WordPress Speed Comparison between Top 4 themes: Avada, X, Enfold and Be

Speed Comparison between Top 4 Themes: Avada, X Theme, Enfold and BeTheme

Avada, X Theme, Enfold and BeTheme are the top 4 best selling themes which have been popular for a long time.

I had a chance to compare the loading speed of these four themes. All four themes are multi-purpose themes and fit most purposes as the word "multi-purpose" indicates.

Most especially, Avada offers really many themes options. Therefore, even those who do not have knowledge in coding can build a professional web-site with this No 1 theme.

Please note that all themes were installed on a server hosted by iPage (with the cheapest "Essential Plan".) I loaded a demo for each theme and installed a cache plugin named "WP Fastest Cache" for all four themes. The load speed test was done with the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool.

As you know, the results may be different depending on various conditions such demos used and plugins installed. Therefore, the following results are just for your reference only.

Avada

Avada"Hotel" demo was used to evaluate the speed. The load time is 1.41 - 1.55 sec.

• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/NPn38/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/hotel/
• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/YL7zb/http://hotel.iwordpower.com/

Update: Recently Avada has been updated to 5.0 with new Fusion Builder. The performance of Fusion Builder has been greatly improved in the new version. Avada offers many theme options which enables beginners create professional looking sites with ease.

X Theme

I loaded a demo named "Renew 2", one-page style. The resulting load time for this X Theme's demo was 1.01 sec.

• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/cjbcBU/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/xtheme

I felst that X Theme is the fastest one among Top 5.

Enfold

The demo Wedding was used to test the load speed for Enfold. The load time was 917 ms.

• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bPZfMj/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/wp/

BeTheme

For BeTheme, I installed the "Language" demo. The load time of this theme was 1.76 sec.

• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dLFMHb/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/betheme

Speed Comparison

Which WordPress theme is the fastest? From the results above, Enfold was the fastest and BeTheme was the slowest among the four:

Enfold (917 ms) > X Theme (1.01 sec) > Avada (1.55 sec) > BeTheme (1.76 sec)

However, the load time I actually felt was a little different: I felt the X Theme was the fastest among the tested themes.

As I mentioned above, the load time will be different depending on various conditions: For example, the results might be varied if I used a different demo for each theme. Therefore, please consider the above results as one of many elements to choose your theme.

Next time, I will try to include more themes such as Bridge and other popular themes.

Added: Bridge Theme

I loaded the New Demo 22 – Tech Showcase demo for testing load time of Bridge. The load time ranged 1 - 1.5 sec.

• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bgrTnE/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/bridge/
• https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/ex9c6g/http://iwordpowercom.ipage.com/bridge/

Bridge offers more than 200 demos, which enables users to chooose an appropriate one for their need.

The test has been performed on my test blog hosted by iPage. I think, iPage is good for personal blogs or test sites. Although I chose the lowest Essential Plan ($1.99/month with unlimited bandwidth and disk space), the site speed is satisfactory. I think iPage is cost-effective. You can check the actual speed at this blog. (I installed a few plugins only including the mulitingual plugin WPML and a free cache plugin with a simple WP theme.)