What are the best free WooCommerce themes?
When preparing to launch an online store, your first priority should be selecting a theme or template that fits your client’s current content and future strategy. There are a number of free WooCommerce themes that can do the trick well.
There is a misconception that the more features a theme is packing, the better. Reality is quite the opposite; you don’t want to run a bloated theme with many features you’ll never use.
There are gazillions of free WordPress themes out there that claim to support WooCommerce, but unfortunately not all themes are created equal. For a developer not as familiar with WooCommerce, it can be tough to filter out themes from your search that weren’t developed following WooCommerce standards.
Check out this article by WooCommerce Specialist Danny Santoro for some surprising inclusions of popular themes doing it wrong.
To help your clients find the best free WooCommerce themes, I ran some tests and comparisons based on various factors, including page generation time, memory usage, database query time, database queries, and WooCommerce developer guidelines.
Best free WooCommerce themes: The methodology
Since finding the best free WooCommerce themes can be seen as objective, I went to the WordPress.org theme directory and used the Feature Filter to include only eCommerce themes. At first I planned to test all themes that fall under eCommerce, but I back pedalled on that idea once I realized there are so many themes out there that use the eCommerce tag.
As an initial filter, I ran all the themes in themecheck.org to find out which themes followed the WordPress guidelines. From there, I selected the themes that scored 95 or above.
I ended up with 43 themes, with the addition of Storefront (since it’s a theme developed by WooCommerce) although it scored low in Theme Check plugin.
Here are the themes included in this review:
- Accelerate
- Agama
- Aqueduct
- Arise
- Awesome
- Base WP
- Bellini
- BlogoLife
- ColorMag
- E-Comme
- Edge
- EightMedi Lite
- Enigma
- Esteem
- eStore
- Fabulous Fluid
- FitClub
- Fluida
- Freesia Empire
- GeneratePress
- HappenStance
- Iconic One
- Illdy
- Inventor
- Level
- Make
- Movers Packers
- NovelLite
- Onepage
- Optimizer
- Pixgraphy
- Regina Lite
- Revolve
- SG Window
- Shop Isle
- SKT Design Agency
- SongWriter
- Spasalon
- Stained Glass
- Store WP
- Storefront
- Terminal Lite
- Tiny Framework
- WP Portfolio
For each theme, I did the following:
- Installed and activated WooCommerce plugin in a fresh install.
- Imported the WooCommerce-supplied demo content.
- Installed and activated the theme.
- Activated Query monitor.
- Went to WooCommerce Shop page.
- Wrote down the stats supplied by Query Monitor.
- Activated WP Reset plugin to reset WordPress.
- Erased everything using WordPress Reset and moved onto the next theme.
For my testing environment, I used a localhost — WAMP on a Windows machine. I used WordPress version 4.6, equipped with WooCommerce, Query Monitor and WordPress Reset. The only limitation of this test is that I’ve only tested the WooCommerce store or shop pages. Another thing to consider is that on live server performance data might vary a little bit.
I captured the data and pulled it into spreadsheets for comparison. You can check out the raw data here. I omitted the themes which used woocommerce_content to display content, as developers are encouraged by WooCommerce to use Hooks instead of WooCommerce_content.
Top 10 themes by page generation time
| Theme name | Page generation time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| Optimizer | 0.512 |
| Bellini | 0.5829 |
| Revolve | 0.5959 |
| Storefront | 0.6156 |
| ColorMag | 0.6168 |
| EightMedi Lite | 0.6192 |
| Esteem | 0.6313 |
| GeneratePress | 0.635 |
| Agama | 0.6663 |
| eStore | 0.6703 |
Top 10 themes by page generation time
- Optimizer: 0.512 seconds
- Bellini: 0.5829 seconds
- Revolve: 0.5959 seconds
- Storefront: 0.6156 seconds
- ColorMag: 0.6168 seconds
- EightMedi Lite: 0.6192 seconds
- Esteem: 0.6313 seconds
- GeneratePress: 0.635 seconds
- Agama: 0.6663 seconds
- eStore: 0.6703 seconds
Top 10 themes by lowest memory usage
| Theme name | Peak memory usage (kB) |
|---|---|
| WP Portfolio | 19,912 |
| Accelerate | 20,067 |
| Esteem | 20,133 |
| Storefront | 20,149 |
| Bellini | 20,222 |
| EightMedi Lite | 20,312 |
| ColorMag | 20,359 |
| GeneratePress | 20,417 |
| eStore | 20,455 |
| Revolve | 20,577 |
Top 10 themes by lowest memory usage
- WP Portfolio: 19,912 kB
- Accelerate: 20,067 kB
- Esteem: 20,133 kB
- Storefront: 20,149 kB
- Bellini: 20,222 kB
