Building a successful online store starts with the right tools. WooCommerce, a powerful and free plugin for WordPress, gives you everything you need to sell products or services online. But to truly maximize its potential, choosing a fast and optimized theme is essential.
In this article, we’ll review eight of the best free WooCommerce themes for 2024 that offer both speed and functionality, helping you create a store that stands out and performs exceptionally well.
Free Lightweight WooCommerce Themes
We will cover themes that are fully compatible with WooCommerce and optimized for performance. Before diving into each theme’s specific features, here’s what they all share:
- Free to download with optional premium paid versions.
- Built with an SEO-friendly structure.
- Performance-focused, scoring high on PageSpeed Insights.
- Clean, optimized source code following WordPress Coding Standards.
- Easy to set up and customize.
- Clean, minimalist design.
- Lightweight for faster load times.
- Seamless, responsive integration across devices.
- Full WooCommerce compatibility, eliminating plugin conflicts, even after updates.
These features ensure reliability, speed, and ease of use across all themes.
NOTE: While all themes performed well in our speed tests, the way you build your site has a greater impact on speed. Adding plugins and custom code often introduces load time delays. For this reason, instead of diving into detailed speed comparisons, we’ll highlight the key features of each theme. This will guide you in choosing the best option for your site.
Let’s explore these theme recommendations. We’ll highlight their unique features and WooCommerce integration. Finally, we’ll compare how each theme’s shop homepage performs.
Blocksy
Active installations: 200,000+ Rating: 5/5
The free version of the Blocksy theme offers drag-and-drop customization options, making it easy to personalize your site’s header, footer, sidebars, layout, colors, typography, and post/page designs.
Blocksy is an excellent choice for WooCommerce stores, with built-in features to enhance the customer experience and improve conversion rates. Its eCommerce-specific tools make it a versatile, user-friendly theme for online shops.
Once WooCommerce is installed and activated, new customization options appear in the customizer, including design and functionality controls for:
- Product archives and single product pages
- Shopping cart
- Checkout page
- Account page
- Product variation gallery
- AJAX add-to-cart functionality
- Custom quantity inputs
- Sale badges
- Star ratings
Blocksy also integrates with a wide range of social networks, helping you connect your online store with potential customers.
Storefront
Active installations: 100,000+ Rating: 4.5/5
Storefront is a top recommendation for WooCommerce projects since it’s designed by WooCommerce itself, ensuring seamless integration with both WooCommerce and its extensions. Built on the Underscores framework, it features a responsive layout, SEO optimization, and a flexible grid system.
In the WooCommerce section of Storefront’s customizer, you’ll find options to further personalize your store, including the ability to:
- Adjust header and footer components
- Configure colors and typography
- Customize widgets and navigation
- Add featured products and product categories
Storefront is created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other tools, and aims to democratize publishing and commerce.
Kadence
Active installations: 300,000+ Rating: 5/5
The Kadence theme is another popular choice for WooCommerce websites, known for being lightweight while offering a robust set of features.
Throught the WordPress Customizer, Kadence provides:
- Advanced configuration for colors, buttons, and typography.
- Drag-and-drop customization for headers and footers, with live previews.
- Options to fine-tune the layout of pages, posts, and custom post types down to the pixel.
- Performance optimization options like CSS preloading, Lightbox, and locally loaded Google fonts.
- Additional settings for various elements like scroll-to-top, 404 pages, comments, breadcrumbs, and search results.
Kadence integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, allowing you to design your store without sacrificing performance. In the WooCommerce section of the Customizer, it offers options to personalize:
- Single-product layout
- Product images appearance
- Checkout and My Account page appearance.
Botiga
Active installations: 10,000+ Rating: 5/5
The Botiga theme is an excellent choice for WooCommerce due to its clean design, fast performance, and customization options tailored for online stores.
Botiga’s features include:
- Built-in drag-and-drop header and footer builder
- Extensive color and typography customization
- Detailed layout adjustments
- Background image options
- Custom button styling and scroll-to-top button
- Blog archive and single post page customization
WooCommerce integration features:
- Flexible product page customization for unique product listings
- Additional controls for search results and cart layout
- Customizable checkout process to improve customer experience
- Built-in product filtering and search tools, enhancing product discovery
Botiga is developed by aThemes, a fully remote team across different countries, focused on creating well-designed, easy-to-use WordPress themes and plugins for small businesses, eCommerce stores, and creatives.
