There is a reason WordPress is so popular and the popularity is increasing day by day and that reason is its really huge developer community. So, the number of themes and plugins in WordPress are increasing and they are all free. This is indeed a great advantage for someone who is willing to set up a new website.

As WordPress is open source and costs nothing, same is the case with its huge plugins and themes which are available for download from WordPress repository. The quality is maintained to a great level making WordPress the best choice for most of the people. Almost 22% of all the websites run on WordPress which is really awesome.

Say you want to start an amazing website with great features and scalability then the best choice you can make would be WordPress. Most users know this part, but the next step after installing WordPress is usually harder for many people and the reason is they don’t know how to choose a great theme that has a lot of features and is fast too.

There are tons of articles and collections which can help you find a nice looking theme but it is hard to see how they perform in terms of speed. Speed, as you might know, has now become an important part of a website’s search engine ranking criteria and a slower website is less likely to be on the first page of Google’s search results.

That is a serious problem since many users including some relatively advanced ones are not aware of how to find and get a high quality theme. A theme that is nice looking as well as scores great in Google’s PageSpeed rankings.

If you are also looking for themes with high PageSpeed score, then you can check out an interesting website WPSpeedster.com for more than 2,500 free themes. All of these themes can be downloaded right away which makes this website unique and great for everyone from a newbie to a seasoned developer.

The interesting thing is that the tests are in detail and serves their purpose very well. They are based on homepage and post page and not only on desktop but on mobile as well, giving you a thorough Google PageSpeed Insights test review of how your theme will perform. You can even browse by popularity making it easier for you to see the best scoring themes first.

If this is your first priority while choosing a theme, your site will surely see better search engine rankings as per the latest Google search engine ranking criteria. For seeing the overall top scoring themes, just go to this link and find the theme that suits you best.

Another great thing they provide is the free Themes Speed Test plugin that gives you a score overview of all the themes you currently have. This makes it easier to see which one is the best and install it to make your website even faster and better, not only in terms of speed, but SEO too. We found this to be a useful tool for people who want a quick glimpse of the information about their theme, but again, it cannot be relied upon 100%.

The reason is that the images and content will vary when you install and put your own homepage and post page content and so does the PageSpeed score. So it is highly recommended that even though a higher scoring theme is preferable, you should still test it again using Google PageSpeed to make sure your own page does not have any elements that are slowing down your page.

There could be one more great feature which we would like to see is to get every page’s PageSpeed results automatically as soon as it is published so that user knows how his page is scoring. If this result can be stored with every revision, that would be fantastic to keep record of how the page performed and with which images and content it scored better.

If you are willing to give it a try, go to their plugin page and install the plugin. Once installed, simply go to the themes page in appearance menu and you should see PageSpeed score in front of the theme title. It should be mentioned here that the results are already saved in their database and pulled using their API.

WPSpeedster.com has plugin test results too. They have tests of over 25,000 WordPress plugins and the test results can be seen on the plugin installation page. For that, you need to go to Plugins Speed Test plugin page and install it. Once installed, look for Speed Impact column on the right hand side of your Plugins page.

It will check multiple things including Home Page Impact, Post Page Impact, Resources that this plugin added to the website and how much database is being used. To summarize, it gives a good quick idea of the plugin’s impact on the site.

These two plugins by WPSpeedster seems to be good in terms of giving users an idea of which themes and plugins are better so the user can make a choice. However, the issue here is that those themes and plugins must be installed. If the results could be seen before installing the plugins and themes, it would be much more helpful because that is when the results are really needed.

In short, besides the room for improvement, the idea for testing themes and plugins seem a very good one because it can help you avoid any bad or low-scoring themes and plugins easily. And remember that faster websites always tend to rank higher than the slower ones.