Over the past few years, we have seen increased efforts to better position and market the WordPress brand. Along with these efforts, we now have a Brand Writing Style Guide that defines how the WordPress voice should sound and what tone it should convey. The brand book was first created in August 2018 and has undergone several updates since then. It serves as a manual for all marketing messages, campaigns, and communication from WordPress.

Recently, I was working on a rewrite of one of our theme list posts and in the process I tested over 30 themes. By the end, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that the majority were junk. My gut feeling was that the “shiny cover, empty box” syndrome I encountered was more widespread than only the niche I worked on. So I decided to fire up a test instance of WordPress and went through 31 additional themes in a separate niche. These are the results of my research.

I’ve been working with WordPress hosting for years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about “cheap” WordPress hosting plans, it’s that they’re only cheap for the first year. After that, the renewal rates kick in, and suddenly…well, tough luck, pay up!