Quality design matters! It helps you attract and convert visitors into readers and these readers into customers.
I know how elated I feel when I come online or get notified that I just got a new visitor on my site. That, for me is satisfying. It truly shows there is something I’m doing right. Before now, locating a good WordPress theme meant I had to forego the official repository and pay for a premium theme, but today they are on equal levels.
I have had to try out series of themes, looking for the ones easy to navigate and also ideal for my blog. In the course of doing this, I came across some WordPress themes I have totally fallen in love with, and it would bke selfish of me to not share this discovery with you.
In this article, I will be taking you through a journey on the various WordPress themes I have encountered and what makes them ideal for your business.
The best free WordPress themes
The first thing I would like you to note is that some of these themes feature are responsive and visually attractive design can be downloaded right from the official repository.
Shall we begin?
1. Magazine Hoot
This theme is ideal for magazine and news style websites, and comes with a grid layout that lets you feature articles without getting cluttered.
You can display ads from sponsors or third-party websites using Magazine Hoot, and also display your editors and contributors with a short bio and link to their websites.
You will totally love this theme as it allows you translate your theme into another language, customize the colors and upload your own logo, amongst others.
2. JustWrite
Perfect for content-heavy sites, I love the fact that JustWrite is fully responsive, includes areas for custom calls to action and grid-based layout, and customizer widget. It is translation ready which is a plus, and comes with inbuilt social media icons and slider areas.
3. Ribosome
I love this theme for its several predefined color schemes. It also has two widget areas, has its theme options located in WordPress Customizer, and comes with a single navigation menu and a social menu on the top. What is there to not love about this theme?
4. GeneratePress
Built to be lightweight, simple, and responsive, GeneratePress is compatible with plugins like WooCommerce, fully responsive, cross-browser compatible and can be translated into over 20 languages. Cool, right?
When it comes to its customization option, I just love how it allows you to tweak colors, fonts, etc. and instantly preview the changes.
5. Barletta
Perfect for lifestyle or fashion blogs, Barletta is fully responsive, features a large homepage slider and a two-column layout, integrates with some plugins, previews changes and tweaks colors, background image, and fonts.
6. Nisarg
If you are a travel or food blogger, Nisarg is ideal for you, as it has large header image and featured images for posts. Fully responsive, this theme was built on the Bootstrap framework.
You can also use its WordPress Customizer to customize your header and background image, set background color, and also change the look of the theme.
7. Writee
Writee is a clean design focused on blog posts, has a responsive theme and includes series of customization options. This theme integrates with WooCommerce to sell your products and monetize your site easily.
8. Floral Lite
If you are into photography, food, and travel blogs, this theme is just for you. Floral Lite comes with two navigation menus, and is easy to setup and customize. I totally love how one of its navigation menus directs people to your social media profile and helps in growing your audience.
9. Magnus
This theme is ideal for photography blogs, and supports two menu locations. Magnus also lets you upload a custom image for the header.
10. Everal
Everal has a responsive and highly customizable design with a clean interface, and is translation and retina ready. You will totally love how it quickly helps you setup your site as it comes with extensive documentation, and has a homepage that features a large header area for displaying a slider of your most popular posts.
Everal supports all major post formats, and displays widget for your bio, social media using the sidebar and footer area. It also lets you use shortcodes to insert buttons, progress bars, etc.
11. Everly Lite
If you are a female blogger, this theme is just right for you. Everly Lite lets you choose between the standard and the grid layout, multiple pre-made demos for quickly setting up your blog, and customizes your typography from about 600 Google fonts. It also changes the color scheme and supports link, video, and standard post formats. Everly Lite is fully responsive and integrates with Instagram and Facebook.
12. ColorMag
If you’re looking for a magazine-style layout, try the ColorMag. Not only does it come with a grid that lets you display your popular posts, it also lets you set the primary color, and test-run 6 custom widgets and 15 different widget areas.
ColorMag is coded with the best SEO practices and optimized to load fast. It can also be used on a multilingual site, thanks to its integration with WPML plugin.
13. Viral News
This is a free and lightweight WordPress theme by HashThemes ideal for magazine and news related websites. Viral News comes with 10+ block layouts configured using either the default WordPress customizer or Elementor page builder.
Viral News also has 5 magazine specialized widgets such as TimeLine and Personal Info, which you can place in your sidebar or footer to make your website.
14. Bulan
Bulan theme is highly classy and responsive, and has custom social sharing buttons. Puts your content front and center, and comes with two custom widgets you can use to display your recent posts and social profiles.
Outside this, Bulan also lets you customize colors, fonts, etc. using the built-in Customizer, configures your homepage and selects your sidebar display.
15. Hueman
This is one of the most popular free themes around. Hueman allows you to customize each page independently using a free add-on, includes a Twitter share bar and custom short codes, and features a modern and responsive design.
Hueman lets you feature a large slider to display your popular posts, and create custom sidebars. Using Hueman, you can easily add audio or video to any of your posts.
