WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five Theme: All Features + Comparison with Old Themes

The latest version of WordPress was released two weeks ago. And one of the most prominent updates that excited the WordPress community is its default twenty twenty-five theme.

The twenty twenty-five theme supports features that enable it to be magic for blogs, portfolios, and business sites because it is designed to be as fast, accessible, and intuitive as possible.

If you are a fan of the default WordPress themes, you will find a lot of good news in this blog. Let’s find out all about the new theme, everything that’s fresh and how it compares to the old themes.

 

Overview Twenty Twenty-Five

Twenty Twenty-Five theme has been designed to provide a modern and adaptable look for all types of sites. 

“While ideating Twenty Twenty-Five, one recurring idea was that simple things should be intuitive while complex things should be possible,” the official announcement about the Twenty Twenty-Five theme read.

It is noteworthy that blogging has been given special importance this time.

This makes it different from previous default themes that were developed to suit a wide range of websites. More on the comparison later.

WordPress.org

The demo content imagery, all of which is taken from the Public Domain, is very poetic, as well as universal and timeless. It encourages a mood that is light, soft, and inspirational.

After exploring the theme, I woudl say the key highlights include:

✅ Responsive design: The theme is optimized for a fantastic look on every device, sharing the elements with harmony in different screen sizes.

✅ Customization: Users can change colors, font, and page styles to their preferences and their company or their own personas.

✅ Focus on Readability: Choices of typography and spacing are optimal for easy reading and that is its strength.

Experience Latest WordPress Version on Cloudways

Make your website secure and super fast with Cloudways’ optimized LAMP + NGINX hybrid stack, and enjoy fast performance. Improve your site’s speed and rank better on Google today.

Learn More

Site Editor Updates

The twenty twenty-five Site Editor has received several improvements, making it more powerful and user-friendly.

Here are the five sections that have significant updates:

• Navigation
• Styles
• Templates
• Patterns

Zoom Out View for Site Editing

This one is so cool. The new Zoom Out View enables users to work with the overall layout of their site visible.

This bird’s eye view does make the process of editing and the ability to organize a complex site structure greatly simplified. It basically allows the user a view of what his or her site looks like, easily letting the user change the overall appearance of the site.

Patterns

Twenty Twenty-Five provides a set of block patterns and template components that help WordPress users create posts and pages.

The theme features more than 70 patterns!

On the structural level, twenty twenty-five offers a rich set of patterns that facilitates interoperability and enables users to create intentional, well-organized pages across the services, products, events, and calls to action categories.

Developers also stand to gain from the theme since they are able to generate templates and block patterns easily within the site editor. Plus, It opens up great opportunities for working with external data through the Block Bindings API.

You can create complex layouts using just predefined patterns. When browsing patterns in the Site Editor, there are various layouts of the landing page in the “Pages” pattern category.

These are pre-designed patterns that can be directly incorporated into your pages as it is. When you are in the process of creating a new page, the editor overlays the page with a prompt to select a block pattern.

If you want to start with a pattern, a Landing Page pattern is a good idea. It includes:

• Event RSVP
• Business homepage
• Coming Soon
• CV/Bio
• Landing page for book launch
• Landing page for an event
• Landing page for a podcast
• Portfolio homepage
• Shop homepage

Post Formats

Remember I mentioned the theme has a special focus on blogging? You will feel that in this section the most.

Twenty twenty five theme supports all post formats: aside, audio, chat, gallery, image, link, quote, status, and video. To give your post formats a unique style, you can apply section styles and patterns within your content.

It has three patterns for post formats:

• Post format name (Displays a single word, for example “Video”)
• A premade design for the Audio format
• A premade design for the Link format

WordPress.org

Styles

As this theme is designed for global use, WordPress ensured that best quality fonts supporting different languages were incorporated.

Plus, with WordPress style variations there is SO much you can do. How? Any setting or style that you can add to theme.json can also be added to your style variation JSON file.

Twenty Twenty-Five offers nine style variations, each with its own color palettes, font families, and typography settings.

WordPress.org

Text Styles

You can apply text styles from the Styles section in the Settings sidebar of your Site Editor. Other than the default text style, the heading and paragraph blocks each include three custom text styles:

• Display
• Annotation
• Subtitle

Let me compare the different styles for you.

