Replacing the theme and Elementor on Indie Agency News

I installed the free version on staging and pointed it at a real category archive so we could judge it against our own content rather than the demo. That test is what settled it. Worth noting this is entirely about list pages — the articles themselves would have rendered fine.

What the staging test showed

On production, the "Meet an Indie Agency" archive gives each story a large headline, a one-line summary, the author and the date. You can scan nine stories and know which one you want. On PortfolioWP, the same archive became nine near-identical tiles: image on top, headline beneath, and a "View Post" button that tells you nothing. No excerpts. No dates. No bylines.

• The grid is the theme's headline feature, and it applies to every archive. Category, tag, author, date — all of them render as a three-column portfolio grid. That's excellent for a photographer's portfolio and wrong for an archive readers browse to find a story.
• It depends on distinctive images we don't have. Our featured images follow a house template — city skyline, Indie TV bar, agency name. In a list layout that repetition is invisible. In a grid where the image is the tile, nine posts became nine rows of the same picture.
• The excerpts disappear. On a news archive the summary line is what earns the click. The portfolio layout has no place for it, because a portfolio piece is supposed to sell itself on the image.
• Most of what you'd pay for doesn't apply. The Pro version's value is 60 patterns and 13 full-page templates covering portfolios, testimonials, services and contact pages. None of those is a page we need.
• WooCommerce is listed as "compatible," which is the floor, not a feature. It means the cart won't break. It doesn't mean anyone designed the shop, cart and checkout with care. Blocksy did.
• The vendor is very small and quiet. Public activity on the theme's own site looks thin since 2024. That's a real consideration for something that has to carry 768 posts and a live store for years.

Could we fix it?

Technically yes — it's a block theme, so the archive templates can be rewritten in the Site Editor. But follow that through: we'd buy a portfolio theme, discard the portfolio patterns and templates that make up its value, and hand-build the archive and single-post templates ourselves. At that point Blocksy gets us further, faster, for free.

Credit where it's due

Blocksy is made by Creative Themes, a small independent studio that has not been acquired. It runs on more than 300,000 sites, holds a 5-out-of-5 rating from over 860 reviews on WordPress.org, and shipped its most recent release in late July. It's a live, maintained product with no ownership question hanging over it.

Why it suits this site specifically

• News-shaped archives out of the box. Headline-led layouts with excerpts, author, date and category — configurable without code. This is the thing PortfolioWP can't do without a rebuild.
• Serious WooCommerce support. Dedicated templates and controls for shop, product, cart, checkout and account pages. Given the store is a live revenue path, this is worth more than it sounds.
• A header and footer builder that replaces Elementor's. This is the practical reason Elementor can go. We rebuild the site chrome in Blocksy, switch Elementor's templates off, and the layout stays under our control.
• Built for the block editor. Our 768 posts are already written in Gutenberg. Blocksy is designed around that, so the content renders natively with no translation layer.
• Accessibility-ready. Flagged as such in the WordPress theme directory, which gives us a compliant starting point to build on.
• You can operate it yourself. Layout changes happen in the WordPress admin, not in code. No developer required for routine adjustments.

The honest downsides

• Small team means future acquisition is possible. No signal of it now, but it's the same risk that took Kadence down. The mitigation is that our content stays portable — see the FAQ on switching later.
• The theme and its companion plugin have to be updated together. Updating one without the other is a known cause of layout glitches. Easy to manage, worth writing into our maintenance routine.
• Fewer first-party blocks than some competitors. Not an issue for us — our posts are plain Gutenberg and we only have about ten pages to rebuild.

GeneratePress is owned and developed by Tom Usborne, independently, and has been for over a decade with no acquisition, no rebrand and no drama. It is the leanest theme on this list — a very small CSS footprint and a deliberately narrow feature set. If the only word that mattered were "stable," this would be the pick.

Why I put Blocksy ahead of it anyway

• The store. GeneratePress will run WooCommerce, but Blocksy's shop, cart and checkout templates are more thoroughly designed. That's the part of the site where a rough edge costs money.
• More setup work. GeneratePress ships intentionally bare. We'd spend meaningfully more time configuring archives and templates to reach the same place Blocksy starts at.
• Less design to start from. Fewer patterns and starter layouts, which matters because we want the new site to look at least as good as the current one on day one.

When I'd change my answer

If the store were closed or negligible, or if you told me you want the single most boring, lowest-risk, least-likely-to-ever-change foundation and you don't mind the extra setup — I'd switch my recommendation to GeneratePress without much argument. It's a genuinely good answer, just second best for a site with a store attached.

I asked Megan Ferrell what she'd use, and she was clear: Blankslate paired with Advanced Custom Fields. She and her partner Nicole build sites this way for some of their clients, regularly reaching 95–100 page speed scores with WCAG-compliant markup. That's a real result and I want to represent it fairly — it's a legitimate, high-craft approach and the numbers aren't exaggerated. I've never built a site this way myself, so I'm relaying their experience rather than my own.

Blankslate is a starter theme, which means it ships with essentially no design and no templates. It's a scaffold. Every header, footer, archive, single-post and store template gets written from scratch in code, with ACF handling any custom content structures. The reason it's fast is that nothing unnecessary exists in it.

Why it's still the wrong fit here

• It has no admin interface for layout. There is no Site Editor equivalent, no visual controls, no "add a section." Every change is a code change. Adjusting the archive layout or adding a new page type means hiring a developer, every time, permanently.
• It's a build, not a theme switch. Blocksy is activate-and-configure — call it a day of work. Blankslate means someone writes the entire front end from nothing: header, footer, single post, archive, shop, cart, checkout, plus the ten pages. Realistically 40–80 hours of development.
• The performance advantage over Blocksy is small. This is the important one. Those 95–100 scores come mostly from not having Elementor, aggressive caching and optimized images — all of which we get with Blocksy. A well-configured Blocksy site lands in the same range. The gap is a few points, not twenty.
• Accessibility isn't uniquely solved by it either. Megan noted they write custom JavaScript to keep plugins compliant — which is honest and telling. Most accessibility gaps on a WordPress site come from plugins and content, not the theme, so that work exists on any foundation. Blocksy ships accessibility-ready; the remaining effort is the same either way.

The distinction worth drawing

I'm including this because Kadence is the theme most people would recommend for a job like this, so it's worth documenting why we're not using it — and because Pat's own read on it turned out to be correct.

• The timeline. Kadence was acquired by hosting company Liquid Web in 2021 and folded into a brand called StellarWP. Liquid Web itself was bought by a private equity firm in 2023. Roughly a quarter of the StellarWP team was laid off in late 2025.
• The founder is gone. Ben Ritner, who built Kadence, left at the end of 2025, as did the founders of the other acquired products.
• The brand was dissolved in May 2026. StellarWP was retired entirely, kadencewp.com was taken offline and redirected, and the rollout went badly — customers reported being unable to log in and lifetime licenses missing from the new portal.

Kadence probably keeps shipping updates for a while yet. But the pattern is familiar and the direction is visible, and I'd rather not put a site with 768 posts and a live store on a foundation heading that way.