One of the first tasks in creating a website is choosing a theme that fits your vision. This guide will show you how to search for a theme and apply it to your website.
All themes offered by WordPress.com are mobile-friendly, accessibility-ready, and professionally designed for modern web standards. To browse our ever-growing collection of themes:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Appearance → Themes (or Appearance → Theme Showcase if using WP Admin).
- Browse all themes, narrow the list down by selecting a category at the top, or upload your own theme.
Using the “View” button next to the search box at the top of the screen, you can narrow your search to the following types of themes:
- Free: Themes available to all sites on WordPress.com.
- Partner: Themes available to purchase on all sites with a Business plan or higher. Learn more in our Partner Themes guide.
- Included with Personal: Themes available to all sites on WordPress.com with the Personal plan or higher.
- Included with Premium: Themes available to all sites on WordPress.com with a Premium plan or higher.
- WooCommerce: Themes for an online store, available to all sites on WordPress.com with a Business or Commerce Plan.
Partner and WooCommerce themes will display tags below the theme thumbnail to indicate they are either Partner or WooCommerce themes.
Use the search bar at the top of the screen to search for themes by name or feature. You can further narrow your theme search by selecting a category from the list beneath the search bar.
On any plugin-enabled plan, you can also search for themes developed by the WordPress community, such as Astra, OceanWP, and more. Search for your favorite community theme, and look for the “Community” tag under the theme thumbnail.
Click the theme’s thumbnail to load the info section and view additional information about the theme. In the info section, you will also have the following options:
- Preview: View a demo site that uses this theme.
- From there, click the “Try and customize” link to preview the theme on your site.
- Activate: Apply the theme to your site.
On this page, you can also download the theme to upload to a self-hosted WordPress site (free themes only; Personal and Premium plan themes cannot be transferred to a WordPress.org site).
Some themes include different style combinations to further personalize the look of your site.
Click the colored circles in the lower-right corner to see the same theme with different color schemes and font choices applied.
You can activate the theme with your preferred style combination. You can make further changes to the colors and fonts after activating the theme.
When you activate a theme, your existing content carries over. Nothing is deleted, so it’s perfectly safe to activate any theme. You can always change your theme back to your previous theme if you want.
Once you have decided on the theme you would like to use, follow these steps to activate and apply it to your website:
- From your site’s dashboard, navigate to Appearance → Themes (or Appearance → Theme Showcase if using WP Admin).
- Click the thumbnail of the theme you want to activate.
- Click the “Activate” button.
- In a few seconds, the new theme will be applied to your site. Click the “Customize site” button to start working on your site’s new design.
If you want to use your own theme, a theme you purchased elsewhere, or a third-party theme, and you have a plugin-enabled plan on your site, you can visit Appearance → Themes and click the “Install new theme” button or the “Add new theme” button to upload the theme. Learn how to upload a custom theme.
If you get an error that reads “Unable to activate theme. Contact customer support” you may be able to resolve this error on your own by checking the following:
- If you are activating a theme on a site that does not have plugins enabled, try to Solve Common Browser Issues and attempt to activate the theme again.
- If you are activating a theme on a site with plugins, check for a theme or plugin conflict with the following guide: Solve Problems With Plugins.
