What is a WordPress Theme Framework?

When you’re setting up a site with WordPress, it’s common to think of two choices for the design: free and paid themes. With free themes, you simply install and start blogging without spending a dime. Paid themes, however, provide more useful features, better written code and offer more options for customization.

But in recent years, a third option has entered the picture: WP theme frameworks. And many are predicting that they will completely take over. But what exactly are they?

WordPress Frameworks Explained

Basically, a theme framework is a strong, flexible foundation for WordPress for which additional themes can easily be built on top.

You can either use them “out-of-the-box,” without doing anything extra, or spruce up their appearance with new templates.

These theme extensions are referred to as child themes, and they use all the same core files, which make up the theme framework or parent theme. The child theme actually only adds two files, a functions PHP file and a CSS file for the styling and layout of the template.

At this point, you might be wondering why theme frameworks are so great if you’ll have to download or create a child theme to get a fancy look. But there are some major advantages, which I’ll explain next.

Benefits of Theme Frameworks

The major advantage of a theme framework is the parent theme on which it runs. All of the core files feature state-of-the-art code that makes your site incredibly fast as well as loved by search engines. Many themes, even paid ones, often have clunkier code which might look good on the surface but could actually be hurting your site.

These types of things change frequently, and by using a theme framework you’ll have automatic updates included.

Also, theme frameworks offer a lot of additional helpful features in the WordPress dashboard, including easy search engine optimization, custom hooks and other easy customizations that would be an arduous process otherwise.

Frameworks also offer an active support community that can give you individualized help about your own site.

In addition, there are developers who create free child themes for all of the major theme frameworks. While regular free themes usually come with concerns (poorly-written code, little support, few to no updates) you don’t have to worry one bit with these—the optimized Parent theme is actually powering the site.

What are Some of the Best WP Theme Frameworks?

Update 4/22/2024: Some of these WordPress frameworks are no longer around as of 2024, including my old favorite Headway. But Genesis is still a great option that has stood the test of time, and still the one that I use for my websites, including this one!

There are a number of theme frameworks out there, including free and paid options.

Popular premium theme frameworks include Headway, Genesis, Thesis, Canvas and Elemental.

I personally have purchased Headway and Genesis for my sites and highly recommend both. Headway is my favorite due to its intuitive drag and drop functionality, although both provide great features.

Although not every website project will require a theme framework, they provide great features and flexibility. And they might soon be the dominant model for WordPress theme development.