When it comes to WordPress themes, there are five themes that are in a league of their own if you want a successful blog with high traffic. To identify the best WordPress themes for bloggers, I focussed on two key measurements. The first was recommendations. How many high-traffic blogs use each theme and which do popular bloggers recommend for their audience to use?
The second was page speed. All five of the top themes consistently produce fast page loading times below 1s (according to Pingdom). Out of hundreds of themes tested for page speed, Astra, GeneratePress and Genesis consistently make it into the top 10 fastest themes.
If you are a new blogger and choose one of the themes below, I highly recommend hiring an expert to help switch your theme and complete the set-up. Installing and setting up the theme to look just right for a new blogger can be a big time sink and your time is best spent writing new posts rather than spending your time fixing issues you might come up against.
For an existing blogger, the risk that you cause something to break on your site is too high to leave it to chance. The last thing you want to do is lose your hard-earned Google rankings and traffic because something broke on your website because of a theme change. An expert will know what they’re doing and will typically use a testing or staging environment to make sure that everything works before making the site live.
The Top 5 WordPress Themes For Bloggers
Astra
Astra is a fast, lightweight and highly customisable WordPress theme that offers both Free and Premium versions. This theme is used on almost 2.5 million websites.
Genesis
Genesis is a powerful theme for WordPress that offers sleek, professional designs in a complete turnkey solution.
GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a lightweight WordPress theme that focuses on speed, stability, and accessibility. Since its launch, it has been downloaded more than 4 million times and offers both Free and Premium versions.
Kadence
Kadence gives new bloggers the ability to quickly launch with a range of starter templates, and build new pages with drop-in-ready sections from the design library.
Trellis
Trellis is already live on over 1,000 sites, 77% of publishers running Trellis are passing Page Experience on mobile, and that number increases every day.
Whether you change your theme yourself or have an expert do it here are some things you will need to check after the theme has been successfully swapped.
- Make sure your Google Analytics code is still active on your page and posts. This is a regular problem, especially if the Google Analytics code is embedded in the Previous theme’s header or footer. This means that when the theme was removed the Google Analytics code was removed with it.
- Check your site across devices and browsers. You should start with some of your most visited posts and work your way through the category pages, about page and contact page.
- Make sure your ads are showing up correctly. If you are running ads you will want to make sure that any pages that they lead back to are still there and continue to be optimised for search terms.
Your theme is the foundation of your blog and you want to make sure that you are using one that is fast and clean. With that being said the five themes mentioned above are not the only high-quality themes for bloggers out there,
