25 Popular Free WordPress Blog Themes 2021
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You can now dive into any niche and industry easily with these best free WordPress blog themes. Start your successful blogging journey quickly and make an immediate difference.
Demand for websites continues to grow at a steady pace. As more people find interest in writing and diverging their professions to sub-categories, a website is a wonderful way to maximize exposure to new clients and readership. In marketing, a website acts both as an informational resource, and as means to generate revenue. Of course, revenue isn’t something that you see appearing instantly. Growing a website and a community can be a very time-consuming process, and often requires great commitment to reap the rewards of success. Ask any successful blogger, and he will tell you that unless you write consistently, your blog is going to fade away.
But, before you think of starting a website, and indeed a blog, you are going to have to figure out how to create your website. These days, website builders are a dominant choice for beginners. But, WordPress, a professional content management system, provides much more ways of personalizing a website for special needs. We recommend WordPress simply because it is the best. You can’t put a price on thousands of free website designs, and thousands of more website plugins — also known as add-ons. With so many free tools and cheap hosting just one click away, WordPress invites beginners as it does professionals.
WordPress can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be. Thanks to the introduction of premium themes and plugins, WordPress can be turned into a business venture itself. And many have taken the opportunity to build premium themes for a nominal fee. Certainly much cheaper than hiring a web developer, with costs exceeding tens of thousands of dollars for a custom design. As a beginner, you don’t have to trouble yourself with such ridiculous sums of money. Instead, you’re much better off by choosing a free theme. In this case, we have compiled a compendium of best free WordPress blog themes. Take as much time as you need to preview each one. Who knows, your next website design could be on this list!
Best free WordPress blog themes for any niche
Shapely
Although we primarily market Shapely as a theme for businesses, countless WordPress bloggers have turned Shapely into a blog theme. It’s something we’ve noted in the documentation ourselves. A theme as versatile as Shapely is easy to configure for personal needs. With an unmatched design, we know that Shapely is one of the most advanced themes on the free market. And numbers don’t lie, with WordPress reporting more than 20,000 active installs. We know the number is much higher than this, as the majority of our theme downloads happen in our own Theme’s section of Colorlib.
The detachable homepage elements of Shapely are easy to move around, enabling you to revamp the homepage into a personal blog style. Many bloggers have recreated their sites by putting business aspects on the homepage. For example, WellnessMama used to be a blog-only website, whereas now the owner has put a lot of sales/business elements on the homepage. And the blog is relocated to the Blog section of the site. So, given that example, you can use Shapely to achieve the same result. Needless to say, the Blog layout of Shapely is pristine, with clean colors and typography, making it a great blog them on its own.
Activello
All of our free themes started out slowly, but over the years the WordPress community has come to embrace our attentiveness to detail and precision. And Activello — a simple multipurpose theme — is a prime example of a simple theme can attract hundreds of thousands of users. Professional bloggers, travel writers and fashion designers are just a handful of people who use Activello for their blog. This minimal yet refreshingly clean theme is everything you’d need to create a trending content blog. With an aesthetic arrangement of components, the Activello can help individuals like you to create a personal brand out of your blog.
As avid WordPress users ourselves, we know what it is that a theme needs to make it complete. And one of the most important things for a theme is compatibility with external plugins. As such, the Activello theme is suitable with plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast, Jetpack, Cache Plugins, and Gravity Forms. You know, the usual suspects of the best WordPress plugins for a blog. Furthermore, Activello uses Schema Markup for posts and pages, so you can get a decent SEO boost as soon as you start using this theme. Most of all, our communication channels are always open, and we’re delighted to hear from users who would want to see new featured added to this already powerful theme.
Sparkling
It’s been unreal to watch Sparkling rise to the top as possibly the best WordPress theme ever built! Would we exaggerate a claim like this for our own benefit? For several months now, Sparkling theme sees anywhere from 500 to 1,000 daily downloads. The clean and modern nature of Sparkling has truly found its “spark” in the community. The Sparkling theme is a responsive and minimal WordPress template for bloggers in all niches. Health experts, marketing professionals, and travel bloggers are just a few of the people who rely on Sparkling for best content performance. With a powerful Bootstrap integration, the Sparkling can handle anything a browser would ever throw at it.
