Do you want to find the best free WordPress themes for your site?
Creating a professional website doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. There are tons of amazing, free WordPress themes that will give your site a polished design without the high price tag.
That said, with so many theme options on WordPress, it can be overwhelming to find the best one for your new blog or business website. In this article, we’ll make choosing a new theme much easier by sharing the best free WordPress themes you can start using today.
How to Choose a Free WordPress Theme
Here are some key things to look for when choosing a free WordPress theme.
- Fast and Lightweight: Speed is super important for the user experience, but it also helps your search engine rankings (SEO). You’ll want to choose a theme with fast loading speeds, clean code, and a small footprint.
- Easily Customized: A theme that’s beginner-friendly and provides options to easily customize things like the header and footer can save you tons of time as you build your website.
- Reputable & Updated: This isn’t to say that there aren’t great themes that are less used, but selecting a free theme from a reputable, active developer in the WordPress theme directory ensures that your theme will be secure and regularly updated.
- Responsive: The majority of people use mobile devices to browse the web, so making sure you have a responsive WordPress theme that looks great on all screen sizes is an absolute must!
When you’re looking through our WordPress free themes list, keep those tips in mind! You’ll also want to pay attention to what each theme is primarily designed to do. We’ll include our favorite multipurpose themes that are great for almost any type of website, but we’ll also include free themes that are more niche-focused, which could be a better fit for your site.
Best Free WordPress Themes
Whether your website is eCommerce, a portfolio site, a personal blog, or something else, we’re sure you’ll find a free WordPress theme that’s fit for the job. Want to make your own theme instead? Check out our easy tutorial to create a custom WordPress theme.
1. Astra
Astra stands out as a top choice among the best free WordPress themes. It’s an excellent multipurpose theme that offers a lightweight and efficient solution for building websites and online stores.
Astra ensures swift loading and makes it easy to customize your theme. It includes pre-built designs with ready-to-use page templates, support for RTL languages, and seamless integration with popular page builders like SeedProd, Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder.
The free Astra theme is fast, flexible, and user-friendly, enabling users to easily create a visually stunning business site that aligns with their brand. For more powerful features and customizations, check out Astra’s demos and premium version!
2. OceanWP
OceanWP is another one of our favorite themes for WordPress. Free basic templates, flexibility, and super fast page loading are a few of the things that make it one of the best free WordPress themes available.
It’s an impressive multipurpose theme that works for any type of website, including eCommerce or membership sites. It comes with built-in SEO optimization, multiple post formats, and social media icons. Plus, it works perfectly with drag-and-drop page builders or the WordPress live customizer, ensuring you don’t need to use a single line of CSS code to change color schemes or other theme options.
3. Neve
Neve, another multipurpose WordPress theme, comes from Themeisle, which ensures it’s a reputable theme with regular updates.
Neve has a mobile-first approach, which guarantees beautifully responsive page designs. The free theme comes with a variety of WordPress website templates that make it easy to get started.
The theme has an elegant, modern design and includes layouts for blogging, small businesses, eCommerce stores, and more. It’s also compatible with popular page builder plugins.
With its minimalist design, Neve is an excellent choice for bloggers and other businesses that want to build a sleek website quickly.
4. Hestia
Hestia, another Themeisle product, is one of the best free WordPress themes for beginners. It’s a stylish theme for building one-page websites and has a focus on speed and performance.
Customization is easy with Hestia’s header background, where you can easily place a custom logo upload, navigation menu, call-to-action button, and text. You can also choose to use parallax effects, and the free WordPress theme has a mobile responsive design.
Other features include photo galleries, image sliders, blog page sections, WordPress Multilingual (WPML) compatibility, and more. It’s a great free theme on WordPress for anyone looking to make a stunning one-page website.
5. Sydney
Sydney is one of the best free WordPress portfolio themes on our list. That said, it can absolutely still be a great choice for any type of website.
It offers multiple layout options, tons of Google fonts, a sticky navigation menu, a fullscreen background image that’s easily customizable using the Elementor page builder plugin, and more.
What makes it a great business theme for freelancers or anyone wanting to showcase their work on a portfolio website is the included portfolio layout that allows you to display your work in neat tiles that easily open up to display more information. It also offers great features for displaying photos, such as a homepage slider and carousel gallery.
6. Hueman
Hueman is one of the best free WordPress magazine themes available. It’s lightweight, highly customizable, has unlimited color options, and includes social media sharing features.
It has a magazine-style layout with multiple columns and sidebars, custom widgets, multiple post formats, screen sliders for featured content, and more. Plus, it’s easy to set up with the WordPress theme customizer and adapts to look great on every device size.
Hueman provides a surprising amount of features for free, making it a great toolset for online magazines and an excellent WordPress blogging theme. It also has enough flexibility to work for other website types.
