Since 2013, I’ve made it a point to always go through each and every default theme WordPress ships with, mostly because I really enjoy doing it and pushing the capabilities of what kind of layouts one can create using just the default theme, and Twenty Twenty Four takes it one step further. Before we dive a bit more into that though, let’s understand some of the advantages you have when you’re sticking with the default WordPress theme:
✴︎ Default themes are some of the best coded themes – they don’t come with any bloatware (companion plugins etc.) to get things to look like the way they did in the theme demo. They’re also coded keeping the best practices and performance in mind, so they’re blazing fast.
✴︎ Default themes are optimized well for SEO – they are built keeping SEO optimization in mind which means you can hopefully avoid a lot of SEO related issues that come with a theme that is poorly coded.
✴︎ Default themes are easy to use – they are built keeping user friendliness in mind, so you don’t have to dive deep into understanding a theme’s custom customization panel (which still seems to be a fairly popular thing for themes sold on marketplaces)
✴︎ Default themes are completely free – This is almost a no-brainer for something that comes packaged with a software, but given the quality of the themes that WordPress ships with at this point, I think this is something a lot of folks don’t appreciate enough.
Up until now though, at least on a personal level, I’ve felt the default themes have always been somewhat opinionated in terms of design. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and even though you could still build out layouts as per your design preferences, taking a more generalist approach that is also showcased in the theme’s demo certainly helps with adoption, as well as demonstrates the flexibility in terms of design choices.
What helps further in Twenty Twenty Four’s case is the fact that when you combine it with the Site Editor, which has gotten really, really good at this point, you can essentially do almost anything with the theme. You can use it to create a personal website (this website is made on Twenty Twenty Four, for example), you can use it for a portfolio, blog, a WooCommerce store, literally anything! And I’m not the only one that feels the Site Editor has come a long way. It still has work that needs to be done, for sure, but it’s getting better and better every single day. WordPress Twitter (X), for the most part, seems to agree:
You don’t have to recreate the demo layouts, they’re all available to be used as patterns which means your average user can just mix and match stuff and have a website that not only looks decent, but performs well! Combined with the fact that there are now tons of really cool, super useful add-ons available for Site Editor, you can really extend the functionality of a core WordPress feature to build any kind of layouts, all visually, without having to touch a single line of code. Jamie from PootlePress talked about some of this stuff in his video here as well!
Now does this mean Twenty Twenty Four will fit each use case? Probably not. But will it fit most of the use cases? Personally speaking, heck yes! I’m also always up to chat a bit about how you could use Twenty Twenty Four for a website you are building, so feel free to comment down below.
All in all, I’m super excited with the direction WordPress is headed in – this is again, not to say there isn’t work that needs to be done, but that we’re all doing it and we’ll get there! If you’d like to take Twenty Twenty Four up for a spin, it’s available for download here.