- EightMedi Lite: 20,312 kB
- ColorMag: 20,359 kB
- GeneratePress: 20,417 kB
- eStore: 20,455 kB
- Revolve: 20,577 kB
Top 10 themes by database query time
| Theme name | Database query time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| Shop Isle | 0.0229 |
| Make | 0.0238 |
| Bellini | 0.0267 |
| ColorMag | 0.0287 |
| Storefront | 0.0298 |
| Optimizer | 0.0313 |
| eStore | 0.0348 |
| EightMedi Lite | 0.0363 |
| Agama | 0.0365 |
| WP Portfolio | 0.0439 |
Top 10 themes by database query time
- Shop Isle: 0.0229 seconds
- Make: 0.0238 seconds
- Bellini: 0.0267 seconds
- ColorMag: 0.0287 seconds
- Storefront: 0.0298 seconds
- Optimizer: 0.0313 seconds
- eStore: 0.0348 seconds
- EightMedi Lite: 0.0363 seconds
- Agama: 0.0365 seconds
- WP Portfolio: 0.0439 seconds
Top 10 themes by database queries
| Theme name | # database queries |
|---|---|
| Shop Isle | 31 |
| Make | 31 |
| Revolve | 31 |
| Bellini | 32 |
| EightMedi Lite | 32 |
| eStore | 39 |
| ColorMag | 42 |
| Agama | 42 |
| Esteem | 42 |
| Storefront | 43 |
Top 10 themes by database queries
- Shop Isle: 31
- Make: 31
- Revolve: 31
- Bellini: 32
- EightMedi Lite: 32
- eStore: 39
- ColorMag: 42
- Agama: 42
- Esteem: 42
- Storefront: 43
Top 10 themes by Theme Check score
| Theme name | Theme Check score |
|---|---|
| Bellini | 99 |
| Shop Isle | 98 |
| ColorMag | 98 |
| Esteem | 98 |
| Revolve | 97 |
| eStore | 97 |
| Agama | 97 |
| WP Portfolio | 97 |
| Accelerate | 97 |
| GeneratePress | 97 |
Which theme holds the top spot?
Here are the best 14 free WooCommerce themes that scored high in one or all of the criteria (in no particular order):
Optimizer
Optimizer is a multipurpose theme that will help you create full-blown websites with just drag-and-drop widgets. It’s extremely flexible and appropriate for creating landing pages, small business, portfolio, photography, corporate, personal and eCommerce websites.
Bellini
Bellini is theme developed for creating eCommerce or online shops. You can easily launch an online store with minimum effort. Built using Bootstrap, Bellini features many customization options for WooCommerce product and shop pages.
eStore
eStore is a clean, beautiful and easy-to-use WordPress theme. It offers many options for creating an online store.
Shop Isle
Developed by Theme Isle, the company behind the popular WordPress theme Zerif, Shop Isle is suitable for building clothing, electronics and almost any kind of store website.
Storefront
The folks at WooCommerce developed Storefront — so you can be certain this theme will always be compatible with WooCommerce. Like WooCommerce, Storefront follows the add-ons model. That means that when you’re ready to upgrade, you can buy only what you need.
ColorMag
ColorMag is appropriate for creating a magazine-style eCommerce website. The theme is flexible and mobile-responsive and it has lots of options.
Revolve
Revolve is an elegant and creative WordPress theme for creating WooCommerce-compatible portfolio, photography, store, arts, freelance and creative websites.
EightMedi Lite
This responsive theme by 8 Degree Themes is ideal for creating websites for the medical industry, including WooCommerce-compatible sites for doctors, surgeons, health centres, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and more.
Esteem
A multipurpose, responsive theme by Theme Grill, Esteem is designed to create business, portfolio and blogging websites.
Agama
Agama is a multipurpose WordPress theme that is suitable for a web agency, corporate business, personal and parallax business portfolio, photography websites and more.
GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a fast, lightweight, add-on based WordPress theme. It is compatible with plugins like WooCommerce, Beaver Builder, Elementor, WPML, BuddyPress, bbPress and many more.
WP Portfolio
WP Portfolio is a simple, clean WordPress portfolio theme that supports WooCommerce. It’s especially designed for designers, photographers, artists and creatives.
Accelerate
Accelerate is a multipurpose WordPress theme by Theme Grill. It’s suitable for building portfolio, business, blog, personal, travel, corporate, and business services websites.
Make
Built by The Theme Foundry, Make is a flexible theme with a robust customizer panel. Along with WooCommerce, it’s compatible with Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7 and Jetpack.
Learn more
As always, your selection of a “winner” is based on what you factor value most. You can check out this detailed spreadsheet if you want more data regarding this WooCommerce theme performance analysis.
Image by: terren in Virginia Flickr via Compfight cc