So, here is what the default text style looks like:

This is what it looks like when I choose Annotation:

Colors

WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five includes a default color palette with 8 colors. To explore them, go to Styles > Colors.

Then pick Palette.

These looked so pretty so I tried some out. The image below shows the Afternoon color palette.

Fonts

Twenty Twenty-Five provides 9 fonts with full sets of variations.

• Go to Styles > Typography

💡 For our dev readers, these font families are located in the Twenty Twenty-Five assets/fonts folder and are registered in the theme.json file.

There’s also 8 typography typesets in Twenty Twenty-Five. Just pick and it will be used on every page of your site.

In this image below, I picked a different typset. Compare it with the default typeset seen in the image above.

Since I chose typography preset number 4 here, i.e “Platypi & Ysabeau,” these two fonts were automatically applied to all elements of my site.

💡 For dev folks, this preset is located in the JSON file typography-preset-4.json inside the /styles/typography folder.

Templates

Twenty Twenty-Five provides users with numerous templates enabling the creation of any type of blog. The theme uses many of the new design tools like the Grid block and Pattern/Section Styles.

Whether you are going to create a blog with a stable text, a photo blog or a portfolio with different layouts, or, if you have a blog with different purposes and definite structure – there is something to choose from.

I checked out various templates like:

• Default (Personal Blog)
• Text-only Blog
• News Blog
• Photo Blog
• Complex Blog

Default (Personal Blog)

The default blog templates have a simple structure suitable for any entry regardless of whether it has a title, image, or is short or long.

Such templates show the complete information of the post unlike some other templates that only show parts of the post.

WordPress.org

Text-only Blog

Even though online presence now seems to require visual elements so much, the theme provides a template option for those who prefer a text-only blog.

It is applicable to the homepage, archives, search results, and individual posts.

I tested the text-only template and this is what my homepage looked after:

News Blog

The news blog offers three advanced homepage designs to choose from.

The default single post template for news includes a sidebar on the right side of the content (seen in the image below).

Photo Blog

The photo blog templates are created mostly for photography or portfolio, as most of them have image-oriented formats based on beautiful layouts that can be used across the fields.

Let’s pick the Photo Blog template, also available on the right sidebar.

As expected, it had much less space for text and offered so much more space for photos in grid view.

Complex Blog

Finally, the set of complex blog templates is better suited for websites with more intricate content. With varied type scales and more distinct designs, some of these templates can cater to different audiences.

WordPress.org

How to Change Template Designs

To switch the template design, follow these steps:

• Open the Site Editor by going to Appearance > Editor.
• Select Templates.

• Choose the template you want to update. I chose Home.

• In the Site Editor, open the Settings sidebar and click on the Template tab.
• Open the Design panel.

• In the Design panel, you’ll see previews of the available template patterns. Click on the one you want to apply.

I chose News With Sidebar and edited some text.

• Save your changes (from the top-right corner) to the template and repeat the process for any other templates you want to update.

How to Test Twenty Twenty-Five Theme?

There are three steps to test the new 2025 theme:

1. Upgrade your WordPress version
2. Back up your WordPress website
3. Create a clone of the website

Step 1: Upgrade to the Latest WordPress Version

To test it, you first need to get your hands on the twenty twenty-five theme. And for that you must upgrade to WordPress 6.7.

Thankfully, WordPress offers quick version upgrades, given that your WordPress hosting provider supports the latest version.

Follow the steps below:

• Go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Scroll down and locate the “At a Glance” widget.
• You’ll see your current WordPress version
• Click on the “update to 6.7” button.

Once upgraded, go to Appearace > Themes and you’ll find the latest default theme.

❗But DON’T click Activate yet! You need to back up first.

Step 2: Back Up Your WordPress Site

Before you test out the new default theme by WordPress, it is important to backup your WordPress site. This is important not only because you can safeguard the data but you can also prevent downtime.

Find out in detail how to back up your wordpress website in the linked blog. We recommend automating your backups so you can make your workflows more efficient.

With Cloudways secure hosting, you get automated server-level backups on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.

Still Doing Manual Backups? Automate Your Backups Now

With Cloudways managed wordpress hosting, you can say goodbye to data loss. Customize your backup frequency, easily download backups locally, or even clone a website from existing backups.

