Discover the best free WordPress themes for building a website, blog or online portfolio.
Free WordPress themes are the perfect way to build a website for free, if you don't have any web design skills. In this post, we round up the best ones available on the web today, covering a range of styles and intended audiences.
First things first, though, If you're completely new to WordPress, you'll want to first check out the beginners' section of our WordPress tutorials roundup. Also remember that while WordPress allows you to build a website for free, you'll still need someone to host it. So check out our guide to the best web hosting services, many of which offer options specifically for WordPress hosting.
With all that in mind, read on to discover the best free WordPress themes available today, and where you can download them from.
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01. Neve
When it comes to free WordPress themes, Neve has everything that you need (Image credit: Neve)
Neve looks clean, modern and beautifully proportioned. It's also super-fast to load and can be used for multiple purposes, from blogs to ecommerce to personal portfolios, and more. While it's lightweight and has a minimalist design, the theme is highly extendable, optimised for SEO and is responsive and WooCommerce-ready. It's compatible with many popular page builders too. In short, when it comes to free WordPress themes, this brilliant design has it all.
02. Flare
Flare is one of the best free WordPress themes for beginners (Image credit: Theme Grill)
Flare is extremely responsive, and one of the best looking free WordPress themes around. Designed for beginners, it's easy to configure, but its simplicity doesn't mean it's feature-less. In fact, the list of features goes on forever, and includes SEO optimisation, parallax image-background option, and an advanced slider with multiple effects and control options.
03. Flash
Flash is a professional, versatile theme (Image credit: Theme Grill)
Currently one of the most popular free WordPress themes, Flash boasts a wealth of features including a boxed and wide layout option, WooCommerce compatibility and a bunch of widgets – portfolio, call to action and testimonial to name just a few. It's a professional-looking theme with great versatility.
04. Hitchcock
Hitchcock is one of our favourite free WordPress themes for crafting a portfolio
Hitchcock is one of our favourite WordPress portfolio themes for designers, photographers and other creatives. The beautiful design comes with Jetpack infinite scroll, custom accent colour, custom header image, support for the gallery post format, the option to always show post preview titles, editor styling and much more. We love the clean lines of the grid on the front page, and the way they reveal the bold background behind.
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05. Gutenshop
Gutenshop is a modern choice for your online shop
This clean, minimal and responsive theme is super fast and fully SEO optimized. One of our favourite free WordPress themes for ecommerce projects, Gutenshop can be used as a one page shop, and it's fully responsive.
06. MinimalistBlogger
MinimalistBlogger is one of the free WordPress themes we'd recommend to bloggers
The elegant, minimalist design of MinimalistBlogger isn't that customisable, so you have to really love what you get when you hit download. However, stripping away the noise makes the content really sing, so this is a great choice for you if you want to push your work into centre stage. This most lightweight of free WordPress themes is also SEO optimised, making it a hassle-free choice.
07. Monty
Monty is a one-page portfolio theme for WordPress
Designed with freelancers in mind, Monty is a one-page portfolio theme that's easy to set up and comes with plenty of features that you'd expect to find in a premium theme. These include a one-click demo importer, Visual Composer to make putting your site together a breeze, Slider Revolution and Swiper Slider, as well as flexible colours and typography so you can get exactly the look you need.
08. Business Zone
Business Zone is one of the most polished free WordPress themes available for professional use
Business is serious business and requires a serious theme. But that doesn't mean you have to pay for it. Business Zone offers all the elements you'll need if you're building a site for a more sober, corporate client, with plenty of ready-made sections that'll tick all the business boxes. Responsive and easily customisable, it uses King Composer to ease the building process.
09. Hamilton
Hamilton's typography is beautifully understated
Responsive and Retina-ready, Hamilton is a portfolio theme with a minimal layout and fine-tuned typography designed to draw attention to the really important stuff: your content. This cleanest of free WordPress themes has built-in support for the Jetpack Infinite Scroll module, so you can pack it with as much imagery as you can muster. And if you're not keen on the white background you can instantly activate Dark Mode to display your portfolio with white text on a dark background.