Structured to include the least amount of junk, Sparkling manages to provide a handful of powerful features. For example, once you go through the process of downloading and activating the template, you can start to dig into the juicy features. One of our favorites has to be the advanced menu. For the menu, we use Nav Walker — a dynamic Bootstrap menu feature with which you can add custom styling and font icons. The feel of using font icons in a placement like a menu is totally different from what you’d normally see on a blog. And if you seek to make your website to feel like a true home to your community, a little bit of visual spice is the way to go.
Antreas
Antreas is a clean and simple free WordPress business website theme. It’s the perfect tool for taking your business projects and ventures online in a flash. You’ll need no prior coding experience to do right by your business with Antreas. Polished, high quality websites are a breeze to create through Antreas. The awesome WP Customizer lets you craft whole sections and layouts like a pro. Handy shortcodes allow you to drop functional elements anywhere on your pages. Introduce your professional team and present your qualifications in style. Attract new business with handsome and flexible pricing tables. Present your products and services in the best light and make the right impression. Businesses large and small can find a home in Antreas. Broad plugin compatibility lets you expand Antreas beyond your wildest dreams. Get Antreas today, and let your project make it big!
Newspaper X
Newspaper X is our latest free theme release and makes our total of published themes to number ten. Along the way of publishing some of the nicest themes (according to individual reviews), we’ve learned what it takes to build a theme which works well. The Newspaper X is a polished free WordPress blog theme with multiple magazine elements. The core principle behind Newspaper X is to highlight as much new content on the homepage as possible. As a result, you can add numerous layers of content categories on the homepage. Which creates a newspaper like atmosphere, and focuses on readability rather than things like widgets.
Apart from the footer area, you won’t find any widgets on the homepage. However, you won’t need them because Newspaper X adds additional ways to highlight any content you want. A tidy content slider is integrated into the upper part of the homepage to display featured posts. And just below the slider is an added grid where you can put any fundamental content. Content display is mostly shown within a two-column grid, with ample spacing between each post. Colors are simple, with lots of dark colors for titles, and grayish tones for taxonomy information. Inside blog posts, the main design change is the addition of a sidebar.
Portum Material
Portum Material is a free Bootstrap-based WordPress theme that creates a clean and comfortable atmosphere for all your visitors. There are no fancy effects and exciting animations going on. Okay, to be 100% candid with you, Portum Material does sport just a little bit of movements and whatnot. For instance, above the fold, you will find a big, full-width slider with text and call-to-action buttons. Moreover, further down, there are also animated statistics for whatever details you would like to display with a distinct touch.
Other features of Portum Material are mobile-ready layout, subscription form, back to top button, Google Maps and multi-level drop-down menu. Besides, Portum Material also comes with a working contact form for your convenience. Start your online project now, alter the layout of Portum Material accordingly and spread the word out.
Portum Clean
Portum Clean surely is neat and tidy, rocking a contemporary and minimal design that will impress and inspire everyone visiting your page. If you are in need of a quick page fix, Portum Clean is a great tool that will get you going in little to no time. On top of that, even if you lack web development skills, heck, even if you have no experience, you will still get online with ease. There is no coding and designing involved; Portum Clean offers a codeless experience.
No need to think twice, but Portum Clean is also responsive, retina-ready, cross-browser compatible and optimized for great performance. It is the cleanness of the theme that brings all your content right in front of your guests’ eyes. Couple Portum Clean with your compelling subjects and thrive.
Kale
As a blog theme for food bloggers, the Kale gets its name from an appropriately named plant — Kale! This gorgeous, and super smooth theme is “stuffed” with features to make food blogging easy, and fun. Lifestyle bloggers, as well as those who blog for personal reasons, can still enjoy Kale as an alternative blogging theme. Kale supports WooCommerce which you can use to build your very own online shop! Food bloggers have so much to offer and often decide to go the route of a personal food brand. That being said, Kale isn’t just a theme to solve a temporary problem.
