I’ve been building websites with WordPress since around 2007, and in that time I’ve tried just about every approach to themes you can imagine. Free themes, premium themes, default themes, child themes … the lot.
These days we build every new website at Web:D using whichever default theme WordPress happens to ship with. Currently that’s Twenty Twenty-Five, although I’ve already got my eye on its proposed successor, Ipsum.
Not because we’re particularly fond of how the default theme looks. In fact, what it looks like is almost completely irrelevant.
And that’s rather the point.
We tried everything
In the early days we’d browse the WordPress theme repository looking for something that resembled the design we wanted. The default themes were fast, but fairly limited when it came to customisation. The free alternatives weren’t necessarily much better.
Then there were the premium themes from places like ThemeForest. They often looked fantastic in the demos, but underneath all that polish were enormous amounts of code for features we’d never use. Many came bundled with WPBakery, adding another layer of complexity and, in our experience, some particularly unpleasant security headaches.
Want to do something the theme designer hadn’t anticipated? Create a child theme.
I hated child themes. Still do. In fact, I’ve never met one I couldn’t surgically remove, but that’s an article for another day.
The problem was that we were constantly adapting the website to suit the theme, or writing more code to make the theme do something it wasn’t designed to do. Surely we had this the wrong way round?
Twenty Seventeen changed our approach
When Twenty Seventeen arrived, I decided we’d try something different. Rather than looking for another theme whenever we started a project, we’d stick with the default one and see how far we could push it.
No child themes. Just the parent theme, with any necessary CSS in the Customizer’s Additional CSS field, PHP using hooks, and occasional JavaScript to manipulate the DOM when WordPress didn’t give us another sensible way to achieve something.
It worked. Really well, actually.
I started noticing that I was making the same adjustments to different websites, so I put some of those options into a plugin. I wanted to call it Twenty Seventeen Options, but the WordPress plugin review team wasn’t keen on that name, so Options for Twenty Seventeen it was.
We published it in February 2018, and it turned out quite a few other people wanted the same thing. At its peak it had over 20,000 active installations. It has around 8,000 now, which isn’t bad for a plugin supporting a theme released nearly a decade ago.
That led to our Options for … range of plugins for subsequent classic default themes. We’d found a way of using WordPress’s own foundations without being constrained by their out-of-the-box designs.
Then WordPress released something that made much of our work unnecessary.
And I couldn’t have been happier!
Along came block themes
WordPress 5.9 arrived in January 2022 with Twenty Twenty-Two, the first default block theme, and I knew almost immediately that this was the direction we wanted to go.
With Full Site Editing, you could change the layouts, templates and styling of the website directly within WordPress. Things we’d previously needed our plugins to achieve were becoming native functionality, and the gaps we could still see were steadily being filled.
For us as plugin developers, that was perhaps not such wonderful news. For us as website developers, it was brilliant.
I should make something clear here: the Gutenberg editor that arrived with WordPress 5.0 in 2018 was not the editor we have today. It was clunky, buggy and, frankly, not ready for everything people wanted it to do. I can understand why it left a bad first impression.
But that was eight years ago. Gutenberg and the Site Editor have come an enormous distance since then, and the functionality keeps improving. We’re even seeing the responsive styling controls we’ve wanted for years getting more attention.
The other thing we noticed was speed. Default block themes provide a remarkably lean starting point. No heavyweight page builder to carry around, no massive commercial theme full of things the client will never use.
Just WordPress, doing what WordPress is increasingly good at.
Tommy designs it. I make it work.
Here’s how we build websites now.
Tommy designs the website around what the client wants, and I make the latest default WordPress theme behave accordingly. Sometimes we argue about whether something is possible.
Tommy usually wins.
And, to be fair, he’s generally right. I’ve yet to be handed a design from Tommy, Richard Clemson or Mark Baker (other local designers I work with) that we couldn’t implement using whichever default theme we were working with at the time. Sometimes it takes a bit of lateral thinking, some creative CSS or a little JavaScript, but we get there.
