New Year, new themes! We’ve been hard at work developing new themes to help you kickstart 2025. Whether you are building your very first website or looking to refresh an existing site, these new options can help you achieve the design you want.

Dadaist

• Designed for: Research Projects and Archives
• Also great for: Blogs, Digital Zines and Magazines, News, Advocacy

Dadaism pushed the boundaries of what was considered art with absurdism and flair – with Dadaist, you too can reject the boring linearity and blank spaces of common web design. Dadaist hearkens back to a different era of handmade collages, irregular lines, and bold color pairings, giving you a one-of-a-kind website that embraces the best of both digital and print design. 

With posts organized into an assemblage-inspired feed, this theme is a great choice for sharing research collections or blog posts. You can add additional pages, like an About or Contact page, in the main header while the subheader is a perfect place to separate your content into multiple collections using tags. A boldly designed subscription block dominates the footer, making it easy for your followers to sign up to receive new content directly in their inbox.

Koinonia

• Designed for: Non-Profits and Community-Driven Projects
• Also great for: Political Campaigns, Advocacy Organizations

Put your mission front and center with Koinoia, a theme built to support NPOs through advocacy, community engagement, and donations. Koinonia is clean and modern, ensuring that your organization’s digital home feels both reputable and professional for visitors old and new. Use your homepage to share your value proposition, mission statement, and additional content to help visitors quickly understand who you serve and what you offer the community. 

With high readability and easy navigation, supporters can find everything they need, whether they want to join your network of volunteers through a built-in form, browse your community’s service offerings, or make a well-deserved online donation (tip: many digital payment processors offer discounted rates for non-profits).

Kentwood

• Designed for: Learning Institutions
• Also great for: Summer Camps, Sports and Hobby Leagues 

At a busy institution, you need to handle questions and resources for a variety of stakeholders, from current staff and students to potential families. With Kentwood, you can ensure you are building a professional and reputable digital brand that meets a family’s needs, from their first visit through graduation.

With two layers of navigation, students and staff can quickly link out to academic resources without compromising space for in-depth information for current and prospective families. Your homepage highlights your brand with custom photography and blog updates while additional pages give you ample space for well-organized long-form content. No matter where they land, families will be impressed with your institution’s plethora of resources.

Professio

• Designed for: Teachers and Tutors
• Also great for: Speakers, Coaches, City Guides

Professio allows private teachers and tutors to create a digital hub for current and potential students. With a simple but visually impactful two-tone theme available in three color waves, it’s you can quickly build a design-forward website for your teaching business. With Professio’s pre-built homepage blocks, you can quickly introduce your services, answer FAQs, and build credibility with downloadable materials, blog posts, and testimonials. Once prospective students are ready to book a course, they can sign up digitally via a form or email. 

Whatever you need to grow your teaching business, Professio can scale beautifully so that you can focus on what matters most: your students.

Streamer

• Designed for: Gamers, Streamers, and Esports Personalities
• Also great for: Bloggers, Podcasters

With black and neon color palettes and futuristic fonts, Streamer brings gamer vibes right out of the box. With Streamer, you control your content in one central location: share exclusive team updates, rep your sponsors, create custom content, or upload a complete library of your Videos On Demand directly on WordPress. Cross-platform fans can become subscribers to get your fully-branded content directly in their inbox.

Got merch? With WooCommerce for Spotify, you can sell personalized products directly on your Streamer website.

Vueo

• Designed for: Digital Portfolios
• Also great for: Bakeries, Microbreweries, Product-Forward Brick & Mortars

When you’re a visual creator, you want your images to take center stage. With Veuo’s full-width image gallery, your homepage will feel like a bespoke, archival experience. A neutral color palette and unobtrusive text ensure that your artistic style, not the template, defines your website’s ultimate look and feel. When viewers click on an image, they can see it in higher resolution alongside any additional information you’d like to provide. Have multiple oeuvres or themes within your portfolio? Automatically create clickable subcollection pages with tags. 

Add your bio or artist statement alongside social media links in your footer, making it easy for fans and potential collectors to follow along on your creative journey. Whatever your style, you can be sure that Vueo will let your work shine.

