Top 10 WordPress Themes Compared - 2023

Last modified: May 28, 2023

It’s been a heck of a year, lots of things have been going on within the WordPress world. It’s time to look back and check out our top WordPress themes and see what we can learn about them.

It was not very long ago that the free “default WordPress themes” were in the top 10 or 20 themes. When we say “default WordPress themes” we are referring to the “Twenty” series. There was the “Twenty Twelve” theme (ranked #28) that was very popular back in the day and was in the top 10 for quite a while. Nowadays the Twenty Seventeen theme (ranked #20) is a bit more popular than the Twenty Sixteen (ranked #22) which are all ranked in the top 50 WordPress themes.

However, this year there are no free themes ranked in the top 10 list. This is the break down:

It was a close competition with Genesis but Divi came out on top. No surprise there. Divi has been the #1 theme for a very long time now and with good reason. Elegant Themes has been working very hard the past year and clearly it paid off. Divi is the most popular multipurpose WordPress theme out there. One of the reasons that Divi is so popular is the fact that you can use it to build an enormous variety of websites. Divi is one of those themes that you can tell they thought about every scenario. Divi users get a totally new design sent to them for free EVERY SINGLE WEEK!

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Divi is the Most Popular Wordpress Theme

Another reason for the huge and rising popularity of Divi is the Divi builder. The Divi builder gives all the other WordPress page builders a run for their money.

The Rest

The rest of the top 10 weren’t too much of a shock. It was interesting to see that Avada was only ranked #4 though. As the theme that uses the selling phrase “#1 selling theme”, it’s interesting that it’s not #1 but not even #1 on Themeforest (among themes that were scanned by us). Newspaper passed Avada and moved into third place.

Themeforest is in the Lead

Aside from Divi & Genesis, #8 – #10 are all Themeforest themes. It looks like Themeforest is still considered to be the top go-to WordPress theme vendor.

Genesis - The Top Wordpress Framework

You can find lots of WordPress themes that are “powered by Genesis”. Unlike straight forward premium WordPress themes, Genesis gives you the framework to build from the ground up. It’s very interesting that 9 of the top 10 are regular premium themes but the second most popular theme is a framework. That shows us that we are headed in a really interesting direction.

Final Thoughts

Looking at the top 10 themes (the page is actually the top 50 themes) can tell you a lot about how most people build their WordPress sites and what the industry is going to look like in the future. Do you have an analysis of your own?

Recap: