How your website appear to visitors greatly affects the overall impression and experience.

In WordPress, the design of a website mostly depends on the theme.

There are a lot of WordPress themes available on the marketplace. Some are free, others requiring a one-time or annual subscription.

The development of themes for the platform WordPress.org is an industry, a proof that WordPress remains the king of content manage systems on the worldwide web.

For example, on Envato’s theme marketplace Themeforest alone, you would have so many options that scrutinizing each one of them requires months to years.

Hence, finding a theme that perfectly fits your taste, and niche requires much effort. Some popular themes are bloated with unnecessary features while others lack functionality.

In this article, I am going to share my theme recommendations for your WordPress.org-powered website. Here are 5 amazing WordPress themes to use right now.

GeneratePress

If you want a website with a blazing speed, stable, and lightweight – GeneratePress is the theme I recommend. The code is clean, and modules reduces the use of plugins – lots of plugins may harm loading speed.

You can immediately start publishing a website through selecting any of their pre-built design called Starter Sites. They have Starter Sites for everything you need – Business, Blog, e-Commerce. Further customization can be done through the pre-built patterns, applying colors.

There is a GeneratePress free theme, but to unlock all features such as the Starter Sites, Theme Library, 100’s of customization options you’ve got to purchase their annual plan at $59/year.

Further enhancements [optional] can be done through the Block Editor – having 20+ premium starter sites, more pre-built patters, drag and drop page building at $99/year; host these patters in the cloud at additional $99/year.

Or take all these features at $149/year for the GeneratePress One and save over $100 annually.

These plans can power up to 500 sites and can even be used for client websites.

Sydney

The Sydney theme by aThemes is another option if you want the best for your website. It is lightweight and optimized for search engines; easy to customize to tailor to your needs.

Like GP Premium, it has pre-built Starter websites. There is a free version available to download.

The premium version, on one hand, has the following features:

• A template builder module
• Extra slider options
• An extended blog module
• Extra WooCommerce features
• 65+ Premium Elementor Widgets from Addons Pro

Plans start at $63 per year for the annual plan (1 website); $119 for 10 websites; $199 for 100 websites. You can also opt for the lifetime plan: $199 for 1 website, $299 for 10 websites, $499 for 100 websites.

Astra

Astra calls itself as the everything you need to design in one toolkit. It is a theme, a template, a page builder, can create a website through artificial intelligence and more.

The theme promises speed, reliable code to ensure that website runs smoothly, and ultimate compatibility with all leading plugins and page builders.

Anybody – from beginners to experts (sleek design for bloggers, enhanced for online stores, simple for beginners, and reduces production time for up to 50% for web pros.

Annual pricing starts from $69/year, lifetime starts at $319. Pricing tier for Astra is either annual/lifetime, features, and number of websites it can power.

The Business Toolkit plan includes a 6-month Ottokit Pro subscription (run recurring tasks), 3-month subscription for ZipWP Pro (create your whole website in less than a minute), and SkillJet membership (an online learning platform).

MH Themes

This is one of the themes that never goes out of style.

The MH Magazine theme by MH Themes is a theme that has long been around, and remains relevant. It has a huge library of popular websites it powered and continues to serve.

This theme is perfect for projects such as online magazines, news websites, professional blogs, and other editorial related projects. This is not made for one-page sites such as portfolio, company profile, but more on news and blogs.

It is clean, moder, fully responsive and SEO optimized. The company says they have focused on quality over quantity – focusing on improving their existing professional themes instead of releasing a new one each month – thereby ensuring quality and maintenance. Subscription to their plans means long-term updates.

Also, SEO friendly with clean and optimized codebase and SEO-friendly structure to achieve good rankings in search engines.

Annual plan starts at $40/year/site; unlimited sites at $75/year. There is an option for lifetime license, priced at $279 and $459 for the one site and unlimited sites respectively.

Avada

Majority of the best themes on the market can be purchased for an annual license, and you must pay a lot more to have the lifetime license. That’s not the case with the premium theme Avada.

Avada, which is available and following Themeforest license terms, can be purchased for $69 for a lifetime license. That’s for a single site and a year of support; you can pay more should you want to extend the support.

It has been in the market for 11+ years and remains #1 bestselling on Themeforest. It features a clean, modern, multi-purpose designs which can be adapted and used for any website.

It has 110 pre-built sites (like Starter sites) which helps you easily create a fully functional site in a click of a button. It has 590 creative content blocks, 125 design elements, 100% mobile-friendly across devices, SEO ready, and extensive website building toolkit.

Final Thoughts

WordPress.org remains king, it powers around 43.3% of all websites on the internet. The WP theme marketplace is a flourishing industry; therefore, there are almost limitless themes out there – competing for sales.

If you want to create a website, you want to use the best theme.

You can look at the themes I have recommended in this article, see their features and demo sites.

Hopefully, these will help you in making a proper decision.