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What is a Starter Theme in WordPress?
A starter theme in WordPress is a basic, pre-designed template that provides a foundation for building custom WordPress themes. It includes essential files and code structures, such as HTML, CSS, and PHP, to help developers kick-start their theme development process.
Starter themes are designed to save time and effort by offering a clean, well-organized codebase. Developers can then customize and extend to create unique, tailored WordPress themes for their projects.
By using a starter theme, developers can avoid starting from scratch and benefit from a solid starting point that adheres to WordPress coding standards, best practices, and compatibility requirements.
Overall, a starter theme simplifies the WordPress theme development process, making it easier for developers to create, customize, and launch high-quality WordPress themes efficiently and effectively.
Technobyte was built on a custom theme using a starter theme!
6 Most Popular WordPress Starter Themes for developers to use in 2024
The following starter themes of WordPress are highly recommended if you are tailoring a website suited to your own needs. A good developer should always have alternatives. Selecting the starter theme by accepting their pros and cons is essential when developing your custom theme.
1. Underscores by Automattic
Developed by Automattic, Underscores offers a minimalistic, clean foundation for building custom WordPress themes, adhering to WordPress coding standards and best practices.
Pros:
- Clean and Minimalistic: Provides a basic, clean, and semantic HTML5 markup as a foundation for building custom WordPress themes.
- Flexible and Customizable: Allows developers to add or remove features as needed, providing flexibility and control over the theme development process.
- Well-supported: Developed and maintained by Automattic, ensuring regular updates, compatibility with the latest WordPress versions, and a helpful community.
Cons:
- Basic Features: Lacks built-in styling, layouts, and functionalities, requiring developers to add additional code or integrate libraries to achieve desired designs and features.
- Steep Learning Curve: May require familiarity with WordPress theme development, PHP, and WordPress coding standards to effectively use and customize the starter theme.
You can download Underscores theme here.
Ease of Use Rating: 4/5
2. Sage
Sage provides a modern WordPress starter theme with a robust development stack, including Gulp, Browsersync, SCSS, and Webpack, to streamline theme development and enhance workflow efficiency.
Pros:
- Modern Development Stack: Offers a robust development stack with Gulp for task automation, Browsersync for live-reloading, and modern development practices like SCSS, ES6, and Webpack.
- Responsive and Mobile-friendly: Provides responsive design and mobile-first approach, ensuring compatibility and optimal performance across various devices and screen sizes.
- Extensible and Scalable: Allows developers to easily extend and customize the theme using built-in hooks, filters, and customizable components.
Cons:
- Complex Setup: Requires setup and configuration of various development tools, dependencies, and environment settings, which may be challenging for beginners or less experienced developers.
- Learning Curve: Requires familiarity with modern web development tools, practices, and workflows, which may require time and effort to learn and master.
You can download Sage starter theme from here.
Ease of Use Rating: 3.5/5
3. Basic Theme by Themify
Themify’s Starter Theme is a beginner-friendly, lightweight WordPress starter theme that offers customizable layouts, built-in features, and responsive design to simplify theme customization and development.
Pros:
- Beginner-friendly: Designed to be easy-to-use and beginner-friendly, allowing developers of all skill levels to create custom WordPress themes with ease.
- Customizable Layouts: Provides customizable layouts, built-in features like Google Fonts integration, custom widgets, and easy-to-use theme options to streamline theme customization and development.
- Responsive Design: Offers a clean and responsive design, ensuring compatibility and optimal viewing experience across various devices and screen sizes.
Cons:
- Limited Features: Lacks advanced features, functionalities, and customization options compared to other starter themes, which may limit flexibility and customization possibilities for complex projects.
- Dependency on Themify Framework: Requires familiarity and dependency on Themify’s framework and ecosystem, which may limit compatibility and integration with other WordPress themes, plugins, and tools.
You can download the basic theme by themify here.
Ease of Use Rating: 4.5/5
4. Bones
Bones is a mobile-first, responsive WordPress starter theme that offers clean, SEO-friendly markup, a flexible foundation for customization, and compatibility with popular libraries and tools for building modern WordPress themes.
Pros:
- Mobile-first and Responsive: Offers a mobile-first approach and responsive design, ensuring optimal performance and compatibility across various devices and screen sizes.
- Clean and SEO-friendly Markup: Provides clean, semantic, and SEO-friendly markup, ensuring accessibility, usability, and search engine optimization best practices.
- Flexible and Customizable: Allows developers to easily extend, customize, and integrate additional libraries, plugins, and tools to achieve desired designs and functionalities.
Cons:
- Basic Features: Lacks built-in styling, layouts, and advanced functionalities, requiring developers to add additional code or integrate libraries to achieve desired designs and features.
- Limited Community Support: May have limited community support, resources, and documentation compared to other popular starter themes, which may make troubleshooting and problem-solving challenging.
You can download bones by themble over here.
Ease of Use Rating: 3.5/5
5. Understrap
Combining Underscores with Bootstrap, Understrap offers a flexible and customizable foundation for building responsive WordPress themes, leveraging the power and features of both frameworks for modern web development.
Pros:
- Bootstrap Integration: Combines the popular Underscores starter theme with the Bootstrap framework, providing a modern, flexible, and customizable foundation for building responsive WordPress themes.
- Extensible and Scalable: Allows developers to easily extend, customize, and integrate additional Bootstrap components, libraries, and tools to achieve desired designs and functionalities.
- Community and Documentation: Benefits from the strong community support, resources, and documentation of both Underscores and Bootstrap, making it easier for developers to learn, troubleshoot, and problem-solve.
Cons:
- Complexity: Combining Underscores and Bootstrap may introduce additional complexity and learning curve, requiring developers to be familiar with both frameworks, their integration, and best practices.
- Performance Concerns: Bootstrap may introduce additional CSS and JavaScript overhead, potentially affecting page load times and performance if not optimized and managed properly.
You can download Understrap from their official website over here.
Ease of Use Rating: 3/5
6. WP Rig
WP Rig is a modern WordPress starter theme and build process bundled into one package, focusing on optimized performance, accessibility-ready markup, and modern development practices to create fast, secure, and high-quality WordPress themes.
Pros:
- Modern Development Practices: Offers a modern and flexible WordPress starter theme and build process bundled into one package, including a progressive web app (PWA) boilerplate, optimized performance, accessibility-ready markup, and modern development tools like SCSS, ES6, and Webpack.
- Performance Optimized: Focuses on performance optimization, including code splitting, lazy loading, and asset optimization, to ensure fast, secure, and efficient WordPress themes.
- Accessibility and Best Practices: Includes accessibility-ready markup, best practices, and standards to ensure inclusive, accessible, and high-quality WordPress themes.
Cons:
- Complex Setup and Configuration: Requires setup and configuration of various development tools, dependencies, and environment settings. This may be challenging for beginners or less experienced developers.
- Learning Curve: Requires familiarity with modern web development tools, practices, workflows, and WordPress coding standards. This may require time and effort to learn, understand, and master.
You can download WP Rig from their official website over here.
Ease of Use Rating: 2.5/5
Moving Forward…
For the purposes of this guide we will be using Underscores. It is developed by Automattic, so that instantly makes it highly recommendable. But other options are not too bad. We will explore how to begin using the Underscores theme.
If you stumbled here without setting up your WordPress Web Development Environment, make sure to follow the instructions in our guide over here for Windows and for Mac.
