1 August 2024
WordPress has been around for two decades and has swiftly become the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).
One of the best parts of WordPress is the ability to customize the look of your site using themes. Among the different types of WordPress themes, block themes are the most recent addition.
Block themes, based on the block editor introduced in WordPress 5.9, have grown to become the future of WordPress.
In this article, we’ll look at the best WordPress block themes available today. But first, let’s discuss what a WordPress block theme is.
A WordPress block theme is a modern type of theme designed to work seamlessly with the block editor, also known as Gutenberg. Unlike traditional themes that rely heavily on custom coding and templates, block themes empower users to build and customize their entire website using a visual, drag-and-drop interface.
This means you can create and modify pages, posts, and even site-wide elements like headers, footers, and sidebars using blocks—a set of pre-designed elements like text, images, buttons, and more.
One of the standout features of WordPress block themes is their support for Full-Site Editing (FSE). This feature allows users to design their website’s layout and content in real time, providing a live preview as changes are made.
Block-based themes also offer reusable blocks and patterns, which help maintain a consistent design across your site and save time during content creation.
The following are some advantages of using a WordPress block theme:
As we’ve seen, WordPress block themes offer several benefits for site design. Let’s look at the best option available.
The first one on our list is GeneratePress, a WordPress block theme with a focus on speed. Its small page size of about 7.5kb allows you to create a lightning-fast, completely customizable website with little effort. You can use the built-in block editor to create pages and templates, or you can install a page builder plugin for more flexibility.
Although the free version of GeneratePress gives all the essential tools you need to build a site. However, upgrading to the premium version offers many benefits to enhance your web development experience.
GeneratePress’s user-friendly WordPress live customizer makes customization a breeze. This tool allows you to set global colors, WooCommerce options, layout options, and fonts with ease. Unlike some block themes that require modifying the theme.json file to add fonts, GeneratePress offers a simpler approach with its font manager. This feature lets you easily upload fonts and apply them to specific areas across your website.
Furthermore, it offers more than 100 professionally designed starter sites to start your business, blog, or ecommerce site easily. Even more, it offers 200 patterns that can be used to build any type of page on your website.
GeneratePress is not just a user-friendly tool for website customization. It’s a useful asset for developers. Its powerful advanced hook system makes creating new functionalities a breeze. The block-based theme builder, which combines GeneratePress with the GenerateBlocks plugin, allows even beginners to design websites without coding. With the ability to design templates featuring static and dynamic blocks, content can be displayed effortlessly.
Learn more in our complete GeneratePress review.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium version costs $59/year.
The Twenty Twenty-Four is the latest default theme from WordPress, designed to fully leverage the capabilities of the block editor (Gutenberg).
This theme represents a significant step forward in WordPress design, offering users a modern, flexible, and highly customizable framework for building websites. With Full-Site Editing (FSE) support, the Twenty Twenty-Four theme allows users to easily customize their site’s layout using intuitive drag-and-drop blocks, including headers, footers, and sidebars.
Furthermore, the theme is packed with pre-designed block patterns, making it simple to create visually appealing and consistent page designs without any coding knowledge. Additionally, it boasts responsive design features, ensuring your site looks great on all devices.
Whether you’re building a personal blog, a business website, or a portfolio, the Twenty Twenty-Four FSE theme provides a versatile and user-friendly solution to help you create a professional and polished online presence.
Since Twenty Twenty-Four is a default WordPress theme, you can use it for free.
Next on our list of the best WordPress block themes is Divi. It is also one of the most popular WordPress themes, with 1+ million active installs.
Its popularity is due to the great features it provides. Divi is the most customizable FSE theme on our list. You can create and design posts and pages in real-time with a front-end visual builder, build custom templates with the Theme Builder, and even set up a global color palette with Divi’s built-in color manager.
Furthermore, Divi offers over 2,000+ premade designs and more than 370 full website packs. These include a number of industries, including business, technology, health, lifestyle, etc. New layouts are added regularly, as are royalty-free pictures, icons, and illustrations.