16. Flash
This is a versatile theme used for personal blogs and business websites. Flash is fully responsive and optimized for SEO and has an easy to use drag and drop builder for creating your own layout. With just a single click, you can import pre-built demo layouts using Flash. It has custom widgets for adding more content to your pages and can customize colors for your background, links and main text color.
Just like some of the themes we have discussed, Flash is fully responsive and optimized for SEO.
17. Placid
This is a creative blogging theme with custom widgets for monetizing your site with display ads. Placid is fully responsive, displays your social media feeds on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, using another custom widget available, and lets you control your colors, background, fonts, logo, etc.
18. Spacious
Used for personal blogs and portfolio and integrated with WooCommerce, Spacious is a multipurpose theme that lets you setup an online store to sell handmade or digital products.
It is translation ready, includes different customization options, and has four-page layouts. Besides this, Spacious also has several blog layouts, 13 widget areas, two custom page templates, etc. It also has an extensive video tutorial that will make it very easy for you to quickly set it up.
19. Anissa
This theme’s typography is focused on readability, and includes a custom About Me widget. It also includes custom styling for popular plugins, and supports large header image. When you want to use Anissa’s About Me widget, you will notice how easy it is for you to add your photo and social media links. You can also use the customizer to modify style settings to your taste.
20. MH Magazine Lite
If you are looking at creating your own online magazine, I recommend using MH Magazine Lite to achieve this. This free theme has been optimized to load fast, offers series of functionality ranging from promoting ads from your sponsors, to using custom widgets to display posts.
MH Magazine Lite is SEO friendly and perfect for sites that cover fashion, international news, gadgets, politics, or any other topic.
21. Ajaira
Perfect for bloggers and authors, Ajaira has a simple and responsive design that lets you share its content without focusing too much on images. Ajaira is fully customized with WordPress Customizer to let you control header social menu, and lets you add your social media links in the footer.
22. Wisteria
This theme is great for adding a social element to your site and bbPress. It lets you tweak colors etc., and also adds forum functionality to build a personal relationship with your readers.
23. Radiate
If you are a food, travel, or photography blogger, the radiate theme is ideal for you. This theme features a large header image, lets you customize the colors and the background, and has three widget areas below, perfect for displaying your featured posts.
You will also notice that the sticky menu of Radiate helps your visitors access other pages on your site. Radiate theme is fully responsive and optimized for SEO.
24. Editorial
Perfect for magazine and news-oriented blogs, Editorial theme is a responsive theme that features a standard magazine-style layout with 6+ widgets, customizes categories with different colors to help your readers quickly find the content they want, and uses the WordPress Customizer to tweak every aspect of your theme.
Editorial also includes areas to display ads for site monetization purpose.
25. Brilliant
This theme is ideal for magazines and personal blogs. Brilliant theme is an appealing theme that focuses on your content, allows you to change colors, the header, widgets in the footer etc., and also features your most popular posts.
26. Astra
This is one of the most popular free WordPress themes around, with over 90,000+ installs, and is customizable and lightweight. Astra has a fast page loading speed, and premium add-ons in the event that you want more customization options.
Price: Free. For unlimited websites, its Premium add-ons start from $59.
27. Poseidon
Poseidon is perfect for featuring your most popular posts, thanks to its stunning full-width slideshow.
It has Slider settings where you can choose a slider category, speed, ad animation effect, amongst others. Just like other themes, Poseidon is fully responsive, and can be customized using the WordPress Customizer. It is also translation-ready and optimized for SEO.
28. SiteOrigin Unwind
If you are a fashion, food or travel blogger, this theme is ideal for you. With the ability to load fast, SiteOrigin Unwind is integrated with SiteOrigin Page builder, has been optimized for SEO, and has five different layouts. It also includes custom widgets, and lets you customize the theme completely using the WordPress Customizer.
You can also use its integration with WooCommerce to sell both physical and digital products.
29. Total
This is a versatile theme used for blogs, magazine and business websites. Total has a clean design with parallax sections, customizes colors, fonts, and other options through WordPress Customizer.
This theme can also be used as a one-page website.
30. Hemingway
This is a clean and responsive theme which features a two-column layout with a sidebar, and adds widgets to the footer of the theme. Hemingway has a header perfect for showcasing appealing brand images. It also has page templates, is very easy to customize with the WordPress customizer, and is retina-ready.
It is perfect for writers, authors, and bloggers.
31. Hoffman
Try Hoffman if you aren’t a fan of two-column layouts. Hoffman features a full-width blog page with no sidebar, integrates with Jetpack out of the box, and supports large featured images. It also has three widget areas in the footer, two-page templates, and a Customizer for tweaking certain options.
32. Kale
This theme is ideal for food bloggers. Kale can display your food creations using the special homepage and category template, and it also features a large homepage slider and image for every post. It has built-in menus for displaying your multiple blog feed layouts, social media presence, and integration with WooCommerce etc., and this in turn lets you sell your cookbooks or recipe collections.