Woostify
Active installations: 40,000+ Rating: 5/5
The Woostify theme integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, preventing plugin conflicts and ensuring smooth updates. It supports essential eCommerce features, including:
- Extensive display options for the product catalog page
- Extensive customization options for the single product pages
- Two cart layout choices
- Customizable mini cart
- Multi-step checkout process
- Adjustable cart button and wishlist styles and more.
Designed for lightweight performance and usability, Woostify is a flexible, efficient choice for building a high-converting online store.
Zakra
Zakra is one of the fastest WordPress themes, known for balancing performance and aesthetics. With built-in WooCommerce compatibility, it simplifies online store setup and efficient product management.
Key WooCommerce features include:
- Ready-to-import, customizable WooCommerce templates
- Distraction-free checkout process
- A sticky “Add to Cart” panel
- Customizable product elements like titles, ratings, and prices
- Additional options for typography, colors, and layouts
Created by ThemeGrill, Zakra is a trusted solution known for lightweight, customizable free and premium themes.
ShoppingCart
Active installations: 5,000+ Rating: 5/5
ShoppingCart is a versatile WordPress theme designed primarily for e-commerce stores. It integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and is highly customizable through the WordPress customizer.
ShoppingCart is a versatile WordPress theme designed for e-commerce stores. It offers extensive WooCommerce customization through the WordPress customizer, including:
- Extra widgets and navigation menus
- Multiple layout options
- Customizable color schemes
- Product promotion tools
- Slider customization options
In terms of design control, ShoppingCart allows you to disable various page elements, such as the top bar, search form, sticky menu, social icons, featured images, and the main menu.
Additionally, you can hide layout elements like category labels, author names, dates, comments, and entry metadata.
ShoppingCart is developed by ThemeFreesia, a well-established WordPress themes and plugins company.
Rife
Active installations: 30,000+ Rating: 5/5
The Rife Free theme is a flexible WordPress theme suitable for portfolios, photography websites, blogs, businesses, and WooCommerce stores.
Key features include:
- Detailed header customization
- Extensive layout customization for WooCommerce elements, including the product list, single product page, pop-up basket, checkout, buttons, and background
- Bricks gallery to display photos and videos on any page or post
- Multiple sidebar widgets
- An eye-catching writing effect for engaging intros
Apollo13Themes, the creators of Rife, specialize in high-quality, customizable WordPress themes that focus on flexibility, design, and user-friendliness to help build visually stunning websites.
Comparison
At Pressidium, we believe in hands-on testing to draw accurate conclusions. Here, we compared these themes using key performance data.
NOTE: We used no extra plugins; just the theme, WooCommerce, and the sample_products.csv file that WooCommerce provides for importing products. The comparison highlights the shop’s homepage performance.
Here are the findings:
| Active installations | Ratings | HTTP requests | Transferred Size (kB) | Load (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blocksy | 200,000+ | 5/5 | 30 | 227 | <520 |
| Storefront | 100,000+ | 4.5/5 | 31 | 196 | <480 |
| Kadence | 300,000+ | 5/5 | 33 | 223 | <590 |
| Botiga | 10,000+ | 5/5 | 34 | 285 | <650 |
| Woostify | 40,000+ | 5/5 | 50 | 390 | <750 |
| ShoppingCart | 5,000+ | 5/5 | 44 | 462 | <750 |
| Zakra | 40,000+ | 5/5 | 33 | 232 | <550 |
| Rife | 30,000+ | 5/5 | 47 | 583 | <850 |
Supercharge Your WooCommerce Theme
Whether you’re just starting to build an online store, or are upgrading your existing one, these themes offer a solid foundation for growth in 2024.
Moreover, an advanced hosting provider such as Pressidium can further enhance theme performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies.
Pressidium uses advanced server-side caching and an Enterprise CDN for ultra-fast page loads. Our N-tier architecture prevents bottlenecks, while automatic load balancing ensures smooth performance, even during traffic spikes.
With a global server network, we guarantee low latency and consistent reliability worldwide. Try Pressidium today for hassle-free, high-performance WordPress hosting!
Start Your 14 Day Free Trial
Try our award winning WordPress Hosting!
The post 8 Fast and Free WooCommerce Themes in 2024 appeared first on Pressidium® Managed WordPress Hosting.