Web Development: Best Lightweight Themes for WordPress 2021

Best Lightweight Themes for WordPress 2021

There are different reasons for using a lightweight WordPress theme for a website. Whether you don’t have enough space on your host or you need an amazing page loading speed, a lightweight theme can help you to achieve your goals.

These kinds of themes can save space on your server allocation and make your website faster. A faster loading speed provides a better user experience, improves SEO, and makes you able to attract more visitors to your site. It’s broadly accepted that over half of users will leave your website after spending 3 seconds waiting to load a page.

So let’s briefly review the features and qualities of lightweight WordPress themes, and find out what a lightweight theme is?

What is a Lightweight WordPress Theme?

In short, it is all about the file sizes and coding quality. Lightweight themes are often very simple, clean, and minimalistic. Simpler code, less complexity, and smaller file sizes will result in better performance and help your website to load faster.

Loading heavy images, gifs, and videos will slow your website down, but once a page is loading in the browser, unprofessional JavaScript and CSS coding (in your WordPress theme), can also increase the numbers of HTTP requests made to the server, slow rendering of the page, and ultimately slow down your site.

So a lightweight theme for your website is a clean, well-developed, and low-size WordPress theme.

How to Find a Lightweight and Fast-Loading WordPress Theme

There are countless numbers of templates for WordPress available on Envato Market. ThemeForest is a huge online market that lets you find, review, and download your desired WordPress themes. ThemeForest includes all details (and a live preview) for each theme and helps you choose a theme armed with more information and confidence.

ThemeForest - a big marketplace for selling WordPress themes

If you are interested in subscription plans and want access to more items with a single purchase, then you can use the most useful source for web designers and developers – Envato Elements. Using Envato Elements you’ll access all necessary digital goods like templates, stock images, videos, fonts, and more.

Envato Elements - the best website to download themes, images, videos, fonts, etc

In this post, I have collected the best lightweight themes available on ThemeForest and Envato Elements that you can use for different goals and purposes. I will also provide you some awesome free lightweight themes from the WordPress repository.

Best Lightweight WordPress Themes on ThemeForest

Now let’s get started with the first lightweight WordPress theme in this list.

1. Veen - Minimal & Lightweight Blog for WordPress

Veen - a simple, fast, and lightweight theme for online magazines

Veen is an elegant and search-engine-optimized theme for WordPress that allows you to improve your rank in Google. It has a lightweight file size on a fresh install and can get an unbelievable score (A-100%) on GTmetrix. This lightweight theme is fully responsive, comes with 6 ready-to-use layouts for the home page, and looks nice on all screen sizes.

2. Klambi - Lightweight E-Commerce Fashion Theme

Klambi is an elegant theme for those who need a fast WooCommerce theme

Klambi is a really fast and light theme for WordPress. It comes with beautiful hover effects and images but as it is a well-coded theme, it won’t slow down the functionality of your website. Loading speed is an important feature for an online store and it can create a very good experience for the customers and increase sales. That’s why you need a lightweight WooCommerce-integrated theme for your website.

If you want to build a WooCommerce website and want more options (themes) to choose from, then take a look at the articles below to find more WooCommerce themes.

3. DW Focus - Modern Lightweight News Magazine theme

DW Focus - lite WordPress theme for blogs

If you’re looking for a fast and clean theme for your news website, this lightweight WordPress theme could be an excellent choice for you. It is specially designed for news portals and developed with the best coding skills to bring you a fast page loading speed. The DW Focus WordPress theme comes with useful features for a news website like news sliders, quick tabs, mega menus, and more.

4. Galway - A Clean Minimalist WordPress Blog Theme

Galway - one of the best blog themes with a minimalistic design

Galway is a lightweight and fast-loading WordPress theme for blogs and online magazines. It comes with 3 different homepages and lets you create multiple sliders for any use cases. Briefly, it is a simple and search engine optimized theme and is suitable for those who want to build a fast website in the shortest possible time.

5. Crux - A modern and lightweight WooCommerce theme

Crux is a beautiful WordPress theme for online stores

Crux includes a unique slider builder (save $15) and a helpful control panel that allows you to customize your website in a simple environment. This WooCommerce lightweight theme provides you additional widgets, and with its Stag tools, allows you to use custom shortcodes on the website. Crux is also fully compatible with WooCommerce plugin so if you are planning to create an online store, this lightweight WordPress theme is what you need.