---

Ready to try out a new look for your website in 2025? You can explore these themes further by clicking on the Preview link and then clicking “Demo site” at the top of the page. There, you’ll be able to explore a clickable sample site to get a better sense of the theme’s appearance and feel. 

Once you’ve found a theme you love, you can click the “Activate this Design” button to customize it. Any new blocks or features you add from WordPress’s suite of tools will be automatically adjusted to match your new theme’s style.

Premium themes from Automattic are available at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. 

You can explore our extensive selection of free and third-party themes by navigating to the “Themes” page under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Third-party themes can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business plan and above. 

No matter what type of website you want to build, WordPress.com has all the tools you need to build your online home. 

Many of those features are powered by Jetpack, a versatile plugin that provides WordPress websites with a suite of essential tools for site security, performance, and more. It’s included with every WordPress.com website (even sites on our Free plan). For self-hosted sites, Jetpack tools are also available on a subscription basis, with bundled and ala carte options. 

Jetpack provides WordPress.com with tons of value. It makes sure your site performs well so you can build and create with confidence. But what exactly does Jetpack do and why should you care? Let’s look at just some of the ways Jetpack gives your WordPress.com site superpowers.  

What’s inside the Jetpack toolbox?

Jetpack offers tools in four categories to meet your website’s needs: security, performance, growth, and management. Many of these tools are included with free WordPress.com websites, with additional tools unlocked on higher plan tiers.

Jetpack Stats: Understand what’s resonating with your readers

Free; more features unlocked on Personal and above

Use Jetpack Stats to see your website performance at a glance, including how many visitors are on your site and what content is performing best. Quickly see where your traffic is coming from to better optimize your marketing and partnership strategies. Jetpack is fully GDPR compliant so you can track your visitor metrics with confidence. 

To access your free stats, navigate to the “Stats” tab in the WP Admin. For even more information on your website’s trends and insights to improve your website’s performance, upgrade to Premium.

Jetpack Social: Share in a snap

Free and above

Gone are the days of logging into every social platform to share your newest blog post with your followers. Jetpack Social lets you preview and share your content across major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Mastodon, and Threads – with just one click from within the WordPress Editor. 

Jetpack Social also enables you to automatically put quick share buttons on your posts, enabling your visitors to share their favorite content with their communities, expanding your content’s reach.

Activity Log: Keep tabs on every move

Free; additional features unlocked on Premium and above 

With the Activity Log, you always have a high-level view of changes and actions taken across your site, from comments to new posts to downloads.  Whether you have a large team of content creators or you’re trying to find the source of a pesky bug, the activity log offers transparency and accountability for every website change. 

Free users have access to the 20 most recent website updates. Upgrade to a paid plan to view your complete site activity across your plan’s data retention period.

AI Assistant: Your creative co-pilot

Free and above (limit 20 requests on Free plan, unlimited on paid plans)

With a suite of AI-assisted tools, creating engaging content for your website has never been easier. Jetpack’s AI Assistant can help you quickly generate text, lists, tables, and AI-generated images. AI can also help you edit existing content, highlight readability challenges, identify tonal shifts, and suggest word and image updates to optimize user engagement on every page.

Jetpack Blocks: Add tons of functionality to your site

Free and above

Blocks make it simple to build pages and add functionality to your site’s content. Jetpack provides WordPress.com websites with several blocks that allow you to embed content, add monetization options, customize forms, and much more. Here’s a glimpse at all the things you can do with Jetpack-powered blocks:

Akismet Anti-Spam: Keep your site squeaky clean

Free and above

Spam can attack your site faster than you can say “where’s the firewall?” but Akismet Anti-spam offers professional-grade defenses. Using advanced machine learning, Akismet can filter out 99.99% of spam in user-submitted text, including spam comments, bot form responses, and fake leads, keeping your site and CRM looking pristine and professional. 

Akismet Anti-spam can be found in the Jetpack section of the WP Admin. From there, you can monitor how much spam has been blocked across your site and choose whether you want to review or automatically delete potential spam messages.

