Rishi vs Astra vs GeneratePress – Which is the Fastest?

You will agree with me when I say page speed is one of the most important ranking factors.

In May 2020, Google officially announced on its developer blog that Core Web Vitals will be a crucial metric for determining website ranking by the search engine. By May 2021, Google officially completed adding Core Web Vitals to its algorithm to determine how to rank websites.  

That means your website speed performance now largely depends on how well you have your site’s Core Web Vitals optimized.

There are many ways to optimize and improve your website Core Web Vitals. Among them, the best way is to use a lightweight, fastest and Core Web Vitals optimized WordPress theme. 

It is because the WordPress theme acts as the site’s foundation in determining the degree of the site’s loading time. 

Introducing Rishi – Core Web Vitals Optimized WordPress Theme 

In August 2020, we started our journey to build the fastest WordPress theme in the market that is lightweight and highly customizable. 

A year later, the result of that labor of love, research and optimization is the Rishi WordPress theme. 

Rishi is lightning fast, and its stats speak for themselves. The theme comes with 0 CLS, 100 in Google PageSpeed Insight (Desktop and Mobile) and 241 LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), making it the fastest WordPress theme in the market. 

But, you don’t have to take our words for it. 

Comparing Rishi with Astra and GenerePress (Two Fastest WordPress Theme in the Market) 

We decided to test Rishi’s speed against the two most popular WordPress themes that are known for their speed – Astra and GeneratePress.

The speed test for all 3 themes was based on the following conditions: 

1. Installed Rishi theme on our server at our test site. The theme was tested against the Speed Test URL provided by GeneratePress [https://speedtest.generatepress.com/] and Astra [https://speedtest.wpastra.com/]. 
2. The test was performed on the default “Sample Page” set as the Home page that comes with WordPress installation. 
3. No caching plugin was used and only the default WordPress installation was used. 
4. Ran the theme speed test URL through the GTMetrix, PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to evaluate the speed. 

Based on these conditions, now let’s have a look at the speed performance result.

Platform 1: Using GTMetrix 

1. Rishi:

2. Astra:

3. GeneratePress:

4. Overall comparison between Rishi vs Astra vs GeneratePress using GTMetrix 

The Result? 

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the important Core Web Vitals metrics because it is highly user-centric. It measures the webpage’s load performance. 

So in general, the lower the LCP score, the higher will be the user experience. 

In the above comparison by GTMetric, Rishi has clearly met the mark as it maintains the lowest LCP score, i.e. 241ms and outperforms Astra and GeneratePress by a high margin, i.e. 376ms and 556ms respectively. 

Rishi is the clear winner! 

Platform 2: Using Pingdom

1. Rishi: 

2. Astra:

3. GeneratePress: 

The Result? 

Based on the tests conducted via Pingdom, we can clearly observe that Rishi is the ultimate winner as it has the lowest page loading time by x3 times than that of its competitors, i.e. Rishi loads in 349ms, while Astra WP loads in 849ms, and GeneratePress loads in 624ms. 

Platform 3: Using PageSpeed Insights

1. Rishi: 

1. Rishi’s Speed – Via Mobile 

2. Rishi’s Speed – Via Desktop 

2. Astra:

1. Astra’s Speed – Via Mobile 

b. Astra’s Speed – Via Desktop 

3. GeneratePress: 

1. GeneratePress’s Speed – Via Mobile 

2. GeneratePress’s Speed – Via Desktop 

4. Overall comparison between Rishi vs Astra vs GeneratePress using PageSpeed Insights

The Result? 

Now, based on the above stats, even in terms of Speed Index, we can clearly see that Rishi is way ahead of GeneratePress by 1.4s. Likewise, it even outperforms Astra by 0.8s. 

Now, if you have a close look at the Page Speed for each theme as well, Rishi Theme scores 100 PageSpeed for both devices, i.e. Mobile and Desktop, outperforming Astra in both platforms, i.e. 96 Speed Score in mobile, and 92-speed score in desktop. 

Similarly, it even wins against GeneratePress, since GeneratePress has 99 page speed score in mobile. 

The difference brought by Rishi Theme plays a crucial role as it helps to drastically improve your site’s speed performance. 

Which Theme is the Winner? 

As per the above tests conducted on the three-speed testing websites, the Rishi theme is clearly the winner. 

Rishi outperforms both Astra and GeneratePress theme, in key metrics such as, Speed Index, Load Time, LCP, which makes it the best when it comes to being super-fast and ultra-lightweight.  

Have you tried Rishi Theme yet? What is your experience like? Let us know in the comment below.