What Is a WordPress Theme and How Do You Choose the Right One?

From configuration to visual design

In the previous step, we configured WordPress and prepared it for work: we checked the essential settings, organised the URLs and removed the content we did not need.

The technical foundation of your WordPress website creation journey is now complete and your design environment begins. The first decision concerns the theme.

But before opening the WordPress library and starting to try designs, you need to understand a difference that almost nobody explains and that changes everything: the difference between the theme and the editor.

What is a WordPress theme?

Each theme provides a design foundation that you can customise. That is why there are themes designed for blogs, stores, service websites or portfolios: each starts from a different structure.

Here is what you need to understand now: the theme is your website’s foundation, not the tool you will use to build each page. For years, choosing a theme meant finding the template that most closely resembled the result you wanted. Today, the theme provides the basic design rules and the pages are built with the editor.

The theme and the editor: two different things

In WordPress, two elements are constantly confused. You need to distinguish them now because everything that follows depends on it.

• The theme decides what your website looks like. The colours, typefaces, content width, header and footer. It is the visual foundation for the entire website.
• The editor decides how you build it. It is the tool where you place every piece of text, every image and every button, page by page.

In WordPress, some paid themes include their own editor, which replaces the WordPress editor. This is called a visual builder. Divi and Elementor are the best known. When you install one of them, you are not just choosing an appearance: you are changing the tool you will use to build your website.

Why do we use the WordPress editor instead of a builder?

With WordPress, there are two ways to build a website: use the editor that is already integrated, the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg), or install a visual builder such as Divi or Elementor. Both options work and can produce good websites. In this journey, we use the first option and it is important to understand why: one is not good and the other bad, the difference lies in our working method.

Because AI will build your website and it needs a language it knows

When AI writes a page, it does so in a specific format. The WordPress editor format is standard and public: AI knows it very well and knows how to write and understand it when it reads it. Each builder’s format belongs to that tool and AI knows it much less well. It is like dictating a text to someone in their own language or in a language they only partially understand.

Because you need to be able to edit what the AI builds yourself

The WordPress editor produces ordinary blocks: a heading, an image, a button. You can select them with a few clicks, exactly where they are. With a builder, the design exists inside its own system: to edit it, you need to enter its interface and learn its rules. Here, the goal is for your website not to depend on anyone, not even on a tool.

Because fewer layers mean fewer things to learn and maintain

A builder is a complete program added on top of WordPress: its licence, its updates and its weight on every page. With the WordPress editor, you work with one tool, the one you already have. With a block theme, that tool also controls the header, footer and styles across the entire website. For someone who is just starting out, this matters more than it may seem.

When is a builder useful?

When you want to design the website yourself visually, with effects that the WordPress editor does not provide by default: animations, carousels and precise settings for each screen size. It is a serious approach that is also taught on Scale & Own: on the blog, you will find the complete Divi 5 series, from installation to the first page, with Install Divi 5, How to Use Divi 5, Create Your First Page with Divi 5, and Create a Menu and Footer with Divi 5.

Free or premium WordPress themes

• Free themes are installed from Appearance → Themes → Add New Theme, directly from the official WordPress directory.
• Premium themes are purchased from the developer or from a marketplace, with a one-off payment or a subscription. They generally add templates, customisation options and support.

That is all the terms free and premium mean: how the theme is distributed and paid for. They do not indicate how you will build your website. A premium theme can save you time if it offers exactly what you need, but paying for a licence does not automatically make it a better foundation for your project. For this journey, a free block theme is enough because artificial intelligence will build the design on top of it.

If you choose another theme one day, check three things: it should be suitable for the type of website you want to create, continue to receive updates and work with the WordPress editor without depending on proprietary features that are difficult to replace.

The theme we use at Scale & Own: Twenty Twenty-Five

Of all the block themes available, we will use Twenty Twenty-Five in this journey. It is the official WordPress theme and the most sensible choice for four reasons.

It is already installed

It is included with WordPress: you have nothing to buy or download from a third-party website.

It is maintained by WordPress

It is updated with each version of the content management system. It will not become incompatible or disappear because a developer abandons the project.

It is a neutral foundation

It does not impose a strong visual style, which is exactly what we need: you will build your design on top of it instead of fighting against someone else’s.

It is the best documented

When you ask artificial intelligence to do something, it will know this theme better than any other because it appears in the official documentation and in most tutorials.

One clarification to avoid confusion: WordPress regularly publishes new default themes. When the next one is released, everything you learn here will remain valid because you are not learning how to use a specific theme, but how to work with block themes.

How to install and activate Twenty Twenty-Five

Open Appearance → Themes in your WordPress dashboard.

In most cases, Twenty Twenty-Five will already be there and will probably be active because it is the default theme installed with WordPress. If that is the case, you do not need to do anything else: you are ready for the next step.

If you cannot find it, install it as follows:

• Click Add New Theme at the top of the screen.
• Enter Twenty Twenty-Five in the search field.
• Move your cursor over the theme and click Install.
• When the installation is complete, click Activate.

Next step

You now know what a theme does, how it differs from the editor you will use to build your website, and why a free block theme combined with the integrated WordPress editor is sufficient for this journey. Twenty Twenty-Five is active on your website and ready to use.

Once you have chosen the theme, the next step is to understand how WordPress organises what you will place inside it. You will then discover WordPress pages and posts: what they are, how they differ and how they are organised.

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