Eventually, you can configure Kale so that it lasts you for years to come, whilst having an up to date design to match trending standards. Your published content is automatically SEO optimized, and adding an additional SEO plugin is further going to increase your exposure on search result pages. The front-page of Kale theme is the one part of the whole design that has gotten a lot of love and attention. With a pleasing placement of sliders, content boxes, and blog post lists, you can rest assured that readers are going to see what you publish immediately.
Maicha
When it comes to Maicha, it does not really matter what kind of blog would you like to start – it works with anything. For instance, you can build travel, food, fashion, beauty, sport, design and business blogs with ease. Maicha has it all available at your fingertips, entirely free of charge. In short, you have nothing to lose, yet all to gain. But first, feel free to visit the live demo preview and go from there. This allows you to investigate Maicha further and see what it has to offer first-hand.
What’s more, Maicha also allows you to modify it according to your liking. With that, make sure you personalize the design, so it matches your style precisely. Of course, for that, you do not need to have any coding and design knowledge, as Maicha offers a codeless editing process.
Sublime
Sublime is another creative and very catchy free WordPress blog theme that will impress everyone. It has this cool and tidy design that works with just about anything that you can think of. In other words, employ Sublime for the exact blog you would like to start, whether it’s personal or covers multiple niches. Everything works for Sublime, thanks to its amazing adaptability – and you do not even need to change much, as it works so amazingly well out of the box.
When it comes to features, there are loads for you to take to your advantage. From slider and back to top button to custom CSS, logo, pagination and Instagram section, it’s all at your fingertips. Sublime also ensures SEO and loading optimization for your convenience. Finally, if you’d ever want to sell anything on your blog, Sublime also comes compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.
Cream Blog Lite
Cream Blog Lite is powerful enough to work as a free WordPress blog theme, online magazine or other publishing pages. Whatever is on your mind, you can now realize it with Cream Blog Lite. Besides, whether you are into writing about a niche topic or you would like to create a generic news platform, Cream Blog Lite is ready and set for both. Cream Blog Lite will stunningly display all your content on mobile and desktop devices, as well as all modern web browsers.
With its lightweight structure, Cream Blog Lite ensures fast loading speed and impressive performance. Different post listing layouts, Instagram feed widget, pagination, translation ready and WooCommerce compatibility are all the amenities of Cream Blog Lite. You can also expect the theme to receive regular updates so it never stays behind the modern trends.
Voice Blog
If you are a storyteller, get your word out with Voice Blog. This free WordPress blog theme provides a contemporary web design that will spark everyone’s curiosity. It is minimal and very appealing to the eye with a nice attention to detail. You can enjoy using Voice Blog for any blog you want, limits are none as it adapts to all project ideas. In other words, Voice Blog is ready to establish your dream page quickly and effortlessly.
Voice Blog also sports all the tech and web rules of the current web, like SEO friendliness, responsiveness and browser compatibility. If you are in need of something different, something that knocks their socks off, you should not miss checking out Voice Blog. It has all and everything a blogger wants in a free theme.
Juliet
Juliet is a feminine-style blogging theme for lifestyle, personal, and fashion blogs. With a smooth scrolling optimization and two included skins, Juliet is more than enough to create a stylish and trending blog website. Once you have the basics of your blog features figure out, you can go ahead and enable your eCommerce store. Of course, the store pages are pre-designed, and you can add products straight away.
The widget areas of Juliet are exceptionally well positioned, allowing bloggers like yourself to maximize exposure to what is important to you. Most of all, Juliet is simple to use and when you want to change something, it can be done without the strain of needing to know how to code. Currently, the Juliet theme consists of features like fancy scrollbars, sticky posts, responsive design, front-page banners, featured posts, and blog feed widgets.
ColorMag
WordPress community is in love with ColorMag — a theme that has been consistently updated and kept in good maintenance by ThemeGrill. It’s one of their better themes for sure, and not without a reason. ColorMag is a stylish magazine theme which is available as a Free version, and a paid Pro version respectively. A magazine theme can mean many things, but ThemeGrill clearly states that you can use ColorMag for news, magazine, and publishing websites. As a result, the intended use matches the provided features.
