A recent survey noted that 48% of Technorati’s top 100 blogs now use WordPress, up from 32% three years ago.
WordPress themes provide a way to ‘skin’ your blog or website – but not just the design. They also provide much more control over the look and presentation of your site.
There are thousands of free and premium (paid) themes available but the one I use for all my WordPress sites is the free theme Suffusion.
I started using it in 2009 when it was a newcomer on the Theme block and it celebrated its third birthday this month – time to see just how popular it has now become:
- In the WordPress Free Theme Directory, Suffusion is second by total number of ratings – and it’s the only one in the top 10 to have a perfect 5 star average rating
- Suffusion is a Featured theme at WordPress.org
- It has also appeared on the WordPress ‘Most Popular’ list of free themes every day for the last couple of years.
- Every WordPress installation comes bundled with 2 default themes – TwentyTen and TwentyEleven. Excluding those defaults, Suffusion is the second most downloaded free theme – more than 800,000 downloads.
Theme Usage By Top Websites
In a study of the top 1 million visited websites in the world, around 160,000 of them used WordPress – these sites were analyzed to see which were the most popular WordPress themes. The summary of the top 20 reveals that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the default themes included with WordPress top the list.
Paid themes dominate the rest of the top 10 (which you might expect from the world’s most visited websites) but Suffusion was 10th – the highest truly free theme after Atahualpa in 9th (which has been around for a couple more years).
Download
Download and more info from WordPress here.
News, FAQ and more info from the developer here.
Conclusion
It turns out I was lucky enough to choose Suffusion in its very early days when it was a relative unknown – it is now a top free theme with great support from creator Sayontan Sinha and an active user forum.
If you’re looking for a versatile and powerful free WordPress theme, Suffusion may be a perfect choice.
Don’t be put off by my own design skills (or lack of!) – there are some very cool examples of what the theme is capable of.