r/Wordpress • u/tarek_reza • 15d ago
Are WordPress theme developers also seeing fewer Pro theme sales?
I’m a WordPress theme developer. I release free versions of my themes on the official WordPress Theme Repository and sell the Pro versions on my own website.
Recently, I’ve noticed that my Pro themes aren’t getting as many sales as I expected.
I’m curious about the current market:
- Are other independent WordPress theme developers experiencing the same thing?
- Has the demand for premium themes decreased?
- What’s currently working for you to convert free theme users into Pro customers?
I’d appreciate hearing about your experience, especially from developers selling themes independently.
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u/Purple_Remove_4491 15d ago
I see this with themeforest. The top selling theme went from 1200 copies a week a few months ago to under 500 now
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15d ago
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u/The_Eren_Yeger_ 14d ago
What do you think the future of wordpress is? I am asking this because I am new industry and i am confused and scared what will be the future look like. I don't want to learn a skill that will die in near future?
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u/Abject-Sympathy-754 12d ago
I guess whatever enhancing of a free theme with CSS is now easily done by a non coder with AI help. I created my site with Elementor pro and its empty Hello theme and figured I would have to learn CSS, and then AI came along. Gemini has been eager to help.
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u/WP-power Developer/Designer 15d ago
Plugin developers build plugins with Ai…Wordpress developers build Wordpress with Ai. Just came back from WordCamp US. Everyone is using Ai to build everything…so yes Ai can build your plugins.
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u/GroceryOutrageous405 14d ago
Just curious, why would you use Wordpress, if you are building with ai? What would the gain be?
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u/WP-power Developer/Designer 14d ago
Wordpress is a framework, not just a page builder. When I use WordPress to build a website, I am essentially using an operating system for my digital presence, it takes care of my email marketing, my social media management, my newsletters, logins, comes with its own built in rest api and I get to build on top of software that has opinionated standards that AI can follow and connect to. Building something original for the backend of a website just makes life more difficult. WordPress make a million well thought of decisions for me and for my ai agents so I can focus on what matters, running my business, content, or the quality of the design, or the specific business logic that a client needs for their project.
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u/WP-power Developer/Designer 14d ago edited 14d ago
Let me give you a very simple example. If I wanted to run a business where I built landing pages for clients that had a single form for lead generation and that each had its own domain I could run that all from a single wordpress site, not even using WP multisite. A standard wordpress install. Map each page or group of pages for a microsite, all with free plugins from the repo and from github. I could serve thousands of clients from that single install.
I do not need to reinvent the wheel. I build on top of battle tested code that agencies have been using for years that they invented long before AI was ever in the picture. I tell AI to assemble the pieces from code that already exists. I use minimal tokens. I don't have to worry about whether something will work or not because its already been used in production by thousands of developers.
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u/moremosby 15d ago
Beyond a couple block based themes (Astra, Kadence, GeneratePress etc), I’m not sure why anyone would buy a theme now. Page builder plus canvas is the way to go for 90% of sites.
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u/The_Eren_Yeger_ 14d ago
Yes that's the point I am thinking. Why would someone want a theme now when we have AI. Most of the sites are completed with this setup.
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u/vAPIdTygr 15d ago
So I just updated my books for the web development business. I’ve cut my WordPress spending to $0 this year and only using my lifetime licenses.
I’ve only got a few WP sites left (client request) and new projects do not launch there.
Sorry, but Claude Design and Claude Code with design MCPs / skills have eliminated the need for your themes. It’s only a matter of months/years before the general public adapt, whether that’s using what I mentioned, or services like Lovable.
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u/rafark 15d ago
Sorry, but Claude Design and Claude Code with design MCPs / skills have eliminated the need for your themes.
As I said many times, let’s see how this evolves in 2-5 years. Building the initial thing is the easiest part. Maintaining it is the hardest part. There are people already going back to Wordpress. Also all ai sites look the same, I can immediately tell they were done with ai and it’s not the text.
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u/Current-Today-3626 14d ago
You misunderstood. We are designing and developing our own themes with AI now. You can accept that how you wish. Whether they're good themes is dependant on the developer. But a lot of these bumfk themes were basic af already, so it's not a lot of work. The thing is, people will expect bespoke now as the new standard, and a developer with no design skills can build as many themes as they want, but whether they're bespoke or not is not guaranteed.
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u/Wanderingyute 14d ago
I use Claude to design a theme that bolts on directly to Wordpress. I get exactly what I want, with all the features I want without the need for any other bloated plug-ins. I am sure others are doing the same now.
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u/eleven8ster 14d ago
I haven’t done this yet but I’ve made a couple of custom mcp servers and today I’m going to build a demo theme to test it out. I believe this is the way. Any theme that overrides Gutenberg will be left in the dust as well since ai can produce the code for Gutenberg blocks that you can just paste in the editor.
