Your website is like a physical store. You want it to look its best, so people feel welcome when they walk in. In a store, you achieve this by decorating and creating a good store layout. On WordPress, that role is often handled by your theme. It manages your site’s design and how content is displayed. The right one makes your site inviting and easy to move around. The wrong one clutters the aisles, slows down the checkout, and drives customers out the door.

Not every theme is the right fit. Some are outdated, stuck in another era. Others are bloated, packed with features you never use. Both will hold your site back, and it shows up most clearly in three areas: performance, accessibility, and responsiveness.

Performance: When extra baggage slows you down

A bloated theme can drag down your site’s performance by loading too many extras. Extra features, plugins, effects, animations, and heavy scripts all pile on. Even if you do not use them, they still load every time someone visits. Loading all the extras slows down your site significantly. 

It’s like forcing every customer in your store to walk through three cluttered hallways before they reach the counter. Visitors lose patience, search engines notice, and your site misses opportunities.

Want to know what else could be slowing down your site? Check out our blog post about what could be slowing down your site.

Accessibility: When your site shuts people out

Accessibility is about making sure everyone can use your site. Outdated themes often fail here because they don’t follow modern standards. They may use poor color contrast, skip alt text, or rely on the wrong heading structure. For someone relying on a screen reader, that makes your site confusing and difficult to navigate.

Bloated themes can cause issues as well. All those flashy effects and custom features can overwhelm or break assistive technology. Keyboard users may get trapped in menus. People with motion sensitivity may struggle with constant animations. Screen readers may stumble over non-standard code. Imagine a store with narrow doorways and flashing neon lights. Some visitors simply cannot get in.

Want to dig deeper? Read our post on why accessibility is good for people and business.

Responsiveness: When your site won’t fit the screen

Most people visit websites on their phones. If your theme was built for desktop first, the mobile version often feels like a whole store squeezed into a broom closet. Outdated themes don’t always adjust to different screen sizes. Text shrinks, buttons overlap, and images shift around the page. This negatively impacts user experience.

Bloated themes make this worse by cramming too many elements into too little space. Instead of guiding visitors, your site becomes a maze.

Check with Google Lighthouse

If you’re not sure if your theme is holding you back? Run a quick check with Google Lighthouse. It’ll check your site speed, accessibility, SEO, and more. It gives you a report that shows how your site scores on every aspect. Not only that, but it highlights what’s slowing you down and where you can improve.

How to fix it

If your theme is the problem, you have options. Switching to a lightweight, modern theme is often the cleanest fix. It won’t erase your content, but it will change how that content is displayed.

Before switching, always check if your plugins are compatible with the new theme. Back up your site, and if possible, test the switch on a staging site first. After switching, you’ll need to customize your design again. Reapply your logo, brand colors, widgets, and any custom code. Review your layouts, images, and shortcodes to make sure nothing is broken.

If switching isn’t an option right now, you can still trim the bloat. Disable unused features, remove extra scripts, optimize your images, and adjust colors for better contrast. Even small changes can help your site run faster and be more accessible.

Find your weak spots

Your theme should make your site shine, not weigh it down. If your Lighthouse scores are low, or your pages feel sluggish, your theme might be the real culprit. Outdated and bloated themes hold you back. Run the check, find the weak spots, and give your site the upgrade it deserves.