5 Premium WordPress Framework/Theme Used in Top 1 Million Sites

Not sure which framework or theme to use for your WordPress site?

Either you use the one recommended by industry experts, friends, or the popular one based on trusted data. There are hundreds of themes in the market, and it’s impossible to try all of them to see what works best for you. Choosing the right WordPress theme is always challenging and time-consuming.

I often receive a request to suggest a theme so thought to put a list of popular ones used on top sites. All data is from BuiltWith.

Divi

Divi by Elegant Themes is the most popular WordPress theme.

Divi lets you create a beautiful website in minutes with their advanced visual page builder. You can design in real-time without coding skills; here are some of the highlights of the features.

• 45+ content elements (CTA, accordion, social, gallery, portfolio, sidebar, search, pricing, etc.)
• Global elements to update once, and it gets updated everywhere in use.
• Responsive editing, see how it looks on a desktop, tablet, and mobile devices
• Responsive editing which lets you control how your website looks across different devices
• Custom CSS control due to the limitless and simple interface
• 800+ pre-made designs
• Inline text editing
• Global elements and styles

Whether you are a professional designer or a beginner, Divi lets you create a beautiful page with ease.

Divi is translated into 32 languages. Let’s explore how they rank.

• It’s the most popular WordPress theme on the Entire Internet.
• Divi is the most popular WordPress theme category in the category of Top 10k, Top 100k, and Top 1 million sites.
• Currently, around 1.4M+ live websites are using Divi.

The pricing of Divi starts at $89/year with unlimited usage, product updates, and 100s of website packs, premium support, and risk-free guarantee.

Genesis

Genesis Framework popularity has gone down recently but still ranks at number 2 position in the top 1 million sites.

Build unparalleled websites effortlessly with the Genesis by StudioPress (now it is part of WP Engine). It empowers you with a search-engine-optimized and secure platform to make the strong foundation of your website.

Genesis is Gutenberg-ready, which enables designers and developers to craft reusable modules for content and designs. Hence, end-users can easily customize these modules for a variety of purposes, like creating landing pages quickly.

The starting price of the Genesis Framework starts at a one-time fee of $59.95 for 1-year unlimited support, unlimited updates, and sites.

The following are some of the famous sites using Genesis.

• WP Beginner
• The Smart Passive Income
• Yamaha

If you are a developer, you will love Genesis.

Avada

Avada is the number one selling theme of all time on the ThemeForest marketplace. It is responsive, and you can customize every element of your site with its powerful editor without coding knowledge.

The multipurpose WordPress theme – Avada lets you launch your dream website in no time so you can save your time to focus on other business aspects.

Avada has been consistently delivering high-quality services for 7+ years to 600,000+ businesses, professionals, and agencies.

Features

• Drag and drop editor
• 65+ professionally crafted demos and rich demo importer
• 400+ pre-built web pages
• SEO-friendly
• Unlimited designs and layouts
• Highly responsive across many devices and browsers

Let’s explore where Avada rank.

• 3rd most popular WordPress Theme in the category of Top 10k, Top 100k, and Top 1 million sites
• More than 600,000+ live sites using Avada

For starters, you can purchase Avada for $60.

Astra

Astra is one of the fastest WordPress themes around the globe. It has clean codes and delivers superb website performance due to its innovative technologies like Vanilla JavaScript. It is comparatively light as it needs resources less than 50KB compared to others with at least 300KB.

Astra loads within the split of a second and are built and optimized for high performance. Besides, it follows WCAG 2.0 standards, is developer-friendly with hooks and filters, has SEO-optimized architecture, and is developed on GitHub.

Features

• Pixel-perfect pre-built websites
• Includes WordPress Optimizer for easy customization without fussy codes
• Works great with page builders like Beaver Builder, Divi, Elementor, Visual Composer, Site Origin, and more
• Effortless layout settings for managing website container, blog, header, posts, footer, sidebar, color, etc.
• Multiple header layouts
• Easy integration with tools like Yoast, WooCommerce, etc.
• SEO-friendly markup

It has recently gained popularity.

• 3rd most popular WordPress theme on the Entire Internet
• 4th most popular WordPress theme in the Top 1 million websites
• More than 650,000 live sites are using Astra

Get Astra FREE from the official website or upgrade to Astra Pro is $49 for better customization and flexibility, unlimited site usage, 20+ free templates, and one-to-one support.

GeneratePress

A brilliant theme by Tom Usborne.

GeneratePress is a lightweight theme. It uses the most stable and latest coding standards for incredible performance.

GeneratePress consumes fewer resources – less than 30 KB for fast site loading. Instead of jQuery, it follows WCAG 2.0 and uses cleaner Vanilla JavaScript which reduces dependency and issues pertaining to render-blocking.

With validated HTML and structure data built-in schema.org, it delivers better SEO optimization.

Features

• You can adjust typography and colors in its Customizer.
• Improved layout control including margins, padding, sidebar, and more
• Works seamlessly with a variety of page builder
• Best-in-practice WordPress coding standards
• Hooks and filters
• Supports 20+ languages for translation in addition to RTL languages

As you can see below, people have started loving them recently.

• 5th most popular WordPress theme in the Top 100k and Top 1 million sites
• Around 249,350 live sites are using GeneratePress.

Download GeneratePress is FREE. You can also go for the upgraded version – GP Premium available at $49.95 for unlimited sites, full access to her site library, and 1-year updates and support, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Conclusion

If you don’t want to take a risk in trying something new, then it’s safe to go with the people already using it. If you are looking for a blog or magazine, then Genesis, Astra, and GeneratePress would be good choices.

Divi and Avada would be a good fit for corporate, agencies, and startups where you need a page builder to create multiple types of pages.

Next, find out where you can host your heavy-traffic WP sites.