Astra, Kadence and Blocksy Are Everywhere. None Is Built for a Blog and a SaaS Together

After enough years of opening other people’s websites, you start to recognise the furniture. For pure blogs on WordPress, I kept seeing the same three names in the source code: Astra, Kadence and Blocksy. Sometimes GeneratePress or one of the default Twenty themes, but mostly those three.

This is not a criticism of them. They are popular for good reasons. It is an observation about what that popularity leaves out.

Why those three are everywhere

The numbers on WordPress.org give a sense of scale. In a 2024 ranking of themes by active installations, Astra was in the top group with more than a million active installs, Kadence had more than 300,000 and Blocksy more than 100,000. Each also has a commercial version and a large following among agencies and bloggers.

They earned it. All three are reasonably fast, well maintained, flexible and backed by companies that answer support requests. If you need a general-purpose theme and you do not want to think too hard, any of them is a sensible choice. I have built plenty of client sites on them.

Good at being general

Their great strength is that they are designed to be anything. A blog, a shop, a portfolio, a business site, a landing page. They achieve that with large option panels, starter sites and integrations with page builders.

That generality has a cost. A theme that can be anything has to carry the weight of everything. Many of its options are irrelevant to any one site. Its structure is neutral, which means it does not help you organise a site of a particular kind. You start from a blank, flexible canvas and build the structure yourself, every time.

The gap I kept running into

The kind of site I found hardest to build well on general themes was one where a blog and a software product had to live together. That is a very common situation now. A small software company has its product on one part of the site, its blog on another, and pages for pricing, help, changelog and comparisons in between.

What that kind of site needs is not more options. It needs a structure designed for it:

• The way into the product has to change with the visitor: “Try it free” for a newcomer, “Open the app” for someone already signed in, “Join the waitlist” before launch.
• The blog has different kinds of articles, such as guides, comparisons with alternatives, use cases and concepts, and each kind deserves its own layout.
• Help, tutorials and what’s new have to be organised in their own sections, without being mixed into the blog stream.
• Everything has to share one address cleanly, often with WordPress serving the content side while the product runs elsewhere.

None of the three general themes is designed for that. You can make them do it with enough custom work, plugins and patience, which is exactly what I did, over and over. That brings me to the next part of the story, in I Was Customizing Every WordPress Theme I Used Anyway.

What I did about it

Instead of one theme that tries to be everything, I make themes that are each designed for one kind of site. Two of them exist precisely for this gap: one for the blog and pages that sit around a software product, and one for the resources of a product, such as help centre, tutorials, what’s new and blog, all sharing the product’s address.

They are not better than the popular three at being general. They are not trying to be. They are built so that a particular kind of site starts with the right structure instead of a blank canvas. That is what well built means to me: the structure is part of the foundation, not something added afterwards.