What is _s?

Underscores, also written as _s, is a starter theme for WordPress. It was created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to give theme developers a clean, minimal starting point rather than building from scratch or stripping down an existing theme. The project is now inactive, archived as of September 2025, because the WordPress ecosystem has shifted to a different approach called Block Themes. When it was active, _s gave developers a bare but functional WordPress theme with a small amount of well-organized HTML templates, starter CSS files, and a navigation script that turned menus into collapsible dropdowns on small screens. It also included two sample page layouts built with CSS Grid, hooks for integrating with WooCommerce (a popular e-commerce plugin), and a set of utility functions to keep template code clean. The intended workflow was to download or clone the repository, rename it for your project, and then do a find-and-replace across all the files to swap out the _s_ prefix with your own theme name. From there you would build on top of the provided structure. The theme included command-line tools for compiling styles written in SASS to plain CSS, checking code quality, generating translation files, and packaging the finished theme into a zip file. _s was never meant to be used as-is. It was a blank canvas for building custom themes, not a finished design. With Block Themes now the current WordPress standard, _s is no longer updated, but the repository remains available for reference.