There are thousands of WordPress themes, and most of them are wrong for you. The good news is that the right choice is simpler than it looks, because the things that actually matter come down to three: speed, clean code, and getting out of your way.
What actually matters in a theme
Speed. A heavy theme drags your loading time down, and slow pages hurt both your rankings and the patience of your readers. Lightweight beats feature-stuffed every time.
Clean, well-built code that plays nicely with Google and with the plugins you’ll add later. And a theme that lets you make your site look the way you want without a fight.
What doesn’t matter: a demo with 300 templates you’ll never use, bundled with so much bloat the site crawls. I used Thrive for years; these days I want less, not more.
The theme I use: Blocksy
This site runs on Blocksy, and it’s what I’d recommend to most people. It’s fast, it’s modern, it works beautifully with the standard WordPress editor, and the free version does almost everything you need — header and footer builders, clean layouts, proper control over how things look. No bloat, no lock-in.
If you want to look around, GeneratePress and Kadence are the other two I’d happily recommend — both fast, both lean, both excellent. You won’t go wrong with any of the three. The one thing I’d avoid is a heavy, do-everything theme that slows your site to a crawl before you’ve written a word.
Some links on this site are affiliate links. I only recommend tools I’ve actually used.