While we won’t go into detail about all features of ColorMag, we’d like to mention some that would be important for a blogger. First feature is a dedicated magazine-style layout, which focuses on attracting readership to your content. Something that we haven’t really seen before is a “unique posts system” developed by ThemeGrill. The posts system scans for any possible duplicate posts within your widget areas, ensuring that every single link on a page is totally unique. And because you get more than 15+ widget-ready areas in total, it’s definitely a welcome addition.
Spacious
Would you prefer a theme which gives your content space? Themes can get overly cramped up with unnecessary elements, and in turn obstruct reader’s ability to engage your content. ThemeGrill has published Spacious — a multipurpose theme which welcomes business owners, and bloggers with a business plan in mind. Spacious theme is as flexible towards business needs as it is towards bloggers. With custom styling, custom widgets, and more than ten widget areas, you can go crazy with modifying Spacious to look how you want. The Blog pages have four display types, while pages can be shown in up to four unique layouts. Most of all, Spacious uses a clean output of typography and content placement, making the theme highly readable. And 100,000+ users is more than enough to justify this theme’s popularity.
Writee
Writee is a blogging theme for writers with 100% positive 5-star reviews. An example of how design effort can lead towards community support. This visually stunning and responsive design theme has a completely unique personality. As such, Writee suits writers with a passion for creative writing and personal blogging. Creative writers often publish more than just written text, and oftentimes expand their content to areas like video and photo. The Writee theme welcomes creative writers from all walks of life, and as such provides custom post formats for publishing more than just blog posts. Widgets, post information, and post outlines use creative border styling, which results in a creative and authentic feel to your blog.
Primer
GoDaddy is possibly the oldest hosting company that’s still ever popular today. And in the last couple of years, the GoDaddy team have expanded they reach into markets like WordPress. As a hosting company, GoDaddy provides solutions for WordPress bloggers, so it’s hardly a surprise that they would publish their own WordPress themes. Primer is one of their two publicly published open-source templates, and both excel with high-quality styling and great functionality. The basic premise of Primer is responsive design, with as many design customization options as possible. For example, you can jump into the theme options of Primer and change colors, fonts, and choose the layouts in which to present your blog content. Furthermore, Primer is available in 30+ languages upon download.
Wellington
Truth to be told, we could revamp this whole roundup to include only ThemeZee themes alone, but where would be the fun in that? We respect these guys as designers and love their style of theme design, but more than two should be sufficient enough to give you an idea of ThemeZee style. Here is Wellington, another lovely blogging theme which utilizes a boxed design concept. Actually, boxed designed was one of the first design patterns that WordPress themes ever used. And to this day, a large number of bloggers have stuck with their old-school designs because they’re so well-known by readers.
Wellington’s responsive markup ensures the best display on smaller screens. Users from countries which don’t use English can easily translate Wellington into a local language. And… the speed is surprisingly swift! Surely with a few thousand blog posts, it might change, but that’s why you have caching plugins, which Wellington is easy to combine with.
Hueman
Hueman by Press Customizr introduced a new concept for blog design, and ultimately led the Hueman theme to attracting well over 100,000 users. And if you know anything about marketing a product in a saturated market, then you know a number as high is no small feat. But, Press Customizr deserves the success, as proven by their dedication to consistently improve Hueman to be the best blogging and newspaper theme that it can be. The high-resolution design welcomes retina-friendly devices, while responsive functionality welcomes mobile readers with a high-definition display.
One thing’s for certain, Hueman redefined the way bloggers look at two-sidebar templates. Perhaps in the past, you thought two sidebars is a big “no-no”, but Hueman will make you rethink your decision as it did for me. And although it may feel like Hueman theme is hiding behind a ton of customization, it doesn’t fail to impress when you look at performance grades. Same goes for SEO, with clear markup and instructions for search engines to understand your content in the best way possible. As you get comfortable with Hueman as a standalone design, you can begin tapping into the Theme Design settings. Inside Theme Design you are going to be working with a sophisticated (but simple to use) dashboard of settings for page and post designs.
