Thomas Richter

Founder & Lead Developer at ThemeTrail

I got into WordPress when it was still just a blogging tool. Version 2.5, if I remember right. A client wanted an online brochure and I figured WordPress could handle it. Turned out I was wrong about a lot of things that week, but that project got me hooked on theme development.

By 2012 I had enough freelance theme work under my belt to launch ThemeTrail. The idea was simple: build themes that don't fight you. Clean code, good documentation, fast support. No bloated page builders bolted on top.

Our best-known theme was Realty — a real estate WordPress theme that ended up on 1,600+ sites. It wasn't the flashiest option on ThemeForest, but agents kept buying it because the property search actually worked and the code didn't make their developer cry.

What I Do Now

I stopped selling themes in 2016. The market got crowded with multipurpose monsters shipping 40MB zip files, and honestly? I didn't want to compete on feature count. I wanted to compete on quality, and the economics stopped making sense.

These days I do three things:

Review themes. Not the "here are 50 themes with affiliate links" kind. I install each one on a staging site, import demo content, run speed tests, and look at the actual code. If the theme ships jQuery in 2026, I'll tell you.

Write guides. Practical stuff. How to actually set up a real estate site, not theory about what a CMS is. The kind of guide I wished existed when I was figuring this out 15 years ago.

Build tools. Small, useful things. Speed comparison data for popular themes so you don't have to run the tests yourself.

My Take on WordPress Themes in 2026

The theme market is weird right now. Full-site editing changed everything, and half the "top" themes still haven't caught up. Meanwhile, lightweight frameworks like GeneratePress and Kadence are eating the market because they got the fundamentals right: fast loading, clean hooks, no jQuery dependency.

If you're picking a theme today, the single most important thing is this: does it pass Core Web Vitals with demo content installed? If not, walk away. Google cares about speed more than ever, and no amount of pretty design saves you from a 6-second load time.

That's what I write about here. No fluff. No "top 100 themes" lists padded to hit a word count. Just honest opinions from someone who's been reading theme code for way too long.

Articles by Thomas