What's The Best Full-Site Editing Starter Theme?

So I got this email from a student of my block theme development course, asking for a recommendation for a Full-Site Editing Starter theme:

What theme would be a good starting point? I used to use Underscores, but now that is too much focused on classic themes.

This is a common question for freelancers and agencies building custom sites. So what options are there?

Types of starter themes

When we talk about starter themes, we can distinguish between two approaches:

A parent theme that is customized through a child theme. The Genesis Framework is a prime example here.
A theme boilerplate that is then adapted. Underscores (or _s) from Automattic is a popular option here.

The Genesis Framework is by far the most popular Classic theme framework for custom sites.

Which one would you choose? It depends on the type of projects that you deliver. The more custom the design and functionality is, the less a parent theme makes sense.

But why is that? Well theme frameworks are developed to fit with the largest number of possible use cases. Their approach is therefore based on what the broad mass of the market wants.

But the more custom your project is, the less these mass market tools help you. Quite the opposite: It could even be that you have to spend more time removing or changing parts of the framework than you save.

The Underscores theme generator website.

A boilerplate is less opinionated. It’s just a starting point. The Underscores theme for example is not available as a standalone theme. Instead a generator adapts the theme for your project, hereby branching off from the source.

Both Genesis and Underscores target Classic themes. But where does that leave us when it comes to Full-Site Editing?

A different set of problems

When developing a Classic theme, you face one major problem: WordPress doesn’t provide you any theme building tools. So you need to develop everything from scratch.

This is why a theme like Underscores was so popular. It provided a set of templates with solid HTML markup, a set of base styles, and a basic theme setup. This freed you from having to write all that code yourself to get to this point.

But with a block theme, this is no longer an issue. Templates can be put together quickly using Core blocks. A lot of theme setup is now no longer needed. Instead we know have a different problem: customizing the theme building tools.

The customization options for the Paragraph block in the Twenty Twenty-Three theme.

This the big disconnect that a lot of freelancers and agencies experience with Full-Site Editing. They see all the blocks in Core, all the customization options for fonts, colors, padding and margins, all the default patterns… and they say: I don’t need this.

And that’s perfectly fine, and in line with what other professionals building custom sites say. So whatever starting point we choose for our projects needs to account for this new reality.

Less is more

So a Full-Site Editing starter theme doesn’t need any starter templates. Or footer and header management tools. Or layout tools. All this is already included in WordPress. Instead what a starter theme needs to provide is a clean slate to start building from.

A prime example here are all the customization options shown above. These shouldn’t be available from the get go.

The Barebones FSE Starter Theme removes all customization options for all blocks.

By removing all the options that WordPress offers by default, site builders can decide what options they need, and what choices there should be.

This is what the Barebones FSE Starter Theme inside of the Block Theme Academy gives you: WordPress paired down to its essentials. Here are the features:

Blocks: Only show allowed blocks in the inserter.
Patterns:
- Disable loading of patterns from the WordPress.org Pattern Directory.
- Disable loading of WordPress Core patterns.
Styles and Scripts:
- Enables improved block style loading.
- Enqueues the main stylesheet on the frontend, and in the editor.
Templates & Template Parts
- Contains a header and footer template part.
- Contains an index.html with the main archive, as well as the header and footer.
- Contains a 404 template (which is often forgotten in block themes)
Theme.json
- Includes schema support.
- Disables all available block settings.

This is a good starting point for building any custom site. But is it the best?

There is no best starter theme

Even though I created my own Full-Site Editing starter theme, I’ll be upfront about the fact that it’s not the best option out there. And this is because there is no best starter theme.

For sure this is a good option for building custom sites from scratch. But this might not be what you want to do. You might prefer to take an existing block theme, and then modify it for your projects.

Or you might have a set of patterns that you use over and over again. In that case, it might be worth forking the Barebones FSE Starter Theme, and add these patterns in.

Building a website is not a paint-by-the-numbers process. So stop looking for the one theme or plugin that fits exactly with what you need.

Instead look at the options out there, take what’s useful, and discard what is not. But whatever you do: just get started. You’ll learn more about what kind of starting point you need by building than by doing lots of research.