Before you just start looking for a theme, make sure you’ve read all the tips for how to evaluate a theme. Beginning a website project by looking for a theme is a sure-fire way to focus too much on design and not enough on your organization’s needs.
When search for themes, focus on themes that support the “Block Editor” or “Gutenberg” and are accessible or “accessibility-ready”. These these are most likely to be built with attention to detail.
Just in case you need proof that I really believe in these themes, those marked with an * are ones I use on this site! Due to the nature of themes (one per site), I’ve recommended more themes here that I haven’t used than compared to the recommended plugins.
Free Themes
- The recent default WordPress themes are all excellent, though fairly simple.
- Twenty Fifteen* (what this site uses!), Twenty Sixteen*, Twenty Seventeen, and Twenty Twenty are all well-suited for certain nonprofits.
- Themes with “Block Editor Styles”:
- The Michelle theme* has fabulous block editor support and lots of interesting Block Patterns to help you quickly create interesting page layouts.
- The Chaplin theme* has good block editor support and is well-maintained.
- The Go theme* has decent customization options (and slightly odd vertical spacing and font size).
- “Accessibility Ready” themes. These themes have been vetted twice to get onto the WordPress.org directory and tend to be newer and higher-quality.
Previously Recommended Themes that Don’t Support the Block Editor
With the introduction of the block editor, many of the previous recommendations on this page have not been sufficiently kept up to date to support the block editor. This very disappointingly includes themes from Automattic. While these themes may still be a good choice for certain very simple sites, it is likely they will become less and less appropriate for selection in the next few years.
- Themes from Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com) are excellent and fairly-well supported. These themes tend to be simple themes that look good out of the box.
- Karuna*, Ixion, Shoreditch*, Sela*, Sequential*, Lodestar, and Dara are among the themes a nonprofit might consider.
- Older “Accessibility Ready Themes”
- Toivo Lite, Apex, Popper, and Founder could all make for great nonprofit themes.
Commercial Themes
These themes cost money but often come with more theme options and templates. Just remember there are great free themes that are much better than the worst of the paid themes.
- Anariel Designs offers three “charity themes”, three of which integrate tightly with the Give plugin for easy donation setup. These themes thrive with big pictures, so make sure you have those!
- The Genesis Theme Framework and associated themes are quite popular and they’re well-coded from my experience with them. However, because they use an additional “framework” on top of WordPress, many developers (me included) won’t be as familiar with customizing them.