The State of WordPress Themes — An Analysis of 14,800 WordPress.org Themes (June 2026)

Of nearly 15,000 themes in the WordPress.org directory, only five non-default block themes have crossed 100,000 active installs. The top 20 themes account for 61.7% of all active installs across the entire ecosystem. Roughly 6,500 themes have not received an update in two or more years. This is what the WordPress theme ecosystem looks like up close in June 2026 — denser, more concentrated, and more divided over the future of theme architecture than the public popularity charts suggest.

Table of Contents

• The ecosystem in numbers
• The top 20 themes hold 62% of every active install
• The long tail is unusually long
• Same ecosystem, two very different rankings
• The block theme paradox
• Last year’s most-installed new themes
• The retention story: downloads vs installs
• Best- and worst-rated themes
• The abandoned half of the directory
• Authorship concentration
• What this says about the WordPress theme ecosystem in 2026
• A note on the data

We pulled the full directory through the WordPress.org API, captured every theme’s metadata, and computed the kinds of cross-cutting statistics that the directory itself doesn’t surface. The full live snapshot lives at the stats page — what follows is the editorial read of the numbers, and the picture they paint of where WordPress themes are in 2026.

The ecosystem in numbers

• 14,822 themes currently exist in the WordPress.org repository (many dormant — see the abandonment section).
• 3,013 distinct authors have published at least one theme.
• 754.7 million downloads across the directory’s history.
• 12.2 million active WordPress installs attributed to those themes (a count WordPress bucketizes for privacy — see notes at the end).
• Average rating across all rated themes is 4.5 stars, with the rating-eligible pool concentrated in the upper end of the scale.
• Average active installs per theme: 820 with bundled themes included, 598 without.

Those last two numbers compress the entire story of theme economics. The mean per-theme audience size on WordPress.org isn’t a thriving product — it’s a small community website, an MVP, a side project. Most themes never reach an audience that justifies the work that went into them.

The top 20 themes hold 62% of every active install

WordPress’s theme ranking is a textbook power-law distribution. We computed how concentrated installs really are:

• The top 10 themes account for 49.3% of all active installs.
• The top 20: 61.7%.
• The top 50: 72.8%.
• The top 100: 77%.

Or — said the other way — the 14,722 themes outside the top 100 collectively account for less than a quarter of WordPress’s active theme install base. The directory has a long head and an even longer tail.

Inside that head, the most-installed themes share the WordPress.org bucket label of “1M+ active installs”: Twenty Twenty-Five, Hello Elementor, and Astra. But the way each of them got to a million is wildly different: Twenty Twenty-Five is the bundled default theme that ships activated with every new WordPress install; Hello Elementor’s growth is downstream of the Elementor page builder’s distribution; Astra is the only one of the three that grew primarily through users choosing it on its own merits. (We dug into the mechanics of the ranking algorithm itself in a separate post.)

The long tail is unusually long

A finer-grained look at the distribution shows just how wide the gap between the top of the directory and everything else is:

Active installs	Number of themes
300,000+	10
100,000–299,999	10
30,000–99,999	25
10,000–29,999	38
3,000–9,999	143
1,000–2,999	468
300–999	1,763
100–299	4,105
10–99	7,305
0 active installs	955

Just under 4,200 themes sit in the 100–299 install bucket — the largest single band of the entire directory. These are the themes that found a handful of users, didn’t take off, and never grew. Combined with the ~7,300 themes in the 10–99 range, this is where most theme work in the WordPress community actually lives. Highly visible themes are statistical exceptions.

Same ecosystem, two very different rankings

If you’ve been reading along, “popular” on WordPress.org may now feel less like a market signal and more like an algorithmic artefact. So what happens when we replace WordPress’s own ranking with a measurement of which themes are actually live on the web? BuiltWith continuously crawls a large representative sample of public websites and detects which WordPress theme each one is running. Their list of the most-used WordPress themes worldwide is a wholly independent view of the same market. Lined up side-by-side, the rankings barely overlap:

#	WordPress.org popular	Real-world (BuiltWith)
1	Twenty Twenty-Five (default)	Hello Elementor — 3.9M sites
2	Hello Elementor	Astra — 3.3M sites
3	Astra	Divi — 2.3M sites (premium · not on .org)
4	Twenty Twenty-Four (default)	Elegant Themes — 1.9M (premium · not on .org)
5	Kadence	Flatsome — 894K (premium · not on .org)
6	Twenty Twenty-Three (default)	GeneratePress — 675K
7	Hello Biz	Avada — 629K (premium · not on .org)
8	Extendable	OceanWP — 520K
9	OceanWP	Kadence — 485K
10	Blocksy	Blocksy — 483K

Four of the world’s ten most-used WordPress themes aren’t on WordPress.org at all — Divi, Elegant Themes, Flatsome, and Avada are commercially distributed themes that you cannot install from the official directory. They are nonetheless running on roughly six million live websites combined. The WordPress.org ranking is, by construction, a ranking of free themes hosted on .org, and tells you very little about what’s actually deployed on the wider web.

