 131 milliseconds and the time taken for the site to load was 517 milliseconds. Along with speed, Astra offers you lots of design options. It has one of the best interfaces, colour options, and multiple layout options.

Test Results

Easy Store

Easy Store is one of the beautifully designed WordPress themes. As the name suggests, Easy Store is specially crafted for online stores or e-commerce platforms. The customizers are very easy to navigate, which is essential for the proper personalization of your site. The customizations can be taken further with the ability to customize product pages, 404 error pages and various other pages of the site.

The theme has a clean and elegant design that is quite capable of attracting the eyes of your customers. Furthermore, Easy Store is made with search engine optimization (SEO) and mobile responsiveness in mind. So, you don’t have to worry about ranking higher search engine result pages (SERPs).

Easy Store is fully compatible with popular e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce, and YITH Wishlist. While it is not an exaggeration to say that the theme functions better with these plugins.

Upon testing the speed of the theme with Woocommerce sample products, we found that the total load time of the page of size 40.9 KB was 1.28 seconds with only three requests.

Test Results

StoreFront

One of the best WordPress e-commerce plugins, WooCommerce, has created its own theme, StoreFront, for its  loyal plugin users. The features and plugin integrations are very good, without any questions. With its solid foundation, the theme has responsive layouts, a flexible and nestable grid system, and enhanced SEO performance.

Furthermore, the theme has a clean and simple design, which will be better for the customization of your website. StoreFront has unlimited colour and multiple widget options to further solidify the personalization of your website.

With its easy and simple design, StoreFront is one of the fastest WordPress themes for e-commerce websites. The time taken by the server to load the first byte of the test website with the StoreFront theme on, was only 135 milliseconds.

And the total time taken for the site to be loaded was 581 milliseconds, as per the test done by ByteCheck. Moreover, with its seamless compatibility with WooCommerce, the loading speed of all the pages is very optimal.

Test Results

Botiga

Botiga is a lightweight, minimal, and highly customizable WooCommerce theme designed to get your online business up and running swiftly. Its clean design allows you to showcase your products effectively while maintaining optimal performance. 

With Botiga, you have full control over your website’s layout, header, footer, sidebars, blog, and product pages. It is meticulously crafted with a focus on performance. Its lightweight codebase ensures swift loading times, benefiting both the user experience and search engine rankings.

The theme is built with various features like a mini cart, Quick View, product card styles, galleries, etc., which will be very essential for an e-commerce website. 

The speed of this theme was as expected. The response from the first byte of the site was 133 milliseconds, as per our test. The website took 816 milliseconds to load. With all the sample products added from WooCommerce, the speed is still profoundly fast. Furthermore, with its responsiveness and SEO-optimised features, it is one of the best e-commerce themes to get for your online store.

Test Results

Additional Tips for Optimizing website Speed 

Sometimes the reason for your site’s slow speed may not be due to the themes, but to various reasons like choosing bad hosting providers, not choosing up-to-date technical advancements and daily optimizing your site’s various aspects on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s check out some of the important tips or advice after choosing a fast theme to make sure your site’s speed stays swift.

Choosing a reliable web hosting provider

Web hosting is the spinal cord for launching your site to the public. It is responsible for making your website’s resources available online and accessible to users. One of the major reasons for the site to be slow may be due to the high latency of the servers. Therefore, it is very important to choose the right hosting providers for your e-commerce websites, along with WordPress themes, to make it fast.

Using CDN

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the major enhancements for sharing resources on the Internet. It is a network of servers connected that stores the cached content close to end users.

Basically, CDNs consist of servers located in various geographical locations all over the world. And when the user requests the contents, such as: images, web- pages, videos, etc., the CDN serves them from the server close to the user. This reduces the possibility of high latency issues and speeds up content delivery.

With the implementation of the CDN, your e-commerce will be faster, consume less bandwidth and improve your site’s security. Furthermore, content delivery networks are capable of handling high traffic and withstand hardware failures better than original servers.

Optimizing WordPress database

Optimizing your WordPress database can significantly enhance your website’s performance and user experience. A well-optimized database results in quicker webpage loading. Removal of redundant and unneeded data improves the efficiency of the sites and provides a better user experience on visits.

WordPress tends to store your posts, products and other types of content in the database alongside its revised versions and updates. This will uselessly load your database with unneeded data. Therefore, optimizing the database could be one of the major steps you ought to take to speed up your e-commerce websites.

Implementing Lazy loads

Lazy loading is a strategy that is used to delay the loading of resources like images or videos until they are actually needed by the users. This approach can significantly enhance web performance, especially for heavy content sites like online stores.

The strategy of lazy loading only loads the visible portion initially when the user accesses the page. This will help your servers load critical contents upfront and greatly reduce load times. Moreover, this will revitalize the user’s experience when surfing your website.

Click here to learn more about the lazy loadings and its implementation in WordPress.

Monitoring the performance of the site for further optimizations

There’s always something better to do when it comes to improving your site’s performance. In the context of the speed of the site, monitoring its speed and the user’s experience in a timely manner is one of the important jobs.

Daily monitoring of the site’s performance and optimizing on the basis of it is very important for higher ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). Thus, these activities showcase the enthusiasm of the site owner for improving their website, ultimately impacting your users positively.

What’s the perfect theme for your website?

The ultimate answer is your choice. The perfect theme for you is what you choose, depending on the various requirements of your business. Speed aside, one of the most important aspects of your theme is choosing the products as per your requirements.

There are many themes that are relevant to your theme, like Easy Store and some that can be modified into any industry and still perform better than most, like Astra.

You also need to have a bit of knowledge about plugins and add-ons. The themes are only the front face of your website. While themes attract visitors, plugins are responsible for converting the visitors into customers.

By leveraging the power of plugins and the design of themes effectively, you can elevate your website’s performance, engage your audience more effectively, and ultimately drive conversions and business growth.