7. Kadence
Kadence is one of the best free WordPress eCommerce themes. It’s a lightweight and mobile responsive theme that optimizes your site’s loading speed while providing awesome customization features.
It provides custom front page blocks so you can create a custom homepage layout, and it fully supports the block editor (Gutenberg editor).
The theme is a great choice for any website, but it’s particularly well-suited for eCommerce due to its included WooCommerce product layouts, product image archive, add-to-cart header, testimonial sections, social icons, and more.
8. Ashe
Ashe is one of the best free WordPress blog themes on our list. Its variety of blog templates makes it a great choice for everything from high-traffic food blogs to personal travel blogs and everything in between.
The theme is mobile responsive, SEO optimized, and includes a slider to feature recent content. It also offers a promo-box feature, which is a great tool for displaying ads or highlighting affiliate product links in widget areas while still maintaining a minimal aesthetic.
Ashe is also WooCommerce-ready with built-in integration, which makes it possible to easily sell items through your blog website to increase revenue.
9. Make
Make is one of the best small business WordPress themes available for free. Its easy drag-and-drop builder helps with fast website creation. Meanwhile, 100+ theme options for customization and a huge selection of typography fonts make it flexible enough for any type of business.
The theme comes with dedicated homepage sections for displaying products and digital downloads. Plus, it integrates with popular eCommerce plugins, including WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
10. Inspiro
Inspiro is one of the best WordPress themes for photography and video-focused websites. It offers a fullscreen image background to make your landing page shine. Plus, it includes a header image background, parallax scrolling support, mobile responsiveness, ready-to-use blocks, and more.
The free version is a great choice, but if you do decide to opt for the premium theme, you’ll get an abundance of theme features for creating a media-heavy website, such as the ability to display video in your backgrounds, header, lightboxes, and slideshows.
11. Storefront
Storefront is the best free WordPress WooCommerce theme. It’s built by the same developers as WooCommerce, which ensures you’ll have no problems with compatibility or updates.
It’s a simple, straightforward, and very useful online store theme. You can select from multiple responsive layout options and use its robust codebase to create a highly custom, personalized eCommerce store.
12. Simple
Simple is one of the best free WordPress themes for Shopify stores. The theme comes from Themify, a popular theme builder. Simple makes it easy to turn your WordPress website into a beautiful Shopify store.
The free theme is built to work with the Shopify buy button and allows you to turn your WordPress site into a responsive eCommerce store without having to redirect customers to Shopify. Although the theme offers some flexibility for blogs or other websites, its primary value comes from integrating your WordPress site with your Shopify store easily.
13. Customizr
Customizr is the best free WordPress theme for mobile page optimization and lazy loading. It’s designed to give any website the feel and look of an app.
Its features include multiple page layouts (including grid templates), an image slider for featured images, parallax effects, and default lazy loading. This theme also integrates with WooCommerce and offers options for stylishly displaying your products.
What Is the Best Free Theme for WordPress?
Most free WordPress themes are great for building starter sites quickly, but the best theme really depends on the type of website you want to create. We think Astra is one of the best free WordPress themes available overall. Its robust features and user-friendly design make it a great choice for any website owner.
That said, if your website is specific to eCommerce, a certain blog style, photography, or another niche, you might prefer starting with a WordPress theme that, while free, provides more targeted features.
What is the best free WordPress theme for beginners?
Any of the themes on our list are great choices for beginners, but we especially like Hestia because of its easy one-page layout that still provides plenty of customization options. It’s retina ready, meaning it’ll look great on mobile, and you can easily use plugins to add a contact form or similar items.
What is the best free WordPress theme for eCommerce?
This depends on the type of eCommerce shop, but we love the Kadence theme because of its add-to-cart and product features that make it easy to design an online store for WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. Storefront is another great option, and since it’s made by WooCommerce developers, the compatibility aspect is very reliable.
What is the best free WordPress theme for businesses?
If you’re looking for a free theme in WordPress for your small business, the Make theme is an awesome choice. The robust customizations combined with an easy drag-and-drop builder and integration with popular eCommerce plugins make it fast, flexible, and powerful.
What is the best free WordPress theme for blogging?
For a feature-rich theme, Hueman is an awesome free WordPress choice. The magazine-style layout, unlimited widgets, color options, and more make it highly customizable for blog websites. However, if minimal is more your style, we recommend Ashe. Its minimalist blog layout still provides enough features to create an elegant, personalized blog.
Well, that’s it for now! We hope you found the best free WordPress theme to start using on your site.
After you’ve finished designing your new theme, don’t forget to download ExactMetrics to start tracking eCommerce conversions, form submissions, custom events, video plays, and so much more on your site with only a few clicks!
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