Three default WordPress themes also drop out entirely the moment you measure adoption rather than installs: Twenty Twenty-Five, Twenty Twenty-Four, and Twenty Twenty-Three all appear in WordPress.org’s top six but in none of the BuiltWith top ten. A million sites running a default theme is a million sites that didn’t pick a theme. A live comparison view (with delta tags for each entry) lives on the compare view.

The block theme paradox

One of the most-asked questions in WordPress 2026 is whether block themes — the architecture WordPress’s core team has championed since the Full Site Editing project began in late 2021 — have actually been adopted. The directory gives a remarkably clear answer: theme authors moved. Users didn’t.

If you look at which themes are getting published on WordPress.org, the shift is unambiguous:

Year added	Themes published	% block themes
2019	812	0.1%
2020	632	0.6%
2021	1,106	2.4%
2022	1,282	12.2%
2023	1,347	25.4%
2024	1,710	33.4%
2025	1,675	34.3%
2026 (partial)	685	44.2%

In 2019, essentially no themes published on .org were block themes. In 2026, almost half of new submissions are. That’s a four-year structural shift in what theme developers are building.

Now look at which themes users actually install. Block themes — the entire category — account for only 8.3% of WordPress’s non-default theme install base. Classic themes hold 91.7%. And inside the block-theme category itself, the install counts are punishingly modest:

Active installs	Block themes (excl. defaults)
1,000,000+	0
100,000–999,999	1 (Extendable, 200K)
10,000–99,999	4
1,000–9,999	71
Fewer than 1,000	1,860

Five non-default block themes have crossed 100,000 active installs. Five. The current leaders: Extendable by Extendify (200K+), YITH Wonder (40K+), Bluehost Blueprint (40K+, only just added in 2025), Variations by Tyler Moore (20K+), and Raft by Themeisle (10K+). Compare that to the classic side: Astra at 1M+, OceanWP at 500K+, Kadence at 500K+, GeneratePress at 500K+, Blocksy at 300K+, Hello Elementor at 1M+. The gap between the biggest non-default block theme and the biggest non-default classic theme is roughly 5×.

The most-installed block themes are also reviewed harshly.

The five worst-rated themes in the directory (filtered to themes with at least 20 reviews) are all bundled block defaults:

• Twenty Twenty-Two (3.2★, 70 ratings)
• Twenty Twenty-Three (3.4★, 62 ratings)
• Twenty Nineteen (3.7★, 63 ratings)
• Alexandria (3.7★)
• Twenty Twenty-Four (3.8★)

Two of the four bundled block themes since Full Site Editing launched have ratings under 3.5, despite hundreds of thousands of active installs each. People install these themes (because they ship with WordPress) and don’t love them.

This isn’t a niche developer opinion either. GeneratePress, one of the most successful classic themes on the directory (500K+ installs, 1,426 reviews at a perfect 5 stars), has publicly explained why they are not betting on full-site editing as their default architecture. Their position, derived from observation of their own users, is that classic themes still serve serious WordPress site-building better than the FSE approach currently does — and the data above suggests they are not alone in concluding that.

The contrast across the two halves of the directory is striking: among new themes being built today, FSE has clearly become the default; but among themes that real users adopt, classic continues to dominate by a factor of 11. Eventually those curves either converge or someone gives up. As of mid-2026, they haven’t.

Last year’s most-installed new themes

For a closer look at the front edge of the directory, here are the themes published in the past 12 months that have already accumulated a meaningful audience. These are the themes that breached the entrance barrier — the two-week eligibility floor, plus enough early adoption to actually register in the install counts.

Theme	Author	Type	Added	Active installs
Bluehost Blueprint	Bluehost	Block	Jul 2025	40,000+
Unibiz	Jegstudio	Block	Oct 2025	5,000+
Hello Commerce	Elementor	Classic	Aug 2025	3,000+
Blogsy	peregrinethemes	Classic	Jan 2026	2,000+
Blogfull	themeansar	Classic	Jul 2025	2,000+
News Mart	Theme Arile	Classic	Mar 2026	1,000+
Blogtimes	themeansar	Classic	Feb 2026	1,000+
Online Courses FSE	ThemeGrill	Block	Jan 2026	1,000+
Newstack	themeansar	Classic	Jan 2026	1,000+
Beiged	Superb	Block	Nov 2025	1,000+

The leader is Bluehost Blueprint, the block theme Bluehost added in July 2025 and which their hosting environment likely surfaces to new customers as a starting point — a distribution moat that produces fast install growth without organic adoption being the cause. Below it, the cluster is mostly blogging and news themes by independent authors (Themeansar appears three times alone), each picking up a few thousand users in their first year.

The split inside this list is roughly 50/50 block vs classic — consistent with the picture of theme authors gradually moving towards block but with no individual block theme yet breaking out at the kind of scale Astra or GeneratePress did a decade ago. Crossing 5,000–10,000 active installs in a year remains a rare event in the WordPress theme world; only a small handful of themes in any given year clear that bar.

