PageSpeed – WordPress themes in comparison

We compared top WordPress themes in terms of PageSpeed and PageLoad – the results are here. The three most popular themes compete against our SV100 WordPress theme in four different scenarios. See here what effect the chosen theme alone can have on the pageload – one of the many criteria for Google ranking.

Themes comparison

Avada

Avada is the most popular paid theme on ThemeForest.

OceanWP

is the most popular independent theme in the WP theme repository.

Twenty Twenty

is the default theme and comes bundled with WordPress.

SV100

our self-developed theme is available free of charge.

Pagesize

The load time of your website depends heavily on the amount of data that is being transferred. Your visitors need more bandwidth or more patience to view your website. A theme should use resources as sparingly as possible, so that you have more freedom in your content.

Google recommends that a website should not exceed 1,600 kilobytes PageSize.

However, Avada – without optimization – already requires over 1,700 kilobytes – without content. Therefore, it is better to choose a theme that is more economical with resources.

Below you can see the tested themes – the bigger the PageSize, the worse:

Space for your content

If you follow Google’s recommended PageSize budget – how much space for your content do WordPress themes give you? We compare here in the optimized scenario, i.e. with activated NGINX + WP-Rocket.

Pageload

The PageSize has a direct impact on the PageLoad – but this mainly affects the path from the server to the client. After that, the pages still have to be displayed in the browser. The loading of data and the structure of the pages happens a bit in parallel and can be influenced by the theme developer. Important data should be transferred first, unimportant later.

For our measurement we used the Load Time from pingdom – but in the PageSpeed tests you can find a more detailed breakdown – e.g. when the first content was drawn or from when the user can interact with the page.

Requests

The number of requests should be kept as low as possible – each request generates additional load. The more files the theme includes, such as media, styles, or scripts, the more requests the client and server need to process.

Intelligent and tidy asset loading through the theme effectively reduces the number of requests required and increases PageSpeed.

PageSpeed

The PageSpeed is a measurement value that gives an expression about the speed of a website – here numerous criteria are queried, which have to be fulfilled. The maximum achievable value is 100/100.

The first value represents mobile speed, the second represents desktop devices. Since Google has switched indexing to Mobile-First, the first value for mobile devices is decisive for the ranking in the Google index.

Google is constantly raising the bar – new technologies are created and eventually assumed. Therefore, do not wait to optimize – it will not make it better.

Avada

TEST SITES	PageSpeed	Pingdom	Pagesize	Pageload	Requests
Vanilla	29/73	91	2.4 MB	877ms	12
WP-Rocket	44/84	94	2.4 MB	433 ms	10
NGINX Optimized	77/95	96	0.64 MB	849 ms	12
WP-Rocket + NGINX Optimized	79/96	97	0.64 MB	490 ms	10

Ocean WP

TEST SITES	PageSpeed	Pingdom	Pagesize	Pageload	Requests
Vanilla	63/90	84	0.71 MB	489 ms	19
WP-Rocket	94/98	96	0.70 MB	351 ms	7
NGINX Optimized	81/95	91	0.29 MB	753 ms	19
WP-Rocket + NGINX Optimized	97/98	98	0.28 MB	200 ms	7

Twenty Twenty

TEST SITES	PageSpeed	Pingdom	Pagesize	Pageload	Requests
Vanilla	94/98	85	0.25 MB	215 ms	8
WP-Rocket	97/100	96	0.18 MB	140 ms	5
NGINX Optimized	99/100	96	0.07 MB	210 ms	8
WP-Rocket + NGINX Optimized	100/100	98	0.06 MB	134 ms	5

SV100

Test Sites	PageSpeed	Pingdom	Pagesize	Pageload	Requests
Vanilla	100/100	99	0.04 MB	267 ms	1
WP-Rocket	100/100	97	0.02 MB	114 ms	3
NGINX Optimized	100/100	100	0.01 MB	275 ms	1
WP-Rocket + NGINX Optimized	100/100	99	0.01 MB	121 ms	3