6. Portfolio Air.

Portfolio Air - a minimalist and lightweight theme for WordPress

Are you planning to create a portfolio website for your business? Do you need a fast portfolio theme with a lightweight size? If yes, take a look at the live preview of Portfolio Air on ThemeForest. It is a minimalist, lightweight, and search engine optimized WordPress theme that comes with 2 header styles, a customizable footer, various portfolio lists, 6 different project layouts, and more.

7. Bushwick Lightweight Minimal Theme

Bushwick - lightweight portfolio theme for wordpress

This one is a simple minimalist WordPress theme that gives you a simple website with a clean environment and helps you to build an eye-catching portfolio in minutes.

“It’s created around a content first concept and an amazing portfolio grid. It’s also packed with a lot of useful features, options, and shortcodes to offer the best solution for any type of website you’d like to create.”

This modern lightweight theme is now available on ThemeForest and Envato Elements.

If you're interested in using a minimalistic WordPress theme for your website or want to find more minimalist themes, then feel free to read the articles below.

8. Rein - Minimal Lightweight Dark Theme for WordPress

Rein - fantasy WordPress theme for blogs and online magazines

Rein is a lightweight WordPress theme with a dark fantasy background that is suitable for almost any blog and online magazine. It is a perfectly-developed theme with a fast loading speed, quality coding, and has a low file size. This super-light theme comes with an advanced options panel that makes you able to easily customize your website.

9. TheGem - Creative Multi-Purpose High-Performance WordPress Theme

If you're looking for a lightweight WordPress theme and want to access many additional features and plugins at the same time, then you should search for popular items on ThemeForest. TheGem is a beautiful & fast multi-purpose theme that brings high performance to your website.

This popular WordPress theme includes a lot of features like pre-made demos, a one-click demo importer, a powerful control panel, and more. However, it hasn’t a small file size but if you're looking for a fast-loading WordPress theme for multiple use cases, TheGem is a great choice for you.

10. Universal - Smart Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme

Universal - lightweight multi-purpose theme for WordPress

Here is another multi-purpose WordPress theme. Universal is a well-developed, lightweight, and fast WordPress theme with more than 80 pre-made inner pages and over 25 different styles for each page. You can download it from ThemeForest and create your super-fast website with ease.

“Universal is a modern multi-purpose, minimalistic, easy to use, lightweight and fast loading WordPress theme for building a simple and beautiful business or personal website.”

Best Free Lightweight Themes for WordPress

The fewer features, lines of code, plugins, and add-ons, the lower the file size!

The official website of WordPress is a good source for finding lightweight themes. Coming up, I will show you some of the best WordPress themes (lightweight, fast, and absolutely free) available on the WordPress repository.

11. Twenty Twenty-One

Twenty Twenty One - default theme in a fresh WordPress website

This is the default theme on a fresh install of WordPress at the moment. Twenty Twenty-One is developed by the creators of WordPress so it works very well with all features of everybody’s favorite CMS. It is a clean, simple, and lightweight theme and it also has brothers and sisters in the WordPress repository! Twenty-Twenty, Twenty-Nineteen, Twenty-Seventeen, and so on, are its predecessors. They are all lightweight, fast, and elegant WordPress themes.

12. OneStore

OneStore - a free lightweight theme for WooCommerce stores

If you want to install a WooCommerce-compatible theme on your site and create a fast online store using a free lightweight theme, then download OneStore and build your website quickly!

“OneStore is a lightweight, fast, highly customizable, and flexible theme and supports all popular page builders”

13. KnowledgeCenter

KnowledgeCenter - fast and free WordPress theme for support websites

KnowledgeCenter is a free lightweight theme for help-desk, FAQ, or documentation websites. It has a white and simple environment, and its minimalistic design helps your visitors focus on their questions or the content. It is a fast WordPress theme and lets you create a documentation website for free.

14. FrannaMag

Frannamag - simple blog theme for WordPress

If you want to install a simple blog theme on your website and need no complexity for its design, then you can use the FrannaMag theme.

“It is a Lightweight and fast WordPress theme for magazines, news websites, and personal blogs build with Bootstrap 5.”

15. Incise

Incise - lightweight WordPress theme for writers and bloggers

The last item in this list is Incise. It is another free and elegant WordPress theme that is perfect for writers and bloggers who want to showcase their content on a simple and minimalist website. Incise is a free theme, and lets you also customize your website with options like header image and footer customization.

Build Your Fast-Loading WordPress Website with Lightweight Themes

Well, I hope this article helped you find a fast and lightweight theme for your WordPress website. If you have chosen a theme, you can easily download it and create your dream website today. But if you are still looking for a lightweight theme or want more collections to choose from, please feel free to search for what you want in the articles below. Thank you for reading!