Blog Way
Hard to describe the initial feelings about Blog Way, but they’re all positive! Think of it was a blank page, upon which you’ve written your blog posts, the links you want to use for navigation, and some sidebar information about yourself. Now, imagine that everything you wrote has a smooth border added around it. And, that’s the Blog Way theme! Hopefully, it makes sense, but you can surely see what I mean in the screenshot above. This minimal theme is for writers who love to write and not turn the design into a bigger deal than it needs to be. Great theme for personal lifestyle writers, travel bloggers, and anyone who likes pressing the publish button regularly. Blog Way Plus (premium version) adds a few other widgets to the theme, but nothing that you couldn’t replace with existing WordPress plugins.
Nikkon
The unique twists of Nikkon theme are endless. How do we mean? Nikkon’s multipurpose extends towards photography blogging and general blogging purposes. A basic design guarantees familiarity amongst readers. But, Nikkon impresses with special attention towards well-known elements. For example, homepage consists mainly of featured images from posts. And colors appear to be gray only. But, once you roll over a particular image, the colors change into the actual colors of the photo. Little adjustments like this make Nikkon a wonderful, unique and creative theme. Furthermore, those of you who like how Nikkon looks can play around with the inbuilt Page Builder. Who knows what you’re going to come up with. Most of all, as a photographer you are able to sell your photos easily through the WooCommerce plugin support.
xMag
Getting a design just right takes years of experience. And Design Lab are no slackers. As a reputable brand, Design Lab designers put their heart’s into refining a theme for maximum brilliance. And love is what keeps this world spinning. xMag’s design is a traditional magazine layout, with standard post lists. It looks like xMag’s popularity comes from the overall presentation. Since everything from social links to custom widgets is already included, new users don’t have to twist their fingers to make xMag ready for production. Worth mentioning is that xMag relies on Underscores as its back-end framework. The Underscores Framework is an excellent WordPress start theme. And was most recently mentioned in our roundup of the best WordPress starter themes.
Magazine Prime
The keyword “prime” in products tends to be used when the product is meant to cover everything for its category. Based on this concept, Magazine Prime from ThemeInWP covers all aspects of magazine blogging. You can’t overlook the modern touch of Magazine Prime. And the professional build of the theme is made ready for some prime time traffic! You can find Magazine Prime being used by food brands, beauty publishers, and publishers with tons of new content on daily basis. Technology blogs are another suitable fit for MPrime. Magazine Prime has a custom tutorials post type, which is ideal for explaining concepts through a step by step framework. You have multiple options to select from wide range of theme options and numerous layouts that fit your necessity.
BlackLite
ZBlack Lite has been generating momentum for the last few months and is nearing the 1,000+ users mark quickly. The ZBlack looks like a strictly personal blog theme. Which is everything we could ask for in a roundup of the best free WordPress themes, is it not? Key details of ZBlack are Customizer Integration, Color Schemes, Logo Management, Custom Settings for Posts and Pages, Social Networking (Feeds and Icons), Translation Support, and SEO Optimization! That’s a lot for something that you don’t have to pay for. But we’re not budging. If anything, I’m fond of ZBlack as a clean and content-first theme. Instagram users can go ahead and add their Instagram feeds to the site using a widget. The said widget shows up right before the footer part of your homepage but also pages and posts.
Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was a super influential writer in American history. Any big time writer will tell you that Hemingway has had at least a little bit of influence on their lives. And now Anders Norn has taken it upon himself to publish a theme by the name of Hemingway. A blogging theme for writers who enjoy their craft. How to best describe Hemingway theme? With sharp colors, bold typography and large images, the theme looks perfect in its natural setting. Furthermore, you can save precious time by not having to configure anything. Would you like to add a content slider? Easy, just click activate. Same goes for additional content areas and widgets. Hemingway theme tries to incorporate as many intuitive elements as WordPress allows. And you can extend traditional post formats with video, images, and quotes.
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