Even more, it offers over 200+ content elements to build just about any website. Plus, each content element is fully customizable and includes hundreds of design settings.
Divi is compatible with WooCommerce and offers specific WooCommerce modules that make the two a perfect pair. It offers over 25 Woo-specific design elements. With these features, you can easily create stunning product, cart, and checkout pages, allowing you to customize ecommerce sites to fit your preferences perfectly.
Furthermore, it integrates with a wide range of online services and popular WordPress plugins. These include MemberPress for creating a membership site, Rank Math for optimizing your on-page SEO, WPForms for creating advanced forms, etc.
Divi is a premium WordPress theme that costs $89/year or $249 for a one-time payment.
BlockPress is the best free WordPress block theme. It stands apart from the other free themes on this list in that it features animation effects, which allow you to effortlessly build amazing parallax, transform, 3D, hover effects, and more. Additionally, BlockPress allows you to create mega menus, transparent headers, and over a dozen query loop templates to highlight your blog content.
BlockPress is also highly customizable thanks to the pre-built template part options included. These include a transparent header, a cover image hero section, or a colored title and image hero section. Plus, it offers a stunning page template with sticky columns that allow you to highlight the information that is most important to you.
But that’s not all. BlockPress is very lightweight due to its usage of conditional asset loading. This means that it generates all of the necessary assets on the fly, resulting in some of the fastest page load speeds of any theme on this list, with an average page size of only 2kb. With such excellent performance, you won’t even need a separate speed optimization plugin to ensure your website loads quickly.
Finally, BlockPress supports WooCommerce and has optimized all WooCommerce styles so they are three times smaller than the default WooCommerce theme.
BlockPress is a completely 100% free block theme for WordPress.
Neve FSE, as the name suggests, is a WordPress FSE theme that is specially designed for full-site editing. It is a lightweight theme that comes with a number of FSE templates for all of your website’s main pages to help you edit it. They contain templates for single and archive pages, header covers, footer and header variants, and many more.
Aside from the FSE templates, the theme also offers styling options for your website. You may easily create a color and typography combination that fits your website’s unique design.
Additionally, Neve FSE is optimized for performance and has a fully responsive design. This means your website looks great on any device.
Neve FSE is a free WordPress theme that can be downloaded from the official theme repository.
The next theme is Bricksy, a free and lightweight WordPress block theme ideal for bloggers. It comes with complete site editing features, a number of predefined block patterns, and a global style option, making it a great addition to our list.
While all block themes come with default templates, Bricksy also features custom templates for home, about, WooCommerce, team pages, and more. The best part? All of these templates may be easily edited thanks to the user-friendly editor.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium license starts at $69.62/year.
The Prime FSE WordPress theme, available from MotoPress, is a free, fully customizable block theme designed to leverage WordPress’s Full Site Editing (FSE) features.
It offers a range of pre-designed block patterns, including testimonials, calls-to-action, and pricing tables, enhancing both design flexibility and functionality.
Furthermore, the theme includes 52+ pattern designs and five pre-set color schemes and supports a responsive mega menu for advanced navigation. Plus, Prime FSE integrates seamlessly with the Getwid plugin, providing additional block options and an AI writing assistant for content creation.
In addition, the theme is optimized for SEO and performance, making it a great choice for modern websites.
Prime FSE is a free WordPress theme that can be downloaded from the official theme repository.
Inspiro Blocks is a free WordPress block theme optimized for Full Site Editing (FSE). It’s a good option for portfolio sites since it supports video and portfolio integration. This allows users to easily showcase their work and build a professional portfolio website.
The theme has over 20 block patterns to help you easily create beautiful pages. These block patterns are created to work seamlessly with the theme’s unique page templates and are easily customizable according to your needs.
Furthermore, it provides six different color styles to customize the look and feel of your site. The theme also supports WooCommerce, one of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins for effortlessly creating an online store and selling your products or services.
By purchasing Inspiro Blocks Pro, you will get seven color schemes and over 40 custom block patterns that can be loaded with one click.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium license starts at $69/year.
