Choose the Right WordPress Theme: Block Theme or Page Builder Theme

Choosing the right theme plays a crucial role in how fast, efficient, and flexible your WordPress website can be. The ideal theme should be lightweight, well-structured, easy to customize, and help you build the site you want, while also staying up-to-date no matter how your site evolves.

This blog post is aimed at developers who combine a theme with a visual website-building tool - whether that's the block editor or a page builder. These tools let you customize page layouts and templates without writing a single line of code.

Based on the tool you choose, there are two main types of themes:

• Block themes – used with the block editor (like Gutenberg)
• Page builder themes – used with third-party page builders (such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, etc.)

After giving an overview of the pros and cons, I’ll share my top FREE theme recommendations for both types to help you make a more informed and confident choice.

Block Themes (FSE Themes)

Pros and Cons

Block themes (also known as Full Site Editing themes or FSE themes) are a new generation of WordPress themes built entirely around the block editor (Gutenberg). They allow users to create, design, and customize every layout of their website, including headers, footers, sidebars, 404 page, and more, by using blocks directly within the WordPress editor.

Block themes use the theme.json file to define global styles such as colors, typography, and spacing instead of using PHP as classic themes do. This approach enables you to style your site visually and more consistently, without needing to write PHP code. The system of templates and patterns is ready to use as well.

Since block themes don’t rely on third-party builders, the page speed is extremely fast and optimized without speed-up plugins.

This type of theme is a modern and future-proof approach aligned perfectly with WordPress direction. By adopting tools and themes built around the latest WordPress technologies, you can ensure that your website stays compatible with upcoming updates and innovations.

Despite their advantages, block themes have some notable limitations. They lack fine-grained responsive controls. This means developers and site owners may have limited options to fine-tune how their layouts adapt across different devices and screen sizes. The user experience on mobile or tablet devices can sometimes suffer.

The variety of available blocks is still limited. Block themes do not provide a few interactive elements, such as a countdown, slider, or accordion. Therefore, you often need to install additional plugins to add those features. Other functionalities like conditional logic and animation are the same.

One key shortcoming of block themes is the absence of dynamic data support. In details, you can not get dynamic data from a custom field plugin (e.g Meta Box). This makes it challenging to build highly personalized or data-driven websites purely with block themes.

Recommendations

Although the number of block themes is rapidly growing, only a several have gained strong community recognition. You can use the default themes or other themes such as Ollie, Spectra One, Frost, etc. Each theme has its own strengths and unique use cases. When it comes to real-world projects, these are the three themes I keep coming back to.

Twenty Twenty-Five

This is the latest default block theme, and it introduces several unique strengths that make it a standout choice among block themes. Besides the pros of the block theme in general, these are some reasons why you should use Twenty Twenty-Five:

It is designed as a starter design framework. It gives users creative freedom to build layouts from scratch using patterns, rather than locking them into a predefined structure.

This theme includes nearly 40 pre-designed block patterns, covering common page types like homepage, about, contact, call-to-action sections, and more. These patterns make it easy to quickly assemble pages without any page builder or coding.

Last but not least, since it is developed and maintained by the core WordPress team, it is always fully aligned with the latest WordPress updates and features. This close integration means users rarely encounter compatibility issues when updating their WordPress installation. Additionally, because it serves as a reference theme for new WordPress releases, Twenty Twenty-Five undergoes rigorous testing alongside WordPress core updates, ensuring stability and performance.

Ollie

It stands out for its user-friendly onboarding experience thanks to integration with the Onboarding Wizard within the theme, making it ideal for beginners and non-technical users. With a wide variety of pre-built block patterns, intuitive layout options, and smart style variations, Ollie lets you build stunning pages quickly without touching code.

You can spend about 1 hour building a website only, including content management with the setup wizard.

Its design feels modern and lively, with just the right balance between creativity and clarity. Whether you're launching a personal site, a portfolio, or a small business website, Ollie offers a flexible and fun starting point for any project.

One major plus for this block theme is its clear documentation, frequent blog updates, and a supportive community, making it much easier for users to get started and troubleshoot when needed.