The retention story: downloads vs installs

WordPress.org counts downloads and active installs separately, and the ratio between them — sometimes called a theme’s “usage” or “retention” score — reveals which themes are kept after being tried.

Across the whole directory, themes have been downloaded a cumulative 754.7 million times. They have 12.2 million active installs. The ratio is about 1.6% across the board — most theme downloads do not result in a long-lived active install.

For comparison, the same ratio for the top 20 themes is much higher: those themes hold 61.7% of installs against 29.4% of downloads, which is the mathematical signature of themes that people commit to rather than try and abandon. The big themes aren’t just big in raw downloads — they’re big because people stay.

Best- and worst-rated themes

Filtering to themes with at least 20 reviews so that single five-star opinions can’t dominate the list:

Best rated (perfect or near-perfect stars with substantial review counts):

• GeneratePress (1,426 reviews, 5★)
• Blocksy (869 reviews, 5★)
• News Portal (163 reviews, 5★)
• Cenote (113 reviews, 5★)
• Royal Elementor Kit (92 reviews, 5★)

Worst rated (lowest stars among themes with serious review samples):

• Twenty Twenty-Two (3.2★)
• Twenty Twenty-Three (3.4★)
• Twenty Nineteen (3.7★)
• Alexandria (3.7★)
• Twenty Twenty-Four (3.8★)

The shape of the worst-rated list is the headline. WordPress’s bundled defaults are also among its lowest-rated themes by users who actually review them. That isn’t an indictment of the WordPress core team’s craft — these are competent themes — but it is a sign that the bundling-driven adoption model produces installs without producing satisfaction.

The abandoned half of the directory

Nearly half the WordPress.org theme directory has been quietly abandoned by its maintainers:

• 7,948 themes have not received an update in 1+ year.
• 6,448 themes have not been updated in 2+ years — 43.5% of the whole directory.
• 4,279 themes are 5+ years stale.
• 1,879 themes have not been updated in a decade or more.

Most of those themes have no users left. But about 918,720 active WordPress sites are running themes that haven’t been touched in 2+ years — almost a million live websites running unmaintained code that will quietly fall out of compatibility with future WordPress releases.

The most-installed abandoned themes include some of the most famous names in WordPress history:

• Default — the original “Kubrick” theme by WordPress.org, last updated June 14, 2010, 16 years ago, and still installed on 10,000+ sites.
• Mercury by ryansommers (11 years stale, 10K+ installs).
• Blank Canvas by Automattic (5+ years stale, 10K+ installs).
• Hemingway, Lovecraft, and Hitchcock, all by Anders Norén, all last updated on the same day — 2022-12-23 — and each still running on 6,000 to 10,000 sites. He retired three themes together, three years ago.
• Graphene, Understrap, Qi, NewsMag — all between 2 and 5 years dormant.

Block themes have a much lower abandonment rate (15.2% stale 2+ years, vs 47.9% for classic themes), but that’s partly an artifact of age — block themes barely existed before late 2021, so very few of them have had the chance to become abandoned yet. The honest comparison will require another two to three years of data.

Authorship concentration

The top three theme authors by number of themes published: Automattic (261 themes), VW THEMES (213), and wpkoithemes (177). By total active installs across all their themes: Elementor (1.1M), Brainstorm Force / Astra (1M), and Nexcess (524K).

The names that produce a lot of themes and the names that produce a lot of users are mostly different — high-volume authors tend to publish many niche themes, while reach-oriented authors concentrate on a single flagship.

What this says about the WordPress theme ecosystem in 2026

Three concrete observations from the data:

The WordPress theme directory may list nearly 15,000 themes, but the market is far more concentrated than that number suggests. Fewer than 80 themes have surpassed 10,000 active installs, and fewer than 25 have reached 100,000. In reality, most users choose from a relatively small group of established themes, while thousands of others see little adoption.

Block themes are a developer movement, not yet a user movement. Theme authors have substantially shifted to building FSE-compatible themes — 44% of new theme submissions in 2026 — but users continue to adopt classic themes at a roughly 11:1 ratio when you exclude bundled defaults. The biggest non-default block theme has 200K installs. The biggest non-default classic theme has 1M+. The gap is large and isn’t closing rapidly.

Roughly half the directory is, functionally, a museum. Six and a half thousand themes haven’t been updated in two or more years. Almost a million WordPress sites are running that code right now. As WordPress’s core continues to evolve — both PHP compatibility and the editor — the abandoned half of the directory is a long-tail risk to a sizable population of real websites.

A note on the data

The figures above were pulled from WordPress.org and stored locally. WordPress.org rounds publicly-displayed active-install counts to coarse buckets (1,000+, 10,000+, 100,000+, etc.), so the per-theme totals here reflect those buckets rather than exact figures. Live, weekly-refreshed numbers are at the stats page. The daily top-250 popularity ranking and its individual theme pages live on the front page of wp.md.

For broader context on WordPress overall — version distribution, PHP version share — the WordPress core team publishes its own dashboard at wordpress.org/about/stats/.