Over the course of three years I’ve researched more than 50 WordPress themes and templates. Evaluating them and seeing what can be done with them. All the themes tested are free or ‘lite’ versions. With one or two premium ones as well.

The themes share the first class WordPress back-end dashboard. All use the excellent coding and architecture already built into WordPress.

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Here’s how I came to choosing the top ten WordPress themes. With a listing of said top ten.

Separating the easy from not-so-easy.

Quickly it became clear some WordPress themes and templates are much easier to use than others. And after a spending a decent amount of time of testing different ones, patterns and common features were observed.

Some themes had a lot more versatility built in from the start. Whilst others focus on particular strengths of WordPress like blog posting, categorising and tagging.

While again there are some ‘white-hat’ themes which can be made into almost any type of website.

Of course there are special ‘parallax’ themes for one-page sites. Often these come with a decent set of support pages.

Most of the themes needed some sort of minor CSS customisation to get them perfect! And many of the require additional specific plugins to get the most functionality.

Favourite Top Ten WordPress Themes.

So here are some highlights from this at times challenging journey in the form of a list of the top ten WordPress themes:

Customizr

Customizr is a fantastic theme. It has many useful options and possible ways of being used. It guides you along if you need it. Or you can build your site as you like it. I used Customizr on several sites.

Quest

Quest is a slick and smooth theme which can quickly be used to set up a site. Of course you need to create all the content elements to get the most value from the presentation but its a great theme to work with.

Spun

Spun is a super-cool minimalist theme. It is one of the most elegant and creative themes available. Really enjoyed working with it. But it now needs an update to keep up with latest WordPress developments.

Spacious

The first HTML 5 version of Tusler Design was launched using Spacious. Its a really nice theme. Lots of possibilities and makes presentation of content an easy process.

Tempera

Tempera is another excellent theme. Its like having a toolkit all ready to go so you can make an excellent site. As long as your content is strong then you can quickly make something decent. This can be refined and tweaked to get the most optimum performance for visitors and site owners.

Point

Point is a versatile and powerful magazine style theme. With loads of possibilities for adaption Point gives you great tools to build your website.

Arcade

Arcade is a really cool parallax style theme. Tusler Design used this theme for several months in 2015. Easy to make an attractive, powerful presentation as long as you have prepared some content.

Full Frame

Full Frame is a classy WordPress theme that I really like. Ideal photographers theme.

Hueman

At the time of writing the Hueman theme is being used on this website. Having tried so many themes I like this the best. It is the one I prefer to use.

Essential WordPress Plugins: I also have a set of plug-ins that I use. These will be discussed in the next article.