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Hi,
I’m pretty much a total newbie, and I’ve gotten Hostgator and WordPress installed on it. I’m struggling with finding a template/theme that doesn’t have one big banner and lots of gimmicks. All I want is literally a super simple blog with categories in the main menu, and on the homepage just displaying smallish previews of articles, nothing else. Does anyone have advice on how to do that, and/or what template to use for it? Thanks.
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Try astra , lightweight and free.
Stick with Gutenberg themes for a blog, imo. Copy paste from Word, Docs, pages. Neve theme sounds like a good fit for you.
Try [Powder]) from Brian Gardner. There you can basically start from scratch with good defaults.
To have the categories in your main menu you only have to edit the navigation block inside the header and add the categories there.
For a preview of articles you can add a query loop block to your homepage and remove the other blocks you don’t need there.
Why not just use Twenty Twenty Three
Try Rishi theme or Neve theme. Both of them are core web vital optimized theme. Later, you don’t need to worry about speed.