If you plan on running more than one blog, the best thing you can do for yourself to standardize on one or only a few WordPress themes. This way you can learn the ins and outs of your WordPress theme and all of your sites become much easier to manage. This is important to think about when you’re trying to pick a WordPress theme for your blog.
Today I want to take a look at my three favorite WordPress themes. We are going to take a look at the three themes I currently use between all of my sites, and why I like them so much.
My Favorite WordPress Themes
No matter what type of blog you have, your WordPress theme is an important decision to make. It has to be a balance between speed, usability, and of course, what it actually looks like! Here are some of my favorite WordPress themes that are light weight, and on the easier side to use.
GeneratePress
GeneratePress is one of my favorite WordPress themes because it’s simple to use extremely fast. It is also cost effective even for multiple sites. This site is running on GeneratePress.
GeneratePress also has something called a site library. If you’re not very good with WordPress or code, you don’t need to worry and can still have a beautiful site. You can import a site from the library and then customize it with things like your brand colors and images.
Besides being simple to use, many of my GeneratePress based sites pass Core Web Vitals without having to do very much to them at all.
GeneratePress itself is free, but if you want to use the advanced features like the site library you will need GeneratePress Premium.
GeneratePress Premium is the least expensive theme out of the ones I’ve listed here, and well worth the investment. This site runs on GeneratePress, by the way.
Feast Design Company Themes and Plugins
I used Feast Design Company themes and the Feast plugin for many of my sites as well. If you are a food blogger, Feast is the gold standard. Even if you aren’t a food blogger you can still use Feast.
The big offering from Feast is something called the Feast Plugin, which allows you to build amazing home pages, and has a ton of built in features for SEO. It also makes your theme easy to customize without needing to code anything.
When you purchase the Feast plugin, you’ll also get access to the Feast Design Company themes, as well as the Genesis framework to run them.
While Feast is aimed primarily at food bloggers, I used a combination of the Feast Design Company themes and Feast plug in on several other sites as well.
It’s really is for any type of blog. The great part about the Feast plug in is it that you’re already using a different WordPress theme that you’re comfortable with, Feast is an easy way to further customize it and help keep your site running fast.
Click HereFeast also has very easy to follow tutorials for using their products.
Feast is significantly more expensive than GeneratePress, however it does have a number of wonderful feature that I think are worth it, especially for Food bloggers and those who want some help with SEO optimization.
Mediavine Trellis
I use Mediavine Trellis on my sites that are on the Mediavine ad network. Mediavine has developed their own WordPress theme that is optimized for not only site speed and passing those core web vitals, but Mediavine ads as well.
I also use Feast plug in on top of Mediavine trellis and the Feast modern homepage to build the homepage of my websites.
Mediavine Trellis can be a little bit more difficult to use if you’re not used to WordPress and customization but the truth is to get a really nice site out of the box page is not extremely difficult. It’s also very much set it and forget it once you get going. Mediavine also offers child themes for Trellis sites to further customize them, but I do not use any of them.
Mediavine Trellis is the most expensive theme on this list, but it is well worth it if your site is on the Mediavine network. If your site is not on Mediavine, I would hold off on using Trellis until it is. Mediavine also offers a concierge service to help get you up and running with Trellis.
Why I Standardized on These Themes
I use a combination of these three themes for a couple of reasons. First, I just love GeneratePress and I have a lot of sites running it because it is so simple and so fast.
I have a couple of food blogs and that’s when I went down the path of the Feast themes and plug ins. I know so many food bloggers do use the Feast themes that I wanted to learn how to use it myself.
I also use the Feast plug in practically everywhere with my GeneratePress and Trellis sites to build the modern homepage, which is a really nice feature.
Note: I also just started testing the Astra theme because it is very popular. My site running Astra passes Core Web Vitals with practically no effort.
There’s many other WordPress themes out there, but these are my favorite because they’re fast and simple to use.
My advice to you is pick one theme and learn it well, then standardize on it as much as possible and use it on multiple sites. If you pick a theme and don’t like it, it really is not a huge deal to change it later on, so try not to stress over it too much.