10. Themx
Themx is one of the best free WordPress themes offering multiple language support (Image credit: ThemeX)
With its drag-and-drop interface, Themx is one of a select band of free WordPress themes that are suitable for almost any kind of website. It's based around Visual Composer to make the business of putting a site together nice and straightforward. If you're aiming for an international audience then you'll find its WPML support invaluable, and it also comes with a variety of custom post types and plenty of customisation options.
11. Brad
This minimalist portfolio theme will help you show off your work in a good light
Crafted for maximum browser compatibility using HTML5 and CSS3, Brad is a fully responsive, minimalist portfolio theme for showing off your work in the best light. It features three portfolio types with multiple layouts, a 12-column grid system and precise, granular page building using Elementor Page Builder.
12. Mallow
Mallow is our pick when it comes to free WordPress themes for writers
Aimed at writers of all kinds, Mallow is a well-balanced and flexible theme designed to be a blank canvas to express what’s on your mind. One of the best free WordPress themes for blogging and case studies, it's fast and fully responsive with complete browser support and regular updates. Upgrade to the Pro version for a live theme customiser and unlimited colour choices.
13. Bandana
Bandana comes with a lot more useful features than most free WordPress themes
Featuring responsive layouts and Font Awesome support as well as custom menus, widgetised sidebars, custom background, featured images and more, Bandana is fully optimised for SEO. And if you don't mind getting handy with code, you can fork it on GitHub to create your own version.
14. Sydney
Sydney was built with business owners and freelancers in mind
If you're looking to attract customers or clients, Sydney is one of your best choices from the free WordPress themes available today. Built with business owners and freelancers in mind, it provides a wide array of customisation options that will help your website stand out. It's also fully responsive, supports translation, and makes social media integration a cinch.
15. Illdy
Illdy is one of the best free WordPress themes that's multipurpose
Built on the Bootstrap framework and fully responsive and mobile-friendly, Illdy is one of the best looking free WordPress themes that's truly multipurpose. All the heavy lifting is done via the WordPress Customizer, enabling you to build your site on the fly using preview mode. Plus, it's entirely compatible with popular plugins such as Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms and Yoast SEO.
16. Hemingway
Hemingway offers an attactive template for your blogging project
Unless you want to change themes every year it's best to pick something that won't look dated as design trends evolve, and Hemingway is a good option in that regard. It's a simple, elegant two-column layout with classic typography and large, readable text. One of the best free WordPress for bloggers, Hemingway is built to be responsive, so will work on desktop and mobile.
17. Origin
Origin offers beautiful type for long reads
If you want to fit a lot of text onto your homepage, Origin does a good job of doing it without looking messy or cluttered. Your articles are arranged in a column that gives each one space for a decent-length intro, and the type looks great. One of the best free WordPress themes for a site with a lot of reading.
18. Upright
Upright is among our favourite free WordPress themes for building a portfolio
Upright is a fully responsive, blog-style theme for WordPress that leverages big imagery and portfolio functionality to present content effectively. Sliders, sidebar colour pickers, and custom background images allow you to create a unique site. This theme is search engine optimised from the get-go, too.
19. Fashionista
Fashionista is one of the best free WordPress themes for creating a blog
Another type-driven design, Fashionista is one of our favourite free WordPress themes for creating a magazine-style blog. We like the bold headlines and pleasingly busy layout that will look good on both desktop and mobile. This theme is built on Bootstrap, and can be easily customised to suit your needs.
20. Hatch
Hatch's image grid shows visitors your work with no clicking or scrolling
Illustrators, photographers and artists will love Hatch. The layout has one large slot for your main image and then a grid of 12 smaller images to instantly give visitors a sense of what your work is like. It's a great use of space that fits a lot of content into one screen. There's also a lightbox included to showcase work individually.
21. Lightly
Lightly is great for building a portfolio site
Lightly is a clean, minimalist blog magazine theme for WordPress that puts your content centre-stage. The theme's refreshing design features a homepage slider and a widgetised homepage that allows users to create custom layouts by simply dragging and dropping everything into place.
22. Glider
Who needs images? Glider brings text to the fore
Don't want to mess about trying to find beautiful imagery? Looking for free WordPress themes that focus on the text, to make that look beautiful instead? Glider is a minimal, text-focused theme is all about seamless reading: no page loads, no interruptions, just a quick and easy way to access content.
Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles.
