Sydney is aThemes' business-oriented theme, aimed at freelancers and small companies who want a working site without hiring a designer. It's been tracked since 2018 and sits among the fifty most used themes in our database — not trendy, but not fading either. The interesting part isn't the sales page. It's what live sites running Sydney actually look like once the demo import is done.
A business theme, not a blank canvas
Sydney isn't a general-purpose theme you bend to any use case. It's built around the front page a service business needs: a slider, a header image, a logo slot, sticky navigation, and blocks meant to be filled with services, testimonials, and a contact form. The author calls it 'a powerful business theme that provides a fast way for companies or freelancers to create an awesome online presence' — accurate as far as marketing copy goes, though it undersells that the theme is a premium product from aThemes rather than a free WordPress.org listing, so a license is part of the cost of entry.
How it actually gets built
The theme leans on Elementor for page layout, and Elementor shows up on the vast majority of sites we studied running Sydney. But it's not the only builder in the mix: a meaningful chunk of installs still carry siteorigin-panels and so-widgets-bundle, tools from an earlier era of Sydney sites built before Elementor became the default. On top of the builder sits Sydney Toolbox, aThemes' own companion plugin that unlocks the pro layout options — so the real feature set is split across theme, toolbox plugin, and whichever page builder the site happens to use. That's three moving parts to keep updated, not one.
Who's actually running it
Services businesses make up the largest single group, with nonprofits and corporate sites well behind but still common — think small agencies, churches, schools, sports clubs, and travel operators. Agency and marketing sites are the leading niche, but only loosely; photography studios, religious and community groups, and education sites all show up in real numbers too, so this isn't a one-industry theme. It also travels well outside English: German, Japanese, French, and Dutch installs are all common. Real examples in the data range from a Hungarian ad agency to a Spanish travel-insurance site to a UK military-history archive — a spread that fits a general services theme more than a niche one.
What it does well
For a freelancer or small business that needs a credible site fast, Sydney's front-page building blocks and color/font controls do the job without custom CSS. Contact Form 7 riding alongside it on most installs confirms it's used the way it's marketed: as a lead-capture front door, not a blog. Google Site Kit turning up frequently suggests owners of these sites do care about tracking visits, which is a healthy sign for a business tool. And the theme's steady, unspectacular usage over time means it's not about to be abandoned by its maker mid-project.
If you're weighing options
Lightning sits in a similar usage bracket and shares most of the same structural building blocks — worth a look if you want a free comparable rather than a licensed one. Twenty Twenty-Five is the opposite philosophy entirely: full site editing with blocks, no page builder dependency, better if you want to stay inside core WordPress. Newspaper shows up in the same popularity tier but is built for publishers, not service businesses — the overlap in actual features is thin, so don't pick it as a Sydney substitute.
Where it starts to hurt
The split between old SiteOrigin builds and newer Elementor builds means a fair number of live Sydney sites are running on two generations of page-building tech at once, which shows in load times when Elementor, Elementor Pro, and a widget bundle all stack up on the same page. There's no meaningful family of child themes to fall back on if you want to extend it independently of aThemes' own plugin — customization stays inside their toolbox rather than an open ecosystem. And usage has been flat rather than growing, which tells you it's a maintained legacy pick more than the theme agencies are reaching for on new builds today.
Before you decide
Is Sydney free?
No — it's distributed as a premium theme through aThemes, and the fuller layout options come through their paid Sydney Toolbox plugin, so budget for a license rather than expecting a free WordPress.org install.
What page builder does Sydney use?
Elementor is what almost all current installs pair it with, though older sites in our data still run it on SiteOrigin Page Builder, a holdover from before Elementor took over.
Is Sydney good for a blog or news site?
Not really — its blocks are built around service pages and lead forms. A theme built for publishing, like Newspaper, fits that job better.
Who this is really for
Pick Sydney if you're a freelancer, small agency, or local nonprofit that needs a working, form-driven site quickly and doesn't mind paying for the toolbox to get there. Skip it if you're publishing content regularly — the theme wasn't built for that and it shows. Skip it too if you want to build purely in the block editor without a page-builder dependency; that's a different theme entirely, and Twenty Twenty-Five is the honest choice there.
Last updated 2026-11-06
