The collection was refreshed on 3 September 2023. Every domain was re-checked, the theme and plugin counts were rebuilt from scratch, and the rankings moved accordingly. Here is what changed.
The headline
Across the 2 000 most used themes, the catalogue now counts 1 169 782 installations — down 0.9% from August. That is the usual pattern for a refresh: when every domain is re-checked, a slice of sites turns out to be offline, redirected, or no longer running the theme we recorded, and the total steps down slightly.
Who moved up
| Theme | August | September | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Astra | 5 849 | 8 212 | +2 363 |
| Divi | 43 329 | 45 357 | +2 028 |
| GeneratePress | 6 169 | 7 655 | +1 486 |
| Hello Elementor | 898 | 1 683 | +785 |
| Flatsome | 5 330 | 5 943 | +613 |
Who moved down
| Theme | August | September | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genesis | 47 223 | 45 302 | −1 921 |
| Sahifa | 9 685 | 8 614 | −1 071 |
| Twenty Twelve | 30 475 | 29 575 | −900 |
| Twenty Fourteen | 20 122 | 19 294 | −828 |
What it tells us
Astra added more than two thousand sites in a single month, and Divi added slightly fewer on a base eight times larger. Both are themes built to work with a page builder, and both keep pulling away from the pack.
On the other side the movement is almost entirely among themes from the previous decade. Genesis, Sahifa and the Twenty-something defaults lost sites in this refresh and in every refresh before it. That is not a sudden collapse — it is the slow clearing of older installations as sites get rebuilt or abandoned.
The full picture for the period is in the 2023 growth ranking, and any single theme can be checked on its page in the theme ranking.