Between May 2023 and July 2024 we recalculated the catalogue every time the collection was refreshed. That gives something rare in WordPress publishing: a clean time series of how many live sites each theme actually runs on, month by month.
This note covers the 2 000 most used themes in the catalogue — the ones that account for the bulk of all detected installations. For each of them we have fifteen monthly snapshots: how many sites were running the theme at that moment.
What a year looks like
Across those themes the number of tracked installations went from 1 184 441 in May 2023 to 1 090 177 in July 2024 — down 8%. The market itself did not shrink. Our crawl got stricter, and the redistribution underneath was much larger than the headline number suggests.
| Month | Installations | Change |
|---|---|---|
| May 2023 | 1 184 441 | — |
| June 2023 | 1 187 017 | +0.2% |
| July 2023 | 1 188 056 | +0.1% |
| August 2023 | 1 180 946 | −0.6% |
| September 2023 | 1 169 782 | −0.9% |
| October 2023 | 1 158 361 | −1.0% |
| November 2023 | 1 127 186 | −2.7% |
| December 2023 | 1 158 241 | +2.8% |
| January 2024 | 1 070 372 | −7.6% |
| February 2024 | 1 076 363 | +0.6% |
| March 2024 | 1 015 705 | −5.6% |
| April 2024 | 1 039 876 | +2.4% |
| May 2024 | 1 061 800 | +2.1% |
| June 2024 | 1 093 463 | +3.0% |
| July 2024 | 1 090 177 | −0.3% |
Where the jumps come from
Not every month in that table is a measurement. The collection is refreshed at irregular intervals, and between refreshes the numbers are carried over unchanged.
That is visible in the median. In a month without a refresh, the median theme moved by 0.00% — almost nothing happened because nothing was recalculated. In a month with a refresh, nearly every theme moved at once: 1 927 of 2 000 in January 2024, 1 934 of 2 000 in March 2024.
And in those months the median was negative. January 2024: −6.56%. March 2024: −7.05%. September 2023: −2.33%. When the crawl re-checks every domain, a slice of sites turns out to be offline, redirected, or no longer running the theme — and the whole curve steps down.
The winners
| Theme | May 2023 | July 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| BeTheme | 6 722 | 25 748 | +283% |
| Astra | 3 574 | 18 242 | +410% |
| The7 | 9 008 | 21 152 | +135% |
| Avada | 36 610 | 47 278 | +29% |
| Divi | 40 725 | 49 525 | +22% |
| GeneratePress | 4 782 | 11 370 | +138% |
BeTheme roughly quadrupled. Astra quintupled. Both are theme frameworks sold with a page builder bundled, and both grew while the catalogue was shrinking overall — which means they were taking sites from somewhere.
The losers
| Theme | May 2023 | July 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genesis | 48 928 | 17 258 | −65% |
| Twenty Twelve | 31 129 | 17 850 | −43% |
| Twenty Fourteen | 20 654 | 12 523 | −39% |
| Twenty Eleven | 27 428 | 17 398 | −37% |
| Canvas | 11 751 | 5 568 | −53% |
| Sahifa | 11 015 | 6 112 | −45% |
Genesis lost almost two thirds. The default Twenty-something themes lost a third to a half each. These are sites that either went offline, migrated to a modern builder, or — and this matters — were never really using the theme as their active one.
What it means
Two movements are happening at once. The old guard — defaults and frameworks from the 2010s — is being replaced, and the themes that replace it are the ones that bundle a page builder, because a builder makes it harder to switch away later.
But treat the size of the swings with care. A theme that grows twentyfold is almost never a real twentyfold jump in popularity; it usually means the detection started finding installations it had missed before — for example, the same theme delivered under a different folder name by a host or a premium bundle.
How to read these numbers
Every figure here is a count of live websites where we detected the theme, not a download count and not a vendor claim. A site running a child theme is counted under the child, not the parent, which is why child themes appear separately in the catalogue.
Refresh dates for the period were 3 September 2023, 2 October 2023, 29 October 2023, 30 November 2023, 1 January 2024, 29 January 2024, 28 February 2024, 9 May 2024 and 13 July 2024. Between them the numbers do not move, because nothing is recalculated.
You can look up any single theme and its own curve on its page in the theme ranking, or compare two themes directly with the comparison tool.