Next on our list is eStroy, a WordPress block theme for blogging. With over ten pre-built templates, you may customize your blog by changing the colors, images, and fonts. You’ll also get access to over 25 block patterns and three starter sites, so you’ll never run out of ideas.
But that’s not all. eStory is also performance-optimized. It has a remarkable 1-second page load time, so you don’t have to worry about bounce rates caused by poor speeds.
As with other FSE themes, templates can be easily edited using the editor. Don’t worry. You aren’t limited to what they provide. With full site editing, you may add or remove any block you want, giving you complete control over the look and feel of your site.
Unlike regular WordPress themes, which require you to make changes using the WordPress customizer, eStory allows you to change any aspect of your site’s design directly from the site editor. This means that you can customize everything at the template level.
The eStory free version gives access to limitless customization options. However, upgrading gives you access to the eStory theme and over 20 other fully responsive themes, each with a unique focus.
A free version is available. The premium version starts at $69/year or $249 for a lifetime.
Blockbase, a simple theme created by Automattic for full-site editing, allows users to build stunning designs using global style options.
With blocks, you can design templates and template parts that can be used as patterns in any area of your site.
Consider it a blank canvas on which you can build anything you want.
BlockBase is a free theme that you can download from WordPress.org.
Blockify is a lightweight and highly customizable WordPress block theme framework designed for creating fast and modern websites.
With features like dark mode, easy customization, and responsive settings, Blockify ensures an optimized user experience across devices. It supports full site editing, allowing you to customize headers, footers, and other elements effortlessly.
The theme is compatible with popular eCommerce plugins, including WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, making it ideal for eCommerce sites.
Blockify also boasts a high page speed score due to its efficient asset-loading framework, enhancing SEO and user engagement.
Overall, Blockify is a great starting point for building your own custom block theme.
A free version is available. The premium version starts at $145/year.
And finally, we have Catch FSE a block WordPress theme designed for full site editing. The theme is ideally suited for all kinds of websites, including online blogs and business sites.
It offers a minimalistic design with customizable global styles, allowing users to choose between light and dark color schemes.
With 15 block patterns and templates, including layouts for posts and pages, users can easily tailor their site’s appearance. The theme is fully responsive, delivering a seamless experience across devices.
Additionally, Catch FSE includes features like featured content sections, customizable headers, and a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, making it a powerful tool for creating unique websites.
Catch FSE is a 100% free WordPress block theme.
WordPress block themes have revolutionized website design, offering unparalleled flexibility and ease of use, especially for those utilizing the Gutenberg editor. These themes allow users to craft visually appealing and functional websites with minimal effort, leveraging full site editing capabilities.
Among the top picks, themes like Divi and GeneratePress stand out for their extensive customization options and responsive design capabilities. Divi stands out with its no-code visual builder and extensive library of pre-designed layouts, making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users. On the other hand, GeneratePress is known for its lightweight structure and speed, which enhances website performance and SEO.
For those looking for a lightweight yet powerful solution, themes like Blockpress provide robust design tools and a seamless user experience, allowing for extensive personalization without compromising speed.
Overall, the landscape of WordPress block themes is rich with options that provide flexibility, ease of use, and a wide array of features to meet the needs of any website owner. Whether you’re building a blog, portfolio, or eCommerce site, there’s a theme that can help you achieve your vision with full-site editing capabilities.
We hope this article has helped you find the best WordPress FSE themes.
For more, check out these other WordPress themes roundups:
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Block themes use the block editor for all aspects of a site, offering more flexibility and customization options without coding. Classic themes, on the other hand, rely on traditional templates and often require more manual customization.
Yes, many block themes support eCommerce features. For example, GeneratePress and Divi integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce for online stores.
Customizing a block theme is typically done through the WordPress Site Editor, where you can add, remove, and rearrange blocks. You can also use global styles to change your site’s overall color scheme, typography, and layout settings.
Yes, many block themes are compatible with popular page builders, offering more customization options for those who prefer a mix of block and traditional design methods.