Download websites that use Twenty Sixteen

About Twenty Sixteen

Every WordPress installation ships with a default theme, and most sites replace it within days. Twenty Sixteen is what remains when that never happens, or when someone decided the bundled design was good enough and moved on. Either way, finding it live is less a statement about design taste than about how much attention the site has had since it was set up.

The theme served as the bundled default for a single release cycle. Published in 2015 by WordPress.org under GPL v2, and written in PHP like the rest of WordPress core, it was built for text-first publishing with an optional right sidebar and heavy typography. Sites still running it carry a rough timestamp as a result. The install, or the template it was cloned from, dates to roughly that period, and nobody has commissioned a redesign since.

As of October 2026 the theme is still active on 16,666 sites. Longevity of that kind has a plain explanation. Core-bundled themes cost nothing, arrive automatically with every install and every hosting one-click setup, and keep working without maintenance, so no forcing event ever removes them. A share of what we detect will be dormant: staging copies, parked domains, sites that stopped publishing long ago.

6,349 of the detections are in United States, and domains cluster on .com. Distribution like that follows WordPress adoption itself rather than anything specific to the theme. Personal blogs, small businesses, clubs, schools and nonprofits are the recognisable shape of the population, and the same shape describes budget-constrained site ownership generally.

For anyone selling into that population the list works as a qualification tool. Agencies pitching redesigns, hosting companies selling managed migrations, security and maintenance vendors and page-builder products all want sites that are demonstrably old and demonstrably unattended, and a default theme still in place is one of the cleaner proxies for both conditions at once. Researchers measuring how long software persists after it stops being current get a natural cohort out of the same file.

Two caveats belong on the number. A child theme or a page builder can sit on top of the theme and change it beyond recognition while the parent files stay in place, and a site that swapped themes but still serves old cached assets can look like a false positive. Detection reports what the delivered page references, not what the owner intended.