The amount of custom CSS we need has actually been decreasing as the editor improves. Custom PHP and JavaScript are more often needed for something a client wants the website to do, rather than for how it looks.
The important distinction is that we don’t use the default theme as a design. We use it as a foundation. We build the design on top of WordPress’s native tools, rather than squeezing it into somebody else’s pre-built template.
And despite what you might imagine, that doesn’t make the website difficult for the client to edit. We deliberately implement our designs in a block-friendly way, so the editing experience makes sense. Clients moving from older editors sometimes need a little help at first, but they soon get the hang of it.
Same website. Much faster.
We’re currently rebuilding Buzspoke, retaining the existing design, which wasn’t ours. The original uses a child theme of Hello Elementor and Elementor itself. The block-based development version looks the same, but renders considerably faster in our testing.
We did something similar for Albumen Publishing. Its previous website used the Porto theme, a child theme and WPBakery. We rebuilt it with blocks while retaining the design so closely that the client said he could only tell he was looking at the new version because it was so much faster!
I love that.
It’s not that I think an extra second or two will automatically send every visitor running for the hills. But an almost-instant website feels good to use. It feels properly made. And that reflects well on both the client and the people who built it.
Of course, merely installing a default theme won’t magically make every website fast. Hosting, images, plugins and the way the site is built still matter. But removing layers of unnecessary code is a very good place to start.
But isn’t the theme free?
Yes. So what?
Clients aren’t paying us for the licence to Twenty Twenty-Five. They’re paying for Tommy’s ability to design something that meets their needs and my ability to make it work. They’re paying for a website that looks good, performs well and does what it’s supposed to do.
We’ve never had a client complain that we were using the free default theme. In fact, I can’t remember anybody even asking what theme we use. We’re open about it from the outset and explain why we work this way.
We don’t automatically replace themes on existing websites whenever WordPress releases another one, either. That would be pointless. Core default themes continue to be maintained, and I’ve even contributed fixes to them myself over the years. The latest theme is for new projects; an existing website doesn’t need to be rebuilt for the sake of a new name.
Enter Ipsum
In September 2026, WordPress announced Ipsum, a proposed new default theme for WordPress 7.2. It’s described as an intentionally minimal canvas for making your own website.
More interestingly, WordPress is moving away from naming default themes after years. Rather than producing a Twenty Something every year (a schedule it was already struggling to maintain), future default themes will have their own names and appear when the design calls for one, not when the calendar says it’s time.
To me, that makes perfect sense.
Why keep producing a new ready-made design every year when the editor increasingly lets you create whatever design you want?
I wouldn’t say the announcement has me dancing around the office. But it is rather nice to be quietly confident that the direction we’ve been heading in for years makes sense.
I should point out that Ipsum is still a proposal at the time of writing, and WordPress 7.2 isn’t due until December. We’ll be trying it as soon as there’s a version ready to test, though. That’s another advantage of getting involved early: we can report issues and help make the thing better before it reaches everyone else.
So, is the theme actually dead?
Obviously, WordPress still needs a theme today. Twenty Twenty-Five is a theme. Ipsum is a theme. I’m not claiming the underlying system has disappeared.
What I think is dead is the old idea that you choose a theme because it looks like the website you want to build.
For us that idea has been fading since Twenty Seventeen, and the moment I tried the first block theme I knew it was on borrowed time.
Does that mean everyone using Elementor, a classic theme or a commercial theme is doing it wrong? I’m not going to tell them how to run their businesses. If they’ve been doing something for years, their clients are happy and they enjoy working that way, good for them.
Personally, I wouldn’t go back. And if everybody did things our way, we’d lose one of the things that makes Web:D different!
My prediction is that WordPress will eventually take the next logical step and become themeless. The editor will handle the design and templates, and there simply won’t be a reason to install a theme at all.
I might be wrong. It’s happened before.
But if that day comes, we won’t need to change the way we build websites. We’ll just stop choosing a default theme at the start.
And that’ll suit me perfectly.
Leave a Reply