If You’re Learning WordPress in 2025 Choosing The Right Theme Is Vital
This is a long post, here’s the takeaway…
You don’t learn WordPress, you learn your specific WordPress theme.
For A Small Content Based Website I Recommend Hestia Theme
There are more than 13000 free themes listed on the official WordPress website, it can take forever to choose the right one. I wrote this guide for small local businesses and community groups and I recommend they use the free version of Hestia theme by Themeisle. Hestia is easy to use, it’s well established and well supported. And most importantly, it enables WordPress newbies to build a professional website without a massive learning curve.
If You Must Have More Power, Use Neve
If you’re a newbie but need more power than Hestia can offer I recommend the free version of Neve theme. Neve and Hestia are made by Themeisle. Neve takes longer to learn than Hestia but it’s still reasonably easy to use. However, if you choose Neve you’ll have to teach yourself how to use it.
WordPress
WordPress Provides The Engine
You do need some WordPress skills, but much of WordPress’s power lies under the surface.
Hestia
Your Theme Provides The Controls
To build, edit, and maintain your site, you need to learn how your specific theme works.
Let Me Explain My Thinking
Let’s look in detail at why choosing the right theme before learning WordPress is so important. And why you don’t learn WordPress, you learn your theme.
Your Skills Are Theme Specific
Think of WordPress as the basic toolkit for building your website—it lets you create pages, add blog posts, organise content into categories, and build navigation menus. These are general skills you’ll need to know no matter what.
But your theme is the real blueprint that shapes how your website looks and works. Each WordPress theme is unique, offering its own set of features, settings, and layout options. To fully understand how to build and maintain your website, you need to focus on the specific theme your site is using.
If you learn how to use WordPress with any other theme than the one active on your own website, your skills won’t be fully transferable. You might understand what changes you want to make, but the user interface and settings will be different. After all your training, you still might not know how to use your site effectively. This can be confusing and frustrating, leaving you disheartened because the time you spent learning hasn’t paid off.
So, while basic WordPress skills are helpful, your main focus should be on understanding the settings and options provided by your theme. That’s how you’ll unlock the full potential of your website.
Switching Themes Is Not Easy
It’s important to choose the right theme before you build your site because you’re locked into the WordPress theme you choose. This lock-in varies in extent, but switching WordPress themes is not an easy task. Doing your due diligence before you start will save you a lot of heartache further down the line.
Each Theme Has Its Own User Interface
Although much of the WordPress editor screen remains the same whichever theme you use, many options and settings are significantly different in different themes. For instance, the difference between Avada and GeneratePress is so great you’d find it hard to believe they both use WordPress.
You Must Learn Your Specific Theme, Not Just WordPress
The important point is that themes can be so different that certain skills learned for a theme such as Avada will be of no use if you’re editing a theme like GeneratePress.
In this article, I cover several important points, such as…
The Role of Themes and Plugins
Ideally, WordPress themes control the look and design of your website, while plugins add any necessary additional functionality, such as contact forms or image sliders. However, many theme designers build this type of functionality directly into their themes. With these themes, if you switch to a different theme, you lose both your website’s design and much of its functionality.
Why Hestia Is a Good Choice for Small Local Businesses and Community Groups
When recommending a WordPress theme, it’s important to focus on the specific needs of your audience. For small local businesses and community groups, Hestia by Themeisle stands out as an excellent option. Here’s why:
Reputation and Reliability
Hestia is developed by Themeisle, a well-established and reputable WordPress developer known for creating high-quality themes and plugins. It’s regularly updated, ensuring compatibility with the latest WordPress version and maintaining high standards of security and performance.
Speed and Performance
Hestia is lightweight and optimised for fast loading times, which is crucial for small businesses and community groups that want to ensure visitors have a smooth browsing experience. Fast-loading websites are also more likely to rank higher in search engines, helping your message reach your audience.
Mobile Responsiveness
Hestia is fully responsive, meaning it looks great and functions well on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. This is especially important for community groups and small businesses, as many visitors are likely to access their sites from mobile devices.
SEO-Friendly Design
Hestia is built with clean, well-structured code that supports search engine optimisation (SEO). This helps small businesses and community groups improve their online visibility without needing to rely heavily on additional SEO plugins. However, if you do need more SEO options Yoast SEO works well with Hestia.
Ease of Customisation
Many of Hestia’s settings are in the WordPress Customiser, allowing users to make changes to their site’s design and layout in real time without any coding knowledge. For beginners, this simplicity is a huge advantage, it makes creating a professional-looking website possible, even with limited skills.
Get Professional Looks With Minimum Skills
For small local businesses and community groups ease of use trumps fancy features. Hestia offers a clean and modern design that can be customised to reflect your brand without overwhelming you, the website builder, with unnecessary features. To keep your learning curve to minimum, you don’t learn WordPress until you’ve chosen your theme. That way your skills fit the task perfectly.
Free Version with Powerful Features
For those on a tight budget, the free version of Hestia provides more than enough functionality to create a professional-looking website. It includes a stylish and easy to set up homepage design and good integration with popular plugins. So, you can get started without needing a premium theme.
Integration With Otter Blocks
Hestia works seamlessly with the Otter Blocks plugin, also developed by Themeisle. This plugin adds advanced block functionality to the WordPress editor, making it easier to create custom layouts without needing a more complicated page builder.
Strong Documentation and Support
Hestia includes comprehensive documentation and the site you’re reading provides great online tutorials that guide beginners through the website setup and customisation process. Themeisle also provides excellent customer support, which can be a lifesaver for users who run into problems.
By choosing Hestia, your small local businesses or community group will get started fast. You’ll be focusing on creating content and engaging with your audience now, instead of wasting countless hours sifting through more than 13000 free themes listed on the WordPress website and the many other premium themes that are also available. The choice really is overwhelming.
I’ve found Hestia to be both powerful and easy to use for small local businesses and community groups. Where as some of the more powerful themes overwhelm and frustrate your website building efforts.
Understanding Theme Lock-In
Choosing the right WordPress theme before building your site is crucial because switching themes later can be a difficult and time-consuming process. This is known as theme lock-in. While the extent of lock-in varies between themes, theme switching often results in a lot more work than you expected.
Why does this happen? Before the introduction of the block editor, most WordPress themes used the classic post editor. So, you could log into any WordPress site and add content using the same interface and same skills you used on all the other WordPress websites you maintain.
Modern WordPress theme developers do not use the classic post editor, and some don’t even use the official WordPress post editor (Gutenberg) theme developers make their own page layout system. This means you now must learn the interface of your chosen theme, and switching themes can result in broken layouts or missing features, thus requiring extensive rebuilding.
Conclusion: Keep It Simple and Focused
For WordPress newbies, the key is to choose a theme that is easy to use, reliable, and well-supported. Hestia by Themeisle checks all these boxes, making it a top recommendation for small local businesses and community groups. By starting with a solid foundation like Hestia, you’ll avoid many of the pitfalls associated with theme lock-in and set yourself up for success as you learn to build and maintain your first website.