Learn More

Once you backup, there is just one more step for your safety, which is to get a staging environment or cloning. 

Step 3: Clone Your Website via Your Web Hosting Provider

While you can test the WordPress twenty twenty-five theme on the live site too, it is not the safest option. It can lead to unintended design changes, some compatibility issues, and more.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to create a clone of your website before testing the new default theme. This way, you can experiment with the theme without affecting your live site. 

A clone allows you to test all the new features, make adjustments, and ensure everything works as expected without risking any disruptions to your actual website.

Fortunately, managed WordPress hosting solutions like Cloudways allow users to create their site’s duplicate without dealing with any complexities.

Follow the steps below to create your website’s clone via Cloudways.

• Log in to Cloudways with your credentials.

• Click on Applications on your dashboard.
• Locate the application you want to clone and click the 3 vertical dots next to it.
• Select “Clone App/Create Staging” from the options.

• Choose a server for the clone application and checkmark the option to create it as a staging site. Then, click “Continue.”

• Wait for the system to check the requirements for your staging application.

• After approximately 2 minutes, your cloned app will be ready.

• Look for the “www” icon next to the server you selected, and click on the staging site.

Now, you are all set to experiment and make changes to the clone application.

Twenty Twenty-Five Theme Compared to Older Themes (2024, 2023)

One of the best ways to understand how feature-rich the 2025 theme is – is to compare it with the older versions.

In the table below, I have compared a few important features.

Feature/Aspect	Twenty Twenty-Five	Twenty Twenty-Four	Twenty Twenty-Three
Responsive Design	Fully responsive, optimized for all devices.	Responsive design, but with more static layouts.	Fully responsive, with a focus on mobile-first design.
Customization Options	Customizable colors, fonts, and page styles. Supports extensive style variations.	Limited customization options compared to newer themes.	More basic customization options.
Typography	9 fonts with full sets of variations, 8 typography typesets, and 3 custom text styles.	Fewer typography options and customization.	Basic typography options with standard font families.
Post Formats Support	Supports all post formats (aside, audio, chat, gallery, etc.) with unique style options.	Fewer post formats, mainly focused on basic text posts.	Basic support for post formats, with a focus on standard blogging.
Block Patterns	Over 70 pre-designed block patterns for various content types.	Limited block patterns, more simplistic layouts.	Fewer block patterns, with emphasis on classic layouts.
Site Editing Features	Enhanced Site Editor with Zoom Out View, making editing easier.	Basic Site Editor features with limited flexibility.	Improved Site Editor with simpler layout adjustments.
Templates	Offers various templates for personal blogs, photo blogs, news blogs, complex blogs, and more.	Primarily a single template for blogs with basic layouts.	Basic templates focused on simplicity and minimalism.
Image and Visual Layouts	Image-heavy templates for photo blogs and portfolios.	Fewer image-focused templates, more text-centric.	Emphasis on balanced text and image layouts.
Blog Templates	Offers specialized templates for text-only, photo, and complex blogs.	One simple, default blog template.	Minimal blog templates with focus on clean design.
Color Palettes	8 default color palettes with options to customize and create variations.	Fewer color palette choices, mostly fixed options.	Limited color customization, mostly neutral tones.
User Experience	User-friendly with a focus on readability, flexibility, and customization.	Simple and easy to use, but with fewer advanced options.	Focus on accessibility, with an emphasis on text clarity.
Developer Features	Extensive developer support with block patterns, templates, and external data integration.	Limited developer tools and fewer customization options.	Developer-friendly, but less flexible compared to 2025.
Text-Only Blog Option	Available as a template option for a text-only blog.	No specific text-only blog option.	Basic text-focused templates available.

Final Thoughts

All in all, the new default WordPress theme is incredible. And no, I am not saying it just because its the latest release.

In this blog, I have discussed all the new features after testing most of them. Not only that, anyone who reads the comparison table above will realize that the WordPress 2025 theme is remarkable with its versatility and customizability.

The user can choose from numerous templates, patterns, and customization options according to different blog formats, text-based or portfolio and photo types, etc.

No wonder the twenty twenty five theme is the most prominent update in WordPress 6.7!