Jetpack Newsletter: Jump from post to inbox

Free and above

You no longer need a separate platform to get your content into people’s inboxes: Jetpack Newsletter allows you to convert your blogs into emails right from your post-publish page. Jetpack offers tools to support your newsletter from start to finish, from collecting subscribers on your website to sending and tracking your newsletter’s performance – all from within WordPress.com. Already have a dedicated following? Simply import your existing subscriber list to get started.

VaultPress Backup: Your site’s safety net

Business Plan and above

Accidentally broke your site with a new plugin? Never fear: VaultPress Backup has you covered. With daily backups and additional backups created every time you make an edit, it ensures that your website is crisis-proof. 

To enable backups, simply navigate to the Jetpack tab in your WordPress Admin and select “Backup.” 

Once VaultPress Backup has been enabled, it will automatically create daily backups of your site and backups after every change, with multiple secure copies stored across the cloud. If you ever want to return to a previous version of your site, click the date arrows to navigate to the date you want to roll back to. Click the “Restore to this point” button to revert your site with just one click.

Jetpack Search: Ctrl-F your content

Business and above

Do you have a large website with a lot of content? Help your visitors find what they’re looking for quickly by enabling Jetpack Search. You can turn on Jetpack Search and filtering with just one click in the Jetpack tab of WP Admin. Jetpack will automatically index all of your site content and offers flexible design options that match your brand.

For eCommerce sites, this is particularly valuable: research shows that people are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search versus standard browsing.

SEO Tools: Climb the ranks on search

Business and above

Help new users find your site with Search Engine Optimization, which helps your website climb up the ranks on popular search engines like Google. With the Jetpack SEO tools on WordPress.com Business plans and above, you can control your title tags and meta descriptions to ensure your site is optimized for search. 

You don’t have to be an expert to use Jetpack SEO: Jetpack will notify you if your text exceeds the recommended character count limitations to ensure your metadata looks great in search engine results.

Additional Plugins from Jetpack

Business plan users and above can install additional plugins to their websites. Let’s look at two top-tier plugins the Jetpack team offers to further extend your site’s capabilities.

Jetpack Boost: Make the jump to lightspeed

Paid plugin

Speed matters: just a one-second delay in website loading times can cause a 20% drop in website conversions, with slow sites causing users to experience stress equivalent to watching a horror movie or taking a math test. With Jetpack Boost, you can get suggestions to optimize your website and give your website a relative speed score. Boost will also optimize your code for ultra-fast response times, no developer required.

With Jetpack, you can be sure you’re getting the best: Boost beat out the top 5 WP performance plugins in a head-to-head test.

Jetpack CRM: Know your customers

Paid plugin

For a fully integrated, simple CRM, try out Jetpack CRM (formerly known as Zero BS CRM). Jetpack CRM allows you to manage your customers and website visitors with ease, ensuring you never lose a contact or a sale. With integrations for WooCommerce, Paypal, Stripe, Gravity Forms, and more, you can ensure all your data and sales operations are at your fingertips. Unlike complex CRM platforms, Jetpack CRM keeps things simple so that you can run your business effortlessly.

Ready for takeoff?

With Jetpack built into every WordPress.com website, you get best-in-class tools to help build and grow your site, no matter which plan you choose. It’s that special ingredient that helps make WordPress.com the best place to host your website (in our biased opinion). Sign up to create your first website today or upgrade your existing plan to access everything Jetpack has to offer.

Bringing back a frosty feature (plus more improvements for WordPress.com users)

About 17 years ago we added an option called “Show falling snow on my blog” to WordPress.com. The name said it all: it added falling snow to your blog. Then, one day, it disappeared. It wasn’t because spring came and melted the snow away. We were cleaning up code, juggling lots of different priorities, and the snow was shoveled away.  

When we first announced this bit of fun in 2007, we were inspired because WordPress co-founder and our CEO Matt Mullenweg was missing out on a White Christmas in his hometown of Houston. Ever since it went away, some of you have let us know you’ve also been missing out on snow — on WordPress.com. Thanks to everyone who reminded us, we’re bringing back this frosty feature today, available now for every WordPress.com user.

