Some WordPress themes pick up sites slowly, some suddenly start appearing everywhere. Themetix counts the sites behind each theme on every collection refresh, which makes that shift visible: the themes below are the ones that added the most sites between May and September 2023.
The ranking uses relative growth among themes already installed on at least 500 sites, so a theme cannot win merely by going from 3 sites to 30. Default themes bundled with WordPress are left out of the list and discussed at the end, because they grow simply because new WordPress installations arrive with them.
| # | Theme | May 2023 | September 2023 | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OceanWP | 685 | 1 755 | +156% |
| 2 | Astra | 3 574 | 8 212 | +130% |
| 3 | GeneratePress | 4 782 | 7 655 | +60% |
| 4 | Soledad | 617 | 916 | +48% |
| 5 | Publisher | 539 | 781 | +45% |
| 6 | Beaver Builder Theme | 2 034 | 2 876 | +41% |
| 7 | Uncode | 753 | 1 044 | +39% |
| 8 | Themify Ultra | 817 | 1 004 | +23% |
| 9 | Flatsome | 4 842 | 5 943 | +23% |
| 10 | Storefront | 2 080 | 2 428 | +17% |
What the leaders have in common
Astra added 4 638 sites in four months — the largest absolute gain of any theme in the period. It is built to work with page builders without carrying their weight, and that is exactly what a large share of new sites seems to want.
OceanWP grew fastest in relative terms, more than doubling. It is a free multipurpose theme with a large library of starter sites, and it benefits from the same builder-friendly positioning.
GeneratePress and Flatsome are different cases: one is a lightweight base theme, the other a complete e-commerce theme. Both grew steadily rather than spectacularly, which usually means agencies adopting them in numbers rather than a single large host switching its default.
Soledad, Publisher and Uncode are magazine and blog themes. Their growth is smaller in absolute numbers but consistent — the kind of movement you see when a niche publication network standardises on one theme.
About the default themes
Twenty Twenty and Twenty Seventeen also grew fast in this period — Twenty Twenty more than doubled. This is not a sign that people choose them: every new WordPress installation arrives with a default theme already active, so those themes grow whenever WordPress itself grows. They are worth tracking as a baseline, not as a recommendation.
How this is measured
Every number is a count of live websites where the theme was detected, not a download count and not a figure supplied by a theme shop. A site running a child theme is counted under the child’s own name, which is why child themes appear separately in the catalogue.
To see where any of these themes stand today, open its page in the theme ranking — each one carries a monthly chart and a list of real sites using it.