25 Best WordPress Themes with Most Active Installs
If you are a WordPress theme developer with themes available on WordPress.org, then tracking your themes on WordPress.org to check how popular your themes are, can be super-addictive.
If your theme gets featured in the first few rows of the popular themes page on WordPress.org’s popular themes section can give you a real high.
The algorithm that determines where you rank on the popularity chart though, is not just directly related to the number of active installs – it factors in the age of your theme too.
This is why even though our CyberChimps’ Responsive Theme has 40k+ active installs, it shows up below themes with much fewer installs.
A couple of years ago the theme directory used to mention the number of downloads for each theme. In November 2015, the download count was replaced with the number of active installs.
‘Active Installs’ are beyond doubt a valid and credible way to measure the popularity of a WordPress theme. Because quite often, users may download a whole bunch of themes to try them out, but may end up activating / selecting only one.
There was a lot of debate and discussion when this was rolled out, but I believe this is a very robust metric – that keeps theme developers like us on our toes – and keeps it ‘real’.
While doing some research around the most popular free themes – I made this list of the ones that have the highest number of active installs, for my own reference, but thought it might be interesting to share it with everyone.
I have excluded the 201* themes (TwentyFourteen, TwentyFifteen, etc…) from this list, because I was more curious about the themes developed by other theme developers.
Please note though that this list is NOT the same as the top most popular ones on WordPress.org’s popular themes section. I have only listed the themes with the highest number of active installs – irrespective of the theme age.
Here are a couple of interesting observations about the themes that made it to this list
All of these WordPress themes have over 30K active installs
Only 14 have over 50K active installs
Of these top 25 – Four themes are One Page themes (this one was a surprise to me at least)
Authors who have more than one theme, -Nicolas Guillame (2 themes), CryoutCreations (2 themes), ThemeGrill (2 themes)
Top 25 Themes With the Most Active Installs
So, here’s the list of the top 25 Free WordPress Themes with most active installs on WordPress:
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3 Comments on “25 Best WordPress Themes with Most Active Installs”
What a great list! It is probably the best list over free wordpress themes I have seen as it is not made with the purpose of pushing a certain theme or developer.
It is added to my bookmarks!
Thanks for sharing.
Susmita, that what I say to my customers:
My policy is: I am honest to my customers! if you follow my professional 2 suggestions “How to select a WP theme” you save tons of money.
1. You can select any theme with more than 100k installs. If you select few thousand installs I need to spent time to fix errors and troubleshoot it on different browsers and my time is not free.
2. A Theme must have the “Bootstrap” Otherwise you should pay double to develop additional mobile app for iOS and android.
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3 Comments on “25 Best WordPress Themes with Most Active Installs”
What a great list! It is probably the best list over free wordpress themes I have seen as it is not made with the purpose of pushing a certain theme or developer.
It is added to my bookmarks!
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Jakob. I am glad that you liked the post.
Susmita, that what I say to my customers:
My policy is: I am honest to my customers! if you follow my professional 2 suggestions “How to select a WP theme” you save tons of money.
1. You can select any theme with more than 100k installs. If you select few thousand installs I need to spent time to fix errors and troubleshoot it on different browsers and my time is not free.
2. A Theme must have the “Bootstrap” Otherwise you should pay double to develop additional mobile app for iOS and android.