Reading Tim’s post about default WordPress themes and bloat, I thought I’d experiment with creating an absolute minimalist WordPress theme, which you can see live here on amdsoft.com here at the time of writing.

I want a single, functional barely styled skeleton theme a default theme that no one will ever use – Tim Nash

The theme is true minimalist: there is no styling. All you get is your browser default styles and barebones html WordPress needs to display content. The only CSS rules are for image alignment, captions and screenreaders – to support in-built WordPress functionality. Everything else falls back to the browser defaults. It supports WordPress comments, menus, widgets and even is translation-ready.

It’s 3 files totalling ~90 lines of code or and about 3kb in size unzipped. I could have gotten it down to half the size but I’ll leave that as an experiment for someone else. Also I’m sure someone has done something similar out there, and by its nature it’ll be similar, so apologies if I’ve replicated something else out there closely, send me an email to amd at this domain and I’ll link anything similar here.

Download here: Just the Essentials