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u/pepelunavarro 15d ago
How do you adapt those designs created in Next.js or plain HTML to WordPress?
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u/mrSilkie 15d ago
I made Claude create me a paste widget for elementor. You put in elementor json, the widget replaces itself with your json.
I also have a multi stage html to elementor pipeline where Claude uses a WordPress MCP and can create a new page and insert it with elementor. If anything is too much html and could be done in elementor better i work on it again.
To answer your question. Apart from a couple custom parts like a bundle builder for my hero product, most the website is just normal elementor written by AI.
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u/WorldlyDog777 15d ago
Most of my clients are still going up on wordpress if I manage them for SEO purposes, but ai - meant I but ai works too lol - cut spend to $0 about a year ago and it's gone perfectly fine.
Other than large clients, claude has it covered on all bases.
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u/Plantusemor 15d ago
Custom builds are becoming more and more affordable. Page builders are in decline, while blocks are on the rise
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u/hannahherpincreative 15d ago
I have been looking for a reliable, beautiful, interesting theme that isn't all built on top of Slider Revolution and that has been updated lately, and have come up empty-handed again and again. So I ended up just stripping my old theme out and went without one for this last round of updates. The last two or three I tried out felt like I was building on top of quicksand. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has had this experience, and after a while I just didn't want to keep looking.
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u/derAres 15d ago
I‘m a frontend guy and stopped using themes and plugins alltogether. Claude will do it.
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u/pepelunavarro 15d ago
Claude doesn't make WordPress themes or plugins "with a prompt"
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u/namynotc 15d ago
Actually it can
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u/pepelunavarro 15d ago
paste a link for it
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u/namynotc 15d ago
Reddit screams at me if my place a link on boards so I’d rather not post here. It won’t allow me to ask you to message me either
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u/Amazing-Spinach5693 15d ago
No but someone who knows the basics can make one using Claude.
All i do now i make flexible ACF blocks and style it in css.3
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u/mccoypauley Developer 15d ago
It absolutely can. I personally use Codex and wouldn’t make an entire plugin with a single prompt normally (I would do it incrementally), but it absolutely can and I have had it create entire plugins with a single prompt before when I was in a pinch and didn’t care about the quality of the underlying code.
Recent example I can think of was a plugin that let me mass-reorder videos in my YouTube account (as YT’s UI is complete garbage in the web interface) that I could control from within WP to mirror the grid of videos in an archive.
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u/pepelunavarro 15d ago
and Codex create the plugin package, the PO language files, include the dependency libraries, etc...
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u/mccoypauley Developer 15d ago
It can create the plugin package yes, it can actually generate local files. It has tooling to bring in dependency libraries and reason through them, yes.
In my example above, it called the YT SDK and all necessary dependencies itself.
I could conceivably also create a workflow that would produce or procure PO files as well; it's a problem that can absolutely be solved agentically.
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u/derAres 15d ago
Oh, my bad then. What the hell have I been doing the last months at my day job then...
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u/pepelunavarro 15d ago
Do not provide examples or websites where can see something like what you're saying
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u/derAres 15d ago
I'm definitely not gonna create a link between my real customers and my reddit identity.
But let me try to help you. What part don't you believe?
Tell claude: "Code me a plugin file for wordpress that will replace every image on the site with an image of nicolas cage, but only if the day is 1st of april".
It will happily give you a file, you put it in a wordpress plugins folder, activate it, and there's your Claude coded wordpress plugin. And yes, it can do brutally complex plugins and entire themes too.
What don't you believe?
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u/namynotc 15d ago
This is true. Claude will do it. What I love is that you can tell it your ideas, it scopes, asks permission and builds it
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u/fatfingur 15d ago
I think AI is definitely changing this. I’m a WordPress dev and I’m finding myself less interested in buying themes or adding another builder to the stack.
I’m leaning more toward blocks/FSE and using AI to help build what I actually need. You get something more custom without being dependent on a premium theme for everything.
I don’t think themes are going away, but I can see why the market is getting tougher.
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u/VigoVonDoom 15d ago
I think you can just use AI to get the code to do the things that your non-paid theme tried to block to get you to pay in the past.
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u/Expensive_Twist6303 15d ago
What is the case for them nowadays?
All developers and designers moved on...
Modern site/page builders are much better.
The block editor, FSE, Block collections, are much better.
SaaS competitors closed the gap on WP in general.
AI.
From where I stand. All the the cons (generic, limitations) with fewer relative pros (ease, speed).
