I'm looking for a simple portfolio theme to update my personal portfolio page. I've been using WordPress for years – since 2.0 – and I've always been able to find a nice, minimal, responsive theme.
But it has been about 5 years since I've done this, and in that time, all kinds of site builders have taken over theming.
I understand why site-builders exist, but I refuse to call a theme "simple" or "minimal" when you have a loading screen, or when page editing takes minutes to load due to Elemantor or Oxygen or whatever. I'm old enough to remember shockwave flash loading screens, and it feels like we're back to that.
At that point, I might as well head over to Squarespace. But Squarespace is also bloated.
I've looked for hours. Does a simple, actually minimal portfolio theme exist these days?
The best I've seen so far are Ander's themes, bless him: https://andersnoren.se/teman/ – but they aren't QUITE what I'm looking for.
Thanks!
Block themes are flexible in the sense you can start completely from scratch and make any layout you wish without having to code or compromise on performance. I would start with one of the themes mentioned here and adapt it to my needs: [https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/](https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/)
You can also get additional patterns/templates from WordPress.org.
I was just in your situation and agree with your statements. Have you tried [https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/](https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/) to generate a no frills FSE theme? Then you can build what you want. That’s what I did and it worked great for me. I did not create that site or generator, but I was able to create a basic theme and then customize using FSE to build what I wanted.