Why Multipurpose Themes Are Quietly Falling Out of Favor

For roughly a decade, the safe answer to "what theme should I build this on?" was a do-everything ThemeForest bestseller: Avada, Divi, BeTheme, The7, Enfold, X/Pro, or Jupiter X. You bought one license, imported a demo that looked like the mockup, and dragged things around until the client was happy. That playbook still sells well. What has quietly changed is that the people who build WordPress sites for a living are increasingly recommending against it.

The decline is real but it is specific. Avada still routinely sits at or near the top of ThemeForest's all-time sales chart, and Divi powers a vast installed base. Nobody is claiming these themes are dead. The shift is in what experienced agencies and performance-conscious developers reach for on new projects, and it is happening for concrete, defensible reasons rather than fashion.

WordPress core ate the main value proposition

The original reason to buy a multipurpose theme in 2015 was the bundle: a visual page builder plus a one-click demo importer plus a pile of pre-styled templates. None of that shipped with WordPress. You were paying $59 to skip a problem core didn't solve.

Core solved it. The block editor, the Site Editor (full site editing), theme.json, and block patterns now give you visual layout control, global styles, and reusable sections natively. Block-first themes built around that model — GeneratePress, Kadence, Blocksy, and the default Twenty Twenty-Five — deliver the "import a starter site and customize it" experience without dragging an entire framework along for the ride. When the platform absorbs your headline feature, the premium you charged for it evaporates.

This is the structural driver, and everything below is downstream of it. A multipurpose theme used to be the only way to get a certain result. Now it is one of several ways, and it happens to be the heaviest.

Core Web Vitals turned the bloat into a ranking liability

Multipurpose themes are architecturally committed to shipping code for features you are not using. The whole pitch is "it can do anything," which in practice means the stylesheet and script bundle have to account for the mega-menu, the portfolio filter, the pricing tables, the animation library, and the slider — whether your page uses them or not. A stock demo commonly loads well over a megabyte of CSS and JavaScript before a single line of your actual content renders, where a lean block theme can keep its base payload in the tens of kilobytes.

In 2018 that was an annoyance. Today it is a measurable problem because Google's Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal and users abandon slow pages. The thresholds are public and unforgiving:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should land under 2.5 seconds. Render-blocking theme CSS and hero sliders fight you directly here.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should stay under 0.1. Builders that inject styling after load are a frequent cause of shift.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) should stay under 200ms. This metric replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024, and it is the one heavy builder JavaScript hits hardest — every event handler the framework registers adds to main-thread work that delays the next paint.

You can claw a multipurpose theme toward passing scores with aggressive caching, critical-CSS generation, and JavaScript deferral. People do it every day. But you are spending engineering effort to undo the theme's defaults, which is a strange position to choose deliberately on a new build.

Builder lock-in stopped being acceptable

Most legacy multipurpose themes are wedded to a shortcode-based builder — Fusion Builder in Avada, WPBakery in countless others. Your content gets wrapped in proprietary shortcodes, so the moment you deactivate the theme or the builder, the page collapses into a wall of bracketed gibberish. That is not portability; it is a hostage situation.

Native blocks changed the baseline expectation. Block markup is stored as comment-delimited HTML that degrades gracefully and moves between themes. Once developers got used to content they actually owned, shortcode soup became a dealbreaker. It is also why the performance-minded builder crowd migrated toward Bricks and Breakdance, which emphasize clean output and lighter footprints, and why even Elementor users scrutinize the markup it generates far more than they did five years ago.

The bundled-plugin trap

Multipurpose themes love to advertise "$200 of premium plugins included free" — typically Slider Revolution and a premium form or gallery plugin. The catch is the update path. A bundled plugin updates on the theme author's release schedule, not the plugin vendor's. When a vulnerability is disclosed in a widely bundled component, every site running it through a theme waits for the theme team to ship a new theme version, then waits for site owners to apply it. Slider Revolution has been on the receiving end of mass-exploitation campaigns precisely because of how many sites carried an outdated, theme-bundled copy. Decoupled plugins that you update directly close that window far faster.

Major-version rewrites expose the fragility

Because so much of a multipurpose theme's behavior lives in its own framework, a major-version rewrite is a genuinely risky event. Divi's transition to a rebuilt builder architecture is the obvious cautionary tale: a from-scratch engine promises better performance and modern internals, but it also means thousands of existing layouts, third-party add-ons, and custom modules have to be re-validated against a new foundation. When your layout, your design tokens, and your content are all entangled inside one vendor's proprietary system, you inherit that vendor's migration risk on their timeline. Block themes spread that risk across the platform: core handles the editing layer, so a theme switch is comparatively low-stakes.

So should you abandon yours?

No — and that nuance is the honest part of this story. If you are running a stable Avada or Divi site that passes Core Web Vitals and the client is happy, ripping it out is busywork, not strategy. The decline is about new decisions, not retroactive guilt.

For a new project, the questions worth asking are practical:

1. How much of the theme will you actually use? If you need three section types, you are paying a full-framework tax for a fraction of the value.
2. Who owns the content? Prefer output that survives a theme switch. Native blocks pass this test; proprietary shortcodes do not.
3. What does the base payload weigh? Measure the front-end CSS/JS of a clean install before you commit. The number rarely improves once you start adding plugins.
4. Can it pass Vitals without heroics? A theme that needs a stack of optimization plugins to hit LCP under 2.5s and INP under 200ms is telling you something about its architecture.

For most builds in 2026, that reasoning points toward a block theme — GeneratePress, Kadence, or Blocksy — paired with a lightweight builder only where the editor genuinely falls short. The multipurpose theme isn't a scam and it isn't obsolete. It is a tool optimized for a problem WordPress core has since solved, carrying a performance and lock-in cost that the modern ranking and ownership environment no longer rewards. That is why the recommendation has quietly moved on, even while the sales charts haven't.