Frost

While many block themes prioritize trendy visuals, Frost is thoughtfully designed for professionals. Its typography, spacing, and layout choices are precise, not just stylish, but built for clarity and consistency across pages.

This is an example of a website for interior design. As you can see, the fonts and block spacing are clean and elegant right out of the box, so you don’t have to spend much time styling things manually.

One of Frost’s strongest advantages lies in its system of patterns, layouts, and styles. They're not only polished and consistent, but also ready to use without tweaking, helping you save hours of trial-and-error design work.

On top of that, the theme is incredibly lightweight and performance-focused, loading fast right out of the box. It avoids the bloat many themes carry, making it a smart choice for anyone who values SEO, speed, and a frictionless user experience.

Page Builder Themes

If you’re using a page builder to build your site, this type of theme may be the right choice for you. As the name suggests, it is a WordPress theme specifically designed to work seamlessly with visual page builder plugins.

The themes of this type, such as Astra, Kadence, Blocksy, and GeneratePress, allow you to customize the patterns, templates, and layouts through their Customizer or the integration page builder for editing.

Pros and Cons

The key advantages that make page builder themes a popular choice among WordPress users are:

• Highly flexible: create virtually any layout with drag-and-drop tools.
• Large ecosystem of plugins, templates, and widgets to extend functionality.
• The active community where you can find support.

Despite these benefits, there are some disadvantages you should be aware of before deciding to use a page builder theme.

• Some page builders generate bloated code, which can slow down website performance.
• You need to learn and find where are the features you want.
• Not suitable for beginners.

Recommendations

Each theme reaches its full potential when paired with a specific plugin or tool. For example: Hello theme + Elementor, GeneratePress theme + GenerateBlocks, Kadence Theme + Kadence Blocks, etc. However, they also support other page builders if you prefer more flexibility. Out of all the options, these two stood out to me as the most impressive.

Astra

Astra is one of the most popular WordPress themes, with a massive library of pre-built starter templates. This theme has been around for a long time. It initially offered strong support for Elementor and later expanded to work well with other page builders. With several major advantages, Astra still manages to stay ahead of many newer themes.

It’s extremely fast and lightweight. Astra can integrate with WooCommerce, Gutenberg, and most of the page builders, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, etc.

This offers hundreds of pre-designed starter templates, allowing users to launch professional-looking sites in minutes. It also provides granular customization options via the WordPress Customizer, without requiring any coding. Whether you're a beginner, freelancer, or agency, Astra offers a flexible, scalable foundation for virtually any type of website.

Astra offers highly customized layouts, styles on the intuitive interface. It boasts a custom layout module that comes with a hooks option. This theme has over 1 million active installations thanks to a balance of performance and design flexibility.

Although Astra has been around for a long time, it has consistently evolved to keep up with modern design trends. Even the free version of Astra offers a rich set of features, including layout controls, responsive design, color and typography settings, and fast performance - making it one of the most powerful free themes available today.

Blocksy

What makes Blocksy truly stand out from the crowd is the way it combines modern tech, intuitive UX, and professional-grade design control, all while maintaining top-tier performance.

Blocksy is highly compatible with page builders like Elementor, Brizy, and Beaver Builder. It doesn’t force you into one workflow but instead enhances whichever builder you prefer. This builder-agnostic approach gives you freedom to scale and switch tools without changing themes.

Blocksy offers one of the richest Customizer experiences available (and the most beautiful from my perspective). Users can visually adjust layout, typography, colors, header/footer, and even conditional elements – all live and intuitive. Unlike other themes that require complex settings panels, Blocksy puts real-time design control at your fingertips, making it perfect for both beginners and advanced users.

In the case that you want to take a look at more themes for the page builders, you can refer to this review.

Last Words

We hope this post has made it easier for you to choose the right WordPress theme. Selecting a theme that balances performance, customization, and visual appeal can significantly optimize your website, helping you achieve your goals more efficiently while saving time and effort.

What’s your favorite theme? We’d love to hear your thoughts! If you’re looking to dive deeper into WordPress and Meta Box, feel free to explore our other helpful series. Thanks for reading!