Revitalizing WordPress Themes: A Call for Creativity and Innovation

Nick Hamze has emphasized the need to make WordPress themes exciting and the web weird again. "WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules," he said. "The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts."

A Lack of Great Themes in the Repository

Hamze believes that there are plenty of good themes in the WordPress Repository, but no great themes that truly break the mold and spark excitement. He argues that the web needs more themes that make people say "Wow!" or "That’s different!" rather than "That’s clean and professional."

The Need for Personality and Risk-Taking

We need more themes that make people say "Wow!" or "That’s different!" rather than "That’s clean and professional." The web needs more personality, more risk-taking, more fun. Great themes should:

• Have a distinct point of view
• Embrace specific aesthetics boldly
• Design for specific use cases
• Break some rules thoughtfully

A Growing Uncertainty About the Future of WordPress Themes

Hamze’s call comes amid growing uncertainty about the future of WordPress themes. While the repository now hosts over 13,000 free themes, recent community discussions have often cast a grim outlook. Some of the discussions/articles published on the fate of themes include:

• Vova Feldman of Freemius highlighted the stagnation in the WordPress theme market: "The WordPress Theme Market is in big trouble! Over the past six years, the annual single-site pricing for themes has shown little to no growth. In fact, the average price has decreased by 9%, dropping from $55.78 in 2019 to $50.75 in 2024."
• Courtney Robertson of GoDaddy emphasized: "Democratizing publishing is for all. WordPress must ensure no one is excluded from creating or consuming content."
• Kevin Geary of Digital Gravy does not support Nick Hamze, stating: "WP ‘themes’ are dead. It’s a dead concept. If you don’t realize this, you’re completely out of touch with how sites are built and managed. It’s especially antithetical to the fundamentals of a block editor….WP needs actual leadership and real improvements to the software. We’d all LOVE a ‘sanitized and professional’ wp-admin right about now. ‘Weird themes,’ not so much."
• Carolina Nymark of Yoast (former team representative for the Themes Team) believes that themes can be art and experimental and still be accessible and high quality. Brian Coords, a WordPress developer, agrees that true creativity often thrives within constraints. Weird for weirdness sake is not art or self-expression. Creating something meaningful that inspires a shared experience between people (regardless of how they navigate the web) should be the ideal.

Accessibility Concerns

Discussions are still going on about accessibility. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising.