Since the release of Themify v5, we have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedbacks about the pagespeed and performance improvements. We've helped many users achieve a 90+ pagespeed score on their sites, which they weren't able to with other themes. In this post, we will present a pagespeed comparison of Themify Ultra versus Divi, Elementor, Avada, Beaver, Astra, OceanWP, all of which are extremely popular themes and page builders in the WordPress market. We are presenting an unbiased comparison using the builtin features from each theme, without any third party cache or minify plugins. The pagespeed test was audited using Google Pagespeed Insights and we've recorded the whole process, which you can watch below. When it comes to pagespeed, we are thrilled to show how Themify outperforms other themes and builders.

Why Is Pagespeed Important?

Pagespeed is very important in not only being more efficient, but also in providing a much better on-page user experience. A slow website not only irritates your visitors, it can also harm your site SEO and business. According to this study conducted by Section.io, there is a 9.6% bounce rate when page speed is 2 seconds and a 32.3% bounce rate when page speed is 7 seconds, which means over a quarter of users will click away if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Similar studies on how page speed affects SEO and site traffics are also available from other reliable sources such as Neil Patel, SEO Clarity, and Pingdom.

In 2020, Google has made pagespeed and user experience a critical ranking factor on their search engine results. That means if your site loads fast, you have better advantage in the search result placement. If your site/business relies on search engines to drive traffic in, we highly recommend you hop on to Google Pagespeed Insights to analyze your site's pagespeed.

Site Setup

We have setup a WordPress multi-site for the pagespeed test. Each site has the same content, with WooCommerce plugin activated. There is no server cache/CDN or any cache plugin installed. At the time of recording the video, the following are installed on the site.

  • WordPress 5.5.3 (mult-site enabled)
  • WooCommerce 4.8.0
  • Themify Ultra 5.1.4
  • Divi 4.6.5
  • Astra 2.6.0 + Elementor 3.0.13
  • Avada 7.1.1 + Avada Builder 3.1.1
  • OceanWP 2.0.0 + Beaver Builder Lite 2.4.0.5

Themify Performance Features

Themify has a number of builtin features that can help speed up page load such as lazy load, caching, Gzip, and WebP image. On our demo, we have the following options enabled: Themify Cache, Gzip Scripts, Themify WebP Image, and jQuery Defer.

Themify performance settings

Pagespeed Audits

The comparison is done using Google Pagespeed Insights to audit the pagespeed on a sample page, home page, shop page, and a product page. You can access the reports below which includes the demo link and pagespeed report link. You can also watch the full length video capturing the whole process.

Result

Below is the summary of the pagespeed result of each site and page.

Sample Home Shop Product
Ultra 99 97 96 90
Divi 93 87 80 70
Astra + Elementor 96 73 92 80
Avada 45 58 51 47
OceanWP + Beaver 80 73 72 64

Sample Page

The sample page is auto generated by WordPress when you create a new page. It only has a text block without any rich media content such as images, videos, etc., making it the lightest page on the site.

Pagespeed result: sample page

Home Page

On the home page, the layout is built with a page builder. Since Astra and OceanWP theme doesn't have a built-in page builder, we use Elementor and Beaver Builder to build the page layout. Each demo home page has the same background images, text, icons, and banner images.

Pagespeed result: home page

Shop Page

On the WooCommerce shop page, each demo shows 12 products with 5 top-rated products on the sidebar. All demos uses the same products' information and images.

Pagespeed result: shop page

Product Page

The product page is a single page consisting of a large product image and 3 product gallery thumbnails. On the sidebar, there are 5 top-rated products with thumbnails. Again, all demos have the same product images uploaded.

Pagespeed result: product page

Conclusion

Based on these results, Themify Ultra surpasses the other popular themes and builders on pagespeed performance. Whether you are using WordPress for a simple website or for a site with heavy content, Themify has proven that you can easily achieve a 90+ pagespeed score on your site. Consider switching to Themify Ultra now!

Credit: Video by James Welbes.