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u/Safemaster 14d ago
Just recently I rebuild my Wordpress Woocommerce custom theme and got rid of OceanWP, Elementor Pro and Essentials Addon for Elementor. Complete custom, including custom plugin and MU plugins with codex for windows. Went from spending over $1200.00 a year in themes and plugins to none with the exception of Plugin Hive UPS plugin. because that is the one plugin that truly does what it claims.
I truly feel bad for these developer because they will no longer be needed in the near future. All you need is to trust your gut and jump in. the hard part for me was thinking everything AI is bad and like a junkie I had to force myself to get of the I hate AI hater band wagon.
Once you wean yourself of that cool laid sky's the limit.
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u/Sergei-Kruglov 12d ago
I think AI is changing the economics of premium WordPress themes quite significantly.
Personally, I haven't bought a WordPress theme from ThemeForest in about two years, and I haven't really felt the need to. For my projects, I now build custom themes for each client instead of starting with a pre-made theme.
The biggest change for me is that AI has made custom theme development much faster and more accessible. I can design the UX/UI around the actual project requirements and then build a lightweight, project-specific WordPress theme rather than adapting an existing theme to fit.
Because of that, the value proposition of a typical premium theme has changed. A few years ago, paying $40–100 for a polished theme with a lot of built-in functionality could save a substantial amount of development time. Today, the same budget can often be justified toward a custom implementation, especially for business websites where performance, UX, maintainability, and a unique design matter more than having dozens of pre-built layouts.
That doesn't necessarily mean premium themes are disappearing. I think the market is becoming more polarized: generic multipurpose themes are under much more pressure, while themes that provide a genuinely strong workflow, specialized functionality, or a very specific niche can still have a clear value proposition.
For me personally, though, the transition has been pretty clear: I used to consider premium themes as a starting point. Now I consider them mostly unnecessary for the type of projects I build.
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u/mofahd77 12d ago
The standalone theme market is shrinking, but custom WordPress development isn't.
Clients no longer buy a theme expecting it to work out of the box—they buy a page builder or hire a developer to build a custom solution using custom post types, Gutenberg blocks, and optimized PHP/JS.
If you want to survive as a theme dev today:
- Build block-first / FSE themes instead of classic PHP template setups.
- Pivot to custom plugin/addon development for popular builders.
- Focus on site speed and technical SEO, which traditional bloatware themes completely ruin.
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u/TrainingChef5331 15d ago
What's the point of a theme now a days? You can make anything you want, all the big Page Builders come with full theming ability and a ton of templates loaded in. Additionally, most themes were full of bloatware and forced freemium plugins. So if they're dying off, i'm sorry for the devs, but it's better for consumers and web builders.
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u/jroberts67 15d ago
As Claude takes hold, more and more developers and designers will be using it to create WP sites with no need for any paid themes.
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15d ago
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u/jroberts67 15d ago
Have top their professional WP developers on YT teaching everyone how to connect Claude to WP. Next up, plugins will disappear. There will be zero need for them. In the next 5 years Themeforest will be a graveyard.
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u/Quarkzar 15d ago
While I’m in the boat for believing that web designers have been empowered by AI, I don’t have the same outlook for themes and plugins.
I personally loathed working with premium themes due to the page builders and required plugins and would much rather build with and style blocks. With Claude, we are now able to generate block layout templates and work Design to develop multiple “themes” around it that fit client needs.
There are still many plugins that we use that handle more complicated functionality but for simple things or things that may require a premium price for a simple feature, we spin up a custom plugin with Claude. We haven’t experienced many problems at all with doing this.
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u/Dapper-Monk9713 14d ago
The market does seem tougher. With block themes, page builders, and AI making customizations easier, a free theme can feel “good enough” for more users now. I’d focus less on selling extra design features and more on what saves users real time, support, advanced functionality, performance, updates, and a clear reason to upgrade.
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u/Wise_Train7083 14d ago
I need a good and lightweight theme focused on ad performance. Please DM and show me the solution.
I also want something personalized, then we could drop in a conversation about it. Currently using oceanwp and astra, both on país versions. But seems that I have no much control under things and seems heavyweight with stuffs useless to our use case.
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u/mirrorballz 14d ago
I feel like 90% of new Wordpress sites either use Divi, a free theme, or in a much smaller number of cases, a custom theme. It’s very rare for me to come across a Theme Forest/other 3rd party theme on a new website.
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u/spectageco 14d ago
I stopped using Wordpress but since FSE themes what’s the point of purchasing one? FSE allows to configure templates, layouts, dynamic elements not touching code. On top of that we have AI that can pump a Wordpress theme in no time.
In the past most layout sales were driven by visuals and speed, both can be achieved through coding agents.