Want to join the fun? Log into your WordPress.com account and visit Settings in the left-hand sidebar. There, you’ll find an option to add some fresh powder to your site:

Voilà! With one click, your visitors can enjoy a wintry surprise, no matter where they are in the world: 

We like to think of it as a fun gift for a time of year when so many people around the world will be sharing gifts — whether or not it’s snowing where you’re writing on your blog.

Now, we know not everyone appreciates snow as much as we do. So, we’ve been working hard on a flurry of other gifts over the past few months too, adding tons of improvements to WordPress.com. Until now, we just haven’t told you about them on our blog! This seems like a great time to recognize all those other small features, improvements, and wishlist items that make the WordPress.com world just a little bit nicer:

• We added over 65 themes to our Free, Personal, and Premium plans in the last half of the year. If you haven’t taken a look at our new themes lately, take a moment and browse around now. If you’re on the Business plan and above, you can use any theme — even custom ones — but we’re always trying to make sure you have a great, curated list of high-quality options on our less expensive plans too.
• We also brought back Bulk Plugin Management, so Business and Commerce plan users can efficiently manage and update plugins across all your WordPress.com sites. If you’re managing multiple sites, this will save you a lot of time, so you can spend more time doing what you love.
• The WordPress core development team created a new component for managing data called Data Views. We’re using this functionality in our Hosting Dashboard, improving the experience of managing your sites and domains.
• Developers know that PHP — a programming language that’s near and dear to our hearts — is the backbone of the web (and WordPress itself). Never heard of it? Not to worry. Just think of PHP as the magic that makes your WordPress website possible. WordPress.com upgraded to PHP 8.1 this year, ensuring your sites maintain top-tier performance and compatibility with your favorite themes and plugins.

With all these new features and improvements, there’s snow time like the present to build your websites with WordPress.com. Feeling the giving spirit too? It’s easy to share WordPress.com with a gift subscription. No pressure, of course. Enjoy the snow, and look for even more enhancements and features to come in 2025!

💾

Another month means another fresh batch of excellent themes for WordPress.com. Let’s look at some of the latest additions to the WordPress.com themes gallery, with great options for content creators, small businesses, event organizers, and personal sites. Preview each one below (and maybe try taking one for a spin).

CoachAva

• Designed for: Professional coaches
• Also great for: Consultants, thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings

With a clean, single-hued design, minimal photography, and approachable fonts, CoachAva is built for professional coaches looking to highlight their core offerings and showcase their expertise. 

Whether you’re a seasoned executive coach, a life coach, or a subject matter expert looking to sell digital or in-person services, CoachAva can help you establish trust with potential clients by putting your thought leadership front and center. Blocks make it easy to share blog posts, podcasts, and/or customer testimonials on your homepage. The flexible design makes it easy to define, package, and showcase your different offerings, connecting clients to the perfect programs.

Explore CoachAva

CastCore

• Best for: Podcasters
• Also great for: Bloggers, serial content creators, news sites with limited photography

Ideal for podcasters building their first site, Castcore features bold, attention-grabbing titles and a minimalist aesthetic that keeps your listeners focused on what matters most – your content. 

With a simple homepage design, this template makes it easy for listeners to scroll through your recent content to find the right episode. Castcore is a great option for podcasters who want to build their subscriber base. The Podcast Player block makes it super easy to create an embedded mini-player for your episodes: simply copy your podcast’s RSS URL to engage listeners right on your page. Choose a grey and black color combo for a classic design or go young and bold with bright yellow.

Explore CastCore

CoachBen

• Designed for: Professional coaches
• Also great for: Thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings

CoachBen’s dark theme with bright accents offers a bold and professional design that perfectly reflects a coach at the top of their game. Striking and to the point, this theme allows professional coaches to quickly articulate their value proposition and define their services. 

With pre-designed blocks for displaying company logos of past clients, a calendar of speaking events, and a blog subscription, there are plenty of ways to show potential clients your expertise and experience. When they’re ready to dig in, they can learn more about specific offerings on your courses page or reach out to schedule a call.

