There is no shortage of high end themes available but as much as you want to consider your sites look and graphics you need to take another thing into consideration and that is how fast the theme loads for your visitors and maybe as importantly, search engine robots. Not too long ago google launched a new feature that it called “google instant” which offers real time search results based on what visitors type and allows them to see the results on the fly, one of the sub-features of google instant is that it also showed website previews for all the sites listed in the search results without having to actually click through towards the website. Many speculated that this new feature is what caused google to release a statement telling webmasters that from now on how fast a website or page loads will be factored into one of google’s many ranking factors.
So what does that mean for you? Very simply it means that if you have a slow loading site, caused by something such as oh let’s say a bloated and sloppily coded wordpress theme, that it could negatively affect your rankings in the search results. Another factor to consider is of course your visitors, one thing Ive noticed among many webmasters is that they assume everyone has a broadband or high speed connection. While there have been great advancements in the past decade for bandwidth, many would be surprised just how many dialup and 128k ISDN/DSL lines are still out there and the last thing anyone wants is to wait 30 seconds for a page to load when all the other sites around you load much faster. In fact I saw an interesting case study that showed slow loading ecommerce sites suffered a shopping cart abandonment rate that was 28% higher than competing ecommerce sites with faster loading times so a bloated theme can not only waste time, but make you lose out on new/repeat customers as well.