WordPress Starter Theme Round Up 2026
Looking for needles in a world full of haystacks
I had the opportunity to build a WordPress theme from the ground up recently, which was really exciting, and also very frustrating. The last theme I built was in 2025, and given the timeline I went with the old trusty _s (aka underscores), which I’ve used for years, and I was able to make a good, useable theme with. But as of Sept. 5th, 2025 _s is no longer being actively supported, with the attention now focused on block themes.
With that in mind, I did a fresh search for WP starter themes and began picking through the Reddit and blog posts to find what people are using these days, and here’s what my experience was trying to use these themes.
Barebones
Barebones was the first theme that I looked it, because of its intense minimalism packaged with a lot of great starter plugins that I use when developing custom themes, including:
Yoast SEO
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
Regenerate Thumbnails
Classic Editor
Simple History
But a quick check on the GitHub repo showed that it hadn’t been updated in a year, which was a yellow flag for me ⚠️, so I passed on it, not wanting to get stuck in a quagmire of NPM commands trying get deprecated and abandoned scripts to work via command line.
air-light
I had a great feeling about air-light. Everything about the notes on its GitHub page made me thing that this was a well-maintained theme with a full suite of backend tools that would help me develop more quickly. Sadly, I was wrong. The quagmire that I avoided with Barebones was exactly where I ended up with air-light.
Its instructions are good, but insufficient, and even following them to the letter, I was unable to get the theme up and running in a timely fashion. There were a number of non-documented errors and the level of customization within the theme docs was too high, forcing me to troubleshoot consistently, and use Gemini to solve obscure NPM errors.
air-light had potential, but the updates required for every new project were too time consuming, and I wasn’t interested in using their bespoke command line function.
Flynt
Flynt, on the other hand, worked right out of the box. I was very happy with everything about the Flynt setup. It was well documented, and it worked almost exactly as expected. Getting composer installed on my Mac turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but thankfully with Gemini’s help I was able to get it installed. But once I got to the WordPress dashboard and the page creation process, I was met with some very unfamiliar dashboards.
The Flynt page creation process is very modular, but also very customized, and looks nothing like the typical WordPress backend interface that my clients were expecting, which was a real negative, since the DX for Flynt was exceptional. But, give my existing familiarity with the traditional WordPress backend, both classic and Gutenberg, and given that I wanted to stay as close to WordPress block development as I could, I made the hard choice to find something else.
Blockbase
At this point I just gave up, deciding that my way of coding WordPress themes was in the past, and that I needed to modernise. With that in mind I gave in and tried the Blockbase theme, which is WordPress’ own basic block building theme. I’d avoided these in the past because I didn’t want to deal with the theme.json learning curve, and didn’t feel like learning full site editing, because it’s the opposite of a developer experience for me. It doesn’t feel like coding.
Nonetheless, defeated by all my previous attempts I downloaded Blockbase and I gave it a shot, following the directions in its README file, and it cratered. I tried the classic npm install, npm run build, and npm start, but nothing happened, I just got another string of errors from the command line, so I moved on from Blockbase.
_tw
I’m not sure what list finally led me to _tw, but I’m grateful for it, wherever it is. _tw is a starter theme based on Automattic’s _s (underscores), but updated for use with Tailwind CSS. As with the previous themes I walked through the traditional set up steps and…it just worked! Everything was in place working as expected, and I was able to just start developing, which was absolute bliss after the frustration of dead end after dead end that I’d encountered previously.
_tw still has a few wrinkles that I haven’t explored to my content yet, but as far as a starter theme goes, I’m very happy with it, and grateful that _s lives on, and I have a new starter theme that I can depend on (for the next year or so 😂).
My biggest takeaway is that I wish I’d given up sooner
The state of WP starter themes hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years in the sense that there are a few out there that do close to what I want and quite a few out there that do nothing close to what I want. Documentation is still very poor; it’s incomplete and outright wrong, which leads to a very frustrating experience.
Which is the biggest lesson: quit sooner. I spent too much time trying to make broken themes work for me, which is reflective of my own inner belief that I’m not smart enough to make them work, that I’m not a good enough developer to understand the way these themes were built. The truth is that I’m smart enough and experienced enough to know a sour theme when I test one, and should trust myself more when I feel like I should give up.