Remove “Popular” themes from WordPress Themes

[amitbajracharya]

WordPress was built on openness and opportunity for everyone, but the current “Popular Themes” section keeps giving visibility to the same few big themes again and again.

Themes with millions of downloads already have strong recognition and no longer need constant promotion, while new creators struggle to even get discovered. This creates an unfair cycle where popularity keeps feeding popularity.

Instead of always prioritizing top themes, WordPress.org could introduce a rotating “Featured Themes” section where 20–30 random themes are highlighted weekly. This would give new creators a fair chance, encourage innovation, and keep the ecosystem diverse and healthy.

Sometimes creators don’t need special treatment — just one chance to be seen.

[dd32]

The logic for the popular themes is effectively Theme Age / Installs which is supposed to allow for both new and old themes to have just as much of a chance to be ranked the same.

Instead of removing it, we should look at ways to be make it more varied.

For example; We could look at options such as having the Theme Age in the above calculation decay in value. Or we could look at other things such as the rate of change in a theme over the past 1/3/7 days. Edit: AI has said decay no good; Other signals might be better.

The catch is that all of these kind of things will always result in some themes being higher ranked than others.

The other catch is that these kind of things encourage authors to submit dozens of new themes with minimal changes (For example; All of the niche themes for SEO of names) and it would be gamed by others in finding ways to boost their rankings.

Bypassing all of that and introducing a Featured Themes that's manually curated is one option, but historically my belief is that it's never had long-term benefit to all authors. But this is also not a case of where both routes couldn't be taken.