Twenty Twenty-Four Theme Review (2026): Is the Old Default Still Worth Keeping?

An update nobody expected, from a team nobody pays

Here is a small irony. On August 19, 2026, the WordPress project released version 1.6 of the theme it replaced as the default nearly two years earlier. Twenty Twenty-Four's newest release is three months younger than Twenty Twenty-Five's, and its readme claims testing up to WordPress 7.1, one version further than its successor's. Retirement, for a default theme, looks a lot like a part-time job.

The facts behind that. Twenty Twenty-Four launched with WordPress 6.4, the Shirley release, on November 7, 2023. It is free under GPLv2 or later, maintained by the WordPress project, and developed in the open on GitHub. Wordpress.org reports more than 500,000 active installs and 9,791,292 downloads. Updates in December 2025, May 2026 and August 2026 show that someone is still minding it, and a theme on half a million sites needs exactly that.

The rating is the one cool spot: 76 out of 100 from only 39 reviews. That is a small sample for a theme on half a million sites, and it probably says more about how rarely owners of a default theme stop to rate it than about the theme itself. The minimum PHP version in the theme's headers is 7.0, although the wordpress.org documentation still says 5.6, a reminder that the docs trail the code.

A default theme does not get retired. It gets reassigned to compatibility duty.

Business, Writer, Portfolio: three sites folded into one theme

Most themes sell you demos. Twenty Twenty-Four was organized around use cases instead. Business is what you see on install. Writer and Portfolio are alternate template patterns: open a template in the Site Editor, choose Replace Template, and the layout changes character. There is no Customizer to hunt through, since it is hidden by default, and no options page. Everything lives in Appearance, Editor.

The 2023 release post promised over 35 templates and patterns. The 1.6 package holds 57 pattern files (10 of them template patterns, 9 hidden) and 11 templates, so the kit has grown a little. It is still smaller than Twenty Twenty-Five's library. For a site that wants a respectable look by Friday, it is plenty. For a designer who wants dozens of starting points, it will feel spare.

Cardo, Inter and seven palettes with geological names

The default look is quietly editorial: Cardo, a classical serif, for headings, Inter for body text, a 620-pixel content column and a 1,280-pixel wide width. That narrow column is why long articles read comfortably, and also why a business page full of side-by-side boxes can feel cramped until you switch sections to wide alignment.

The theme package ships seven style variation files beside the default: Ember, Fossil, Ice, Maelstrom, Mint, Onyx and Rust. The wordpress.org documentation says nine additional variations, but the same seven files have appeared in every release we checked, from 1.0 to 1.6, so plan on seven. Fonts are bundled locally: Inter as a variable font and Cardo in regular, italic and bold, with Instrument Sans and Jost also included according to the readme.

Small block style variations give the theme its personality: a heading with an asterisk, a checkmark list, details with an arrow, a navigation link with an arrow and pill-shaped category terms. They are touches rather than a design system. Builder fit follows from all of this: the theme is native to the block editor and takes advantage of the design tools introduced in WordPress 6.4. There is no official statement about Elementor or other builders, and installing one means giving up the parts described above.

How it loads: a theme with no stylesheet of its own

Twenty Twenty-Four is about as quiet as a theme can be in the browser. It enqueues no front-end theme stylesheet at all. Styling comes from theme.json, which WordPress turns into CSS itself. The only extra file is button-outline.css, attached to the core Button block through wp_enqueue_block_style(), and a comment in the theme's functions.php notes such files load only when the block is rendered. Fonts come from your own server, not Google's.

That makes it one of the themes that ship the least CSS and JavaScript, and it means a slow Twenty Twenty-Four site is almost always slow for reasons the theme did not cause: oversized hero images, embeds, a slider plugin, a cookie banner, a chat widget. The Twenty Twenty-Four speed guide walks through finding the real culprit, and Core Web Vitals and WordPress themes explains which of those metrics a theme can and cannot influence.