33. Optimizer
This is a multi-purpose theme that lets you customize your theme, and comes with two-page layouts. Optimizer is for both bloggers and businesses, offers the perfect support for WooCommerce, bbPress, etc., and is optimized for SEO. Just like other themes, Optimizer is responsive and retina-ready
34. Teletype
This is a minimalist theme that supports image and standard post formats, features a masonry layout to display sections, and tweaks font settings. Teletype includes horizontal location for the primary menu, and has a custom Text + Icon widget for creating product sections. It is also translation-ready and responsive.
35. Royal Magazine
This theme has a responsive design, and includes advertisements from sponsors. Royal Magazine has a grid layout with 5 custom widgets, and inbuilt social media options. It is SEO optimized, lets you display the most recent posts, articles, and news, and includes 3-footer widgets.
36. Baskerville
This theme supports all nine post formats making it easy to add a gallery slideshow, and is perfect for content-heavy sites. Baskerville posts featured image thumbnail, customizes the theme, and features a Pinterest-style layout. It also has three custom widgets for Flickr, video, and Dribble.
37. Panoramic
The Panoramic theme is attractive as it has a full-width slider, and is responsive and translation-ready. It lets you share brief information about your company, and modifies the layout of the homepage with drag and drop widgets. It also has customizer widget, and supports Contact Form 7 and WooCommerce.
38. Hestia
Hestia is a free multi-purpose WordPress theme suitable for any business. If you are new to WordPress, I recommend you build your website using one of its starter sites.
Hestia has great features like SEO friendly, mega menus, live customizer, amongst others. The good thing about this theme is that it also has video guides for when you get confused.
39. Make
If you want a theme great for personal bloggers ad businesses, this theme is ideal for you. Versatile and easy to use, this theme is built with a drag and drop page builder, and creates custom layouts. Make theme lets you add full-width banners, brand colors and background images. It’s compatible with plugins like WooCommerce, and has a customization option of about 100 settings.
40. Allegiant
This theme is used to add a call to action button, and also display testimonials to build credibility. Allegiant integrates with popular free plugins, and is perfect for small businesses and freelancers, especially those wanting to display their portfolio. You can also use Allegiant to display information about your team members.
41. Enlightenment
Best as a multipurpose theme, Enlightenment creates unlimited layouts with the drag and drop editor, and displays your works with Jetpack portfolio feature. This theme supports sticky posts, threaded comments, and is responsive and translation ready. Enlightenment theme is built with SEO and speed optimization.
42. Arcade Basic
This theme is built to be lightweight and lets you share information about your blog using its large header image. Arcade Basic uses WordPress Customizer to tweak some areas of your content, and supports eight post formats including image, videos, gallery etc.
This theme includes your social media links, features a large header image for sharing blog information, and integrates with some popular plugins.
43. Fluida
This is a multipurpose theme that features a completely fluid design, and can be used by bloggers and freelancers to display past projects. It also comes with 8-page templates, 6 widget areas, and support for all post formats. Fluida is quite reliable as it has two navigation menus, provides over 100 customizer theme settings, and can tweak the settings for featured images.
44. Ignite
A great choice for personal blogs and authors looking to have their content out as quickly as possible, Ignite has a simple layout with customizable and modifiable fun accent colors, and social media buttons for growing your following. This theme is also mobile device responsive, and supports WooCommerce. You can also use the sidebar to display your most popular posts or recent comments.
45. Connect
This theme creates an interesting visual effect as it has a unique design with blog excerpts on the featured image. Using the header carousel, Connect theme features your popular posts, and also boosts your blog rankings using integrated structured data and SEO optimizations.
The good thing about this theme is that it is cross-browser compatible and responsive, and ensures your visitors don’t experience difficulties viewing your content.
46. Match
This theme is ideal for wedding or personal bloggers, includes responsive layout, and page templates. Match theme lets you post formats, featured images, custom menu, and custom background.
It is also translation ready.
47. Ample
This is another multipurpose theme that runs both as a personal blog and as a business website. Ample is fully responsive and translation ready, adds call to action buttons, and has an attractive parallax area. It also adds up to four widgets in the footer, and can create your own custom menus.
48. Delivery Lite
This is a lightweight theme ideal for blogs, magazine, and review sites. Delivery Lite lets you feature your content, and integrate ads. It also contains multiple custom widgets, and has different customization options.
The theme is fully responsive and translation ready.
49. Olsen Light
Try this theme if you are either a fashion or lifestyle blogger. Olsen Light lets you display your outfits, add links to your social media profiles, Instagram feed, content in widget areas etc.
Optimized to load fast and translation ready, Olsen Light allows you to also customize your logo and site identity, and toggle pagination styles. Outside this, you can also use Olsen Light with page builders.
Conclusion
Whew! We finally did it! As a blogger, you don’t have to spend hours searching for a premium theme. Try choosing from the list of themes mentioned in this post to enjoy seamless content creation.
Finally, you need to understand that these themes may not give you the same support and functionality as a purchased theme. If you need extra features, you will need to purchase a premium version of the themes if available.
So, which is your favorite?