Explore CoachBen

GreenSeed

• Designed for: Flexible visual sites
• Also Great for: Brick and mortars, Restaurants, Personal care providers, Digital portfolios, visual artists, photographers

Greenseed is a beautifully simple, highly adaptable theme that makes it easy for businesses to take their brick-and-mortar brands online. Designed with full-site editing in mind, Greenseed can be customized to match any brand style, but its open spaces and bold visuals make it a particularly great choice for businesses looking to establish a streamlined online presence that embraces custom photography. 

This minimal, approachable layout gives your photos space to breathe while providing key business information like address, phone number, and store hours. Link to your reservations page or provide visitors with a contact form to make it easy for potential customers to make an appointment or plan a visit.

Explore Greenseed

Aether

• Designed for: Small jewelry or accessory brands
• Also great for: Eco-conscious consumer brands, wedding suppliers 

Like the jewelry and accessory brands it was built for, Aether embodies modern elegance. With delicate fonts and natural-toned color palettes, this product-focused template offers a tasteful design that allows artisan accessories and jewelry to truly sparkle. 

With social media integrations and the ability to highlight products on your homepage, Aether creates a flexible hub for your digital brand. You can allow your customers to purchase products directly through WordPress’s e-commerce plugins or you can link your website to an existing storefront. With Aether, you can be sure your customers will understand your brand’s commitment to quality and design.

Explore Aether

Miko

• Designed for: Personal professional website
• Also great for: Writer portfolios, speakers, brand consultants

With a bold split-page design and minimalist elements, Miko keeps your brand center stage. Best for individuals, creators, or service providers who want to make a lasting visual impact, this template allows visitors to navigate through all of the pages of your site on the left side without ever navigating away from the image and title anchored on the right. 

Featuring a variety of hyper-modern font options and cool color combos, Miko can lean sweet and delicate or bold and artistic, effortlessly complimenting a huge range of personal and professional website identities. Regardless of the style you choose, Miko is the perfect theme for anyone who wants to present themselves as a modern, polished professional with an eye for design.

Explore Miko

Conference

The best way to market your upcoming conference is with a sleek custom website. Conference is a flexible template that helps conference planners create a credible online presence. 

The Conference template can support both marketing and event logistics: You can highlight your speakers, sponsors, and conference news to draw in new attendees via the signup form. Once attendees register, the site acts as a home base for key information, providing pages for the conference location, daily schedules, and lists of attendees to help your participants connect in advance. Whether you are hosting a multi-day affair or an intimate workshop, Conference can scale to meet the needs of your event.

Explore Conference

---

Ready to give your site a makeover? You can explore these themes by clicking the “Demo” button on each theme page. Whether you’re starting a coaching business or looking to improve your professional online presence, you might just find the perfect jumping-off point for your future website.

Most premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business or Commerce plans, so if you haven’t found what you’re looking for today, there are plenty of alternatives available.

You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard, or by clicking the button below:

Spam bots and denial-of-service attacks are a reality for many website owners. Depending on timing and scale, they can be an annoyance or a detriment to your business’s bottom line. Services like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Vercel are popular choices for mitigating these attacks with sophisticated techniques beyond the firewall rules many hosts (WordPress.com included) employ to examine and potentially block incoming traffic.

WordPress.com’s defensive mode introduces similar, sophisticated DDoS protection that further enhances your site’s security. It works by issuing proof-of-work challenges to browsers visiting the site. Legitimate users will briefly see a challenge page while their browser completes the work before accessing the site. The feature is powered by our global edge network, but it can still be enabled independently of our global edge cache feature.

What is defensive mode?

If you notice an inordinate amount of traffic to your website that is slowing it down, this setting filters spam traffic by requesting that they complete a proof-of-work challenge. When visitors come to your website for the first time, they will see the following screen:

This proof-of-work challenge page has a unique random puzzle embedded in it, along with JavaScript that can solve the puzzle. The puzzles are designed to take a typical CPU a few seconds to solve, and they deter botnets, which are not able to run the scripts to solve the puzzles.