Search visibility is your plugin's job

The theme outputs tidy block markup and leaves search to WordPress core and whatever SEO plugin you install. Core supplies a sitemap; titles, meta descriptions, redirects and structured data come from the plugin. That division is fine. The risk is the narrow default column tempting owners to cut content short, and thin pages hurt rankings more than any theme setting.

Three problems that show up after launch, not before

Twenty Twenty-Four's support threads rarely report bugs in the code. They report collisions between how block themes store design and how owners expect websites to behave. Each of these tends to surface in the second year, when the site starts doing more.

The child theme that starts from scratch

A cautious owner creates a child theme to protect customizations, activates it, and watches the edited header and templates vanish. Site Editor changes were saved in the database against the parent theme, and they do not carry over. The remedy is to export or copy those templates before switching, which is easier to do once than to discover afterward. If a layout has already scrambled, start with Twenty Twenty-Four layout broken.

One header for every page

The header template part uses the core Navigation block directly, laid out horizontally and justified to the right, with alternative header parts available. Hiding the menu on a single landing page means building a separate template and assigning it. When a header disappears where it should not, Twenty Twenty-Four header not showing covers the usual causes. Phone behavior follows the Navigation block's overlay setting, and the mobile menu guide shows where it hides.

A menu that speaks only one language

Owners adding Spanish or another language with Polylang report that the Navigation block inside templates stays in the default language. The forum thread was unresolved when we checked in October 2026. For a business serving two language communities, that is not a cosmetic problem. Plan the second language before launch, not after, because it decides whether this theme can stay.

Shops and builders: two guests it never planned for

There are no WooCommerce templates in Twenty Twenty-Four. Its templates are 404, archive, home, index, the page variants, search and the single variants, and store pages fall back on the block templates WooCommerce supplies. A few products will sell fine. The shop will simply look like WooCommerce rather than your brand until someone rebuilds those templates in the Site Editor, and if product grids already look wrong, WooCommerce layout broken is the place to start.

Page builders are the other uninvited guest. When the editor shows one design and the live page another, the checks are collected in block editor not matching the theme. Adding Elementor to a block theme brings its own set of quarrels, collected in Elementor theme conflicts. Our advice is plainer: if the team wants drag-and-drop, change the theme rather than stacking a builder on this one.

Scored against its own successor

The useful comparison for a Twenty Twenty-Four owner is not a premium theme. It is the free default that replaced it, because switching costs nothing in license fees and keeps the same editing model. So the scorecard puts each verdict beside Twenty Twenty-Five.

Read across the table and a pattern appears: the successor is broader, not better built. If your site works, that difference rarely justifies redoing templates. If you are starting over anyway, take the newer theme. A careful theme migration between the two mostly means re-creating Site Editor changes, which is quick when someone has kept notes.

Keep it, swap it, or rebuild: sorting owners by situation

• Keep it if the site is a writer's home, a portfolio or a small business brochure, one person edits it, and nothing on it has broken in a year. Spend the money on content instead.
• Swap to Twenty Twenty-Five if the site looks tired and you want more layouts without paying for anything. The editing model stays the same.
• Consider [Ollie](/wordpress-themes/ollie) if you like block themes but need WooCommerce templates. The free theme includes them, and the paid plans add pattern collections.
• Consider [GeneratePress](/wordpress-themes/generatepress) if a developer maintains the site and prefers a classic theme with hooks to the Site Editor.
• Rebuild if the site now needs two languages, member logins, a real store or a steady flow of leads from paid traffic.

The last group is where WordPress itself, not the theme, sets the ceiling. Twenty Twenty-Four vs Next.js weighs that choice in full. If you go, block content moves cleanly, and moving Twenty Twenty-Four to Next.js treats the move as a chance to retire plugins you no longer need. The new site runs on Athena CMS, where Harmonia prepares Spanish versions and checks accessibility, which answers the menu that would not translate.

Not ready to decide? Our theme customization team can fix the header, the column width or the child theme mess without moving anything, and a free website health check gives you a quick reading first. The full set of reviews lives in the WordPress theme reviews section.