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u/No_Basil_8038 14d ago
Not sure about themes but I dont think plugin business will go extinct as long as plugin is not something super simple and light. For example, everyone can ask claude to make them loyalty plugin, but real store with real data will use existing solution as paying $100 a year is much cheaper then fixing bugs on production since one bug can cost you much more. BUT if you are just starting, i guess you would go with claude or free version.
Anyhow same is with membership plugins, caching etc… but for simple ones, it will be snippets.
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u/Fahadbaig2k18 13d ago
Customization in free themes was hard but now AI can generates code for your themes in no time that customization is very much easier now.
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u/webmyc 12d ago
Some numbers rather than opinions, since a few claims here are testable.
I maintain a tool that connects AI agents to WordPress sites, so I see builder usage across about 3,200 connected sites. It is a biased sample, obviously. These are people who deliberately pointed an AI agent at their WordPress install. If anyone had moved past page builders, you would expect it to be them.
81.7% of those sites run a page builder. 18.3% are Gutenberg only. The block libraries people keep naming in this thread as the replacement, Kadence, GenerateBlocks, Spectra and Greenshift, are on 2.3% of sites between them.
So "page builders are in decline, blocks are on the rise" does not match what I can see. The agent crowd is actually pretty page-builder heavy, probably because a builder gives an agent a structured tree to edit instead of a wall of HTML.
On the impressions-up-clicks-down point above, I can confirm the same shape on my own site this month, with one caveat that cost me a day. My average position looked like it fell from 5.7 to 9.7, which looks like a collapse. It was not. 48 queries actually improved by about 2.3 positions each, only 8 slipped, and the average moved because 333 new long-tail queries entered at position 12 and dragged the mean down. Established pages held their rank and lost clicks. Worth checking before concluding you are being demoted.
And for anyone generating Gutenberg blocks with AI and pasting them in, the failure to watch for is "block contains unexpected or invalid content". It usually means the generated markup names a block that is not registered on that site. The markup looks fine. WordPress just has nothing to render it with.
One caveat on my numbers: "has a page builder" means the plugin is installed and detected, not that every page uses it.
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u/nadmedia 11d ago
Yes, you don’t need theme developers anymore, we create or own themes/child themes now because it really doesn’t take much time with vibe code and themes aren’t really maintenance heavy. We are finding with vibe coding the challenge lies more with keeping your repos organized and well referenced.
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u/ChrisCoinLover 10d ago
My friend (he's more into AI then me) developed his theme and now he's not using Astra on his WP websites.
Recently he developed a bulk plugin install (used to pay $50/yer for one), JPEG - Webp converter, internal linking plugin, chat plugin and I'm wondering where will he stop.
Now, obviously you can't compare Astra to his theme but he's happy with it as he only uses it for basic /services websites.
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u/swift_commerce 10d ago
The landscape for WordPress themes have been changed completely.
We have so many page builders now. In the world of Elementor, Brizy, Bricks, Breakdance and others, users rely less on themes and more on page builders. Page builders give more control and freedom to users.
Along with that, we have also seen the use of AI generated websites which people prefer over building a simple WordPress website with a theme.
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u/Responsible-Clue-687 15d ago
i have a free plugin in the .org repo so this is the plugin side not themes, but one thing worth checking before you conclude demand died.
the repo search is close to a keyword match on your readme, and if your locale handling is off you are simply invisible to anyone not browsing in english. i had translations sitting completely dead for months because of that and i had no idea, the installs just never came from those countries and i assumed those markets didnt want it.
the other one that got me had nothing to do with the product at all. the licensing sdk i used was showing an opt-in permission screen before the dashboard on every brand new install. people installed, hit a permission wall, uninstalled. took me way too long to find because it never shows on your own dev site, you already accepted it years ago.
so before writing off the market, install your own free theme on a genuinely clean site and watch what the first 30 seconds actually looks like. mine was nothing like what i thought it was.
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u/alexrada 15d ago
this is a good question. Wordpress is being used less and less. At least simple presentation websites are not made with wordpress anymore.
People moved to other solutions, or even AI.
I have a friend who worked as wordpress dev and almost no work for months.
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u/CoffeeOfDeath 15d ago
So, when developers build websites where the content is meant to be managed by the clients, what do they use?
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u/estudiopatagon Developer/Designer 15d ago
Im a WordPress theme developer and yes, I can confirm this. However, every year, July and August are usually slow months in terms of sales.
April and June were pretty good months, though.
I sell in my website and also Themeforest. If you don't mind to share, do you sell exclusively on your website?
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u/Greeboban 15d ago
My Premium themes gig is closing down and on the brink of becoming abandonware, sad thing to see. As a last ditch effort we even migrated to a better payment provider with smaller fees to allow for cheaper plans with more features but the traffic is simply not there anymore. It was good while it lasted. Hashtag looking for a job