How to enable it

This system protects all sites hosted on WordPress.com. Sites on Free, Personal, and Premium hosting plans are managed for you. For sites on Business or Commerce hosting plans, this setting can also be managed manually from your site’s Hosting Dashboard.

Here’s how to enable it:

1. Visit your Sites page by clicking on the WordPress logo in the upper left corner of your dashboard.
2. Click on your site title.
3. Click on the “Server Settings” tab on the site overview page.
4. Scroll down to the Defensive mode section.
5. Select a duration and click the “Enable defensive mode” button

Note that WordPress.com staff may proactively enable defensive mode on your behalf, regardless of what hosting plan you have, if your site is attacked.

Get it all on WordPress.com

Many hosts charge extra for capabilities like this, or they require integration with a third-party provider. On WordPress.com, defensive mode is included on every plan and can be managed manually on Business and Commerce plans.

This is just one more reason why WordPress.com stands out as the premier managed host for WordPress sites. With staging sites, SSH and WP-CLI access, or GitHub deployments, we’re always working on new tools to make WordPress.com an essential component of your development workflow. 

What other features would you like to see on WordPress.com? How can we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Let us know in the comments below.

When you’re browsing the web, how quickly do you navigate elsewhere if a website isn’t instantly loading? We all know from experience that every second counts. If your website takes too long to load, visitors won’t hesitate to move on—sometimes straight to your competitors. 

Faster load times not only improve user satisfaction but also boost your search engine rankings and ultimately drive more conversions. 

That’s why you’re going to love using our new Site Speed Tool. It can quickly identify areas impacting your site’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), like load times, interactivity, and visual stability and provides actionable insights and recommendations, making it easier to optimize your site’s performance and deliver a smoother, faster user experience.

The need for speed 

The numbers speak for themselves:

• Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
• Almost half of consumers say they’ll try to refresh a page at least once when it takes 3 seconds to load. But 22% say they’ll close the tab, and 14% say they’ll visit a competitor’s site.
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• If a website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of the people will leave that site.

Website performance plays a critical role in the success of any online business. Slow websites will cost you not only visitors but also potential revenue. Investing in performance optimization could be the difference between closing a sale and losing out to a competitor.

A faster website gives you a competitive edge by capturing traffic from slower sites. Visitors are more likely to stay, explore, and convert into customers when your site loads quickly. Speed isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a key driver of business growth. 

Optimize your WordPress site for lightning-fast performance

Is your WordPress site as fast as it could be? Test the speed of your WordPress site with free our Site Speed Tool and get detailed performance metrics and tailored recommendations with just a few clicks. Simply enter any public WordPress URL, and we’ll run real-time tests on your site to assess its performance.

Our tool evaluates key areas, such as:

• Loading speed: How fast your site loads for users.
• Core Web Vitals: Metrics that focus on user experience, including loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
• Historical performance: Tracking your site’s performance over time to spot trends and areas for improvement.

Once analyzed, you’ll receive an easy-to-understand performance score and WordPress-specific, AI-enhanced recommendations to boost your website’s speed and overall performance.

You can access our developer documentation for more specifics about the report.

If you already have a site on WordPress.com with a Business or Commerce plan, you can also easily access the speed test directly in your dashboard. Test your performance across all of your sites to better understand correlations between site changes and performance.

Get weekly performance change alerts

Want to stay ahead of performance issues? Sign up for weekly performance change alerts, which provide a comprehensive overview of your website’s metrics over the last handful of weeks. These reports will highlight trends, performance fluctuations, and areas where further optimization is needed—keeping you informed and in control of your website’s health.

Test your site today

Your website’s performance can make or break your success online. With our easy-to-use performance measurement tool, you can take the guesswork out of optimizing your site.

Test your URL now for free and get personalized recommendations to ensure your site performs at its best, or head to the Performance tab in your site’s Hosting Overview menu to get automatic performance data about your WordPress.com sites.

Don’t leave your website’s success to chance—start optimizing today.