19 Best Free WordPress Blog Themes 2023

These free WordPress blog themes allow you to easily dive into any niche and industry. Start your successful blogging journey quickly and make an immediate difference.

Before starting a website and a blog, you must 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 many more ways to personalize your website. You can’t put a price on thousands of free website designs and more website plugins. We recommend WordPress simply because it is the best. WordPress invites beginners as it does professionals, with so many free tools and cheap hosting just one click away.

WordPress can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be. Thanks to premium themes and plugins, WordPress can become a business venture. 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 ridiculous sums of money. Instead, you’re much better off by choosing a free theme. In this case, we have compiled a compendium of the best free WordPress blog themes. 

Best Free WordPress Themes For Blogs

1. Shapely

Although we primarily market Shapely as a business theme, countless WordPress bloggers have turned Shapely into a blog theme. It’s something we’ve noted in the documentation. 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 most theme downloads happen in our 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. The Blog layout of Shapely is pristine, with clean colors and typography, making it a great blog theme.

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2. Activello

All of our free themes started slowly, but the WordPress community has come to embrace our attentiveness to detail and precision over the years. 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 need to create a trending blog. Activello can help individuals like you create a personal brand from your blog with an aesthetic arrangement of components.

As avid WordPress users ourselves, we know that a theme needs to make it complete. And one of the most important things for a theme is compatibility with external plugins. The Activello theme is suitable with plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast, Jetpack, Cache Plugins, and Gravity Forms. 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 using this theme. Our communication channels are always open, and we’re delighted to hear from users who want to see new features added to this already powerful theme.

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3. Sparkling

Watching Sparkling rise to the top as possibly the best WordPress theme ever built is unreal! Would we exaggerate a claim like this for our benefit? For several months now, Sparkling theme has seen anywhere from 500 to 1,000 daily downloads. The clean and modern nature has truly found its “spark” in the community. The Sparkling theme is a responsive and minimal WordPress template for bloggers. Health experts, marketing professionals, and travel bloggers are just a few people who rely on Sparkling for the best content performance. With a powerful Bootstrap integration, Sparkling can handle anything a browser would ever throw.

Structured to include the least amount of junk, Sparkling provides several powerful features. For example, once you download and activate the template, you can dig into the juicy features. One of our favorites has to be the advanced menu. We use Nav Walker — a dynamic Bootstrap menu feature for the menu to add custom styling and font icons. The feel of using font icons in a placement like a menu is different from what you’d typically see on a blog. And if you seek to make your website feel like a true home to your community, a little visual spice is the way to go.

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4. 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 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 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!

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5. Newspaper X

Newspaper X is our latest free theme release and makes our total of published themes to number ten. Along the way to publishing some of the nicest themes (according to individual reviews), we’ve learned what it takes to build a good theme. 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. This creates a newspaper-like atmosphere and focuses on readability rather than widgets.

You won’t find any widgets on the homepage besides the footer area. 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 for any fundamental content. Content display is mainly shown within a two-column grid, with ample spacing between posts. Colors are simple, with many dark colors for titles, and grayish tones for taxonomy information. Inside blog posts, the main design change is the addition of a sidebar.

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6. Portum Material

Portum Material is a free Bootstrap-based WordPress theme that creates a clean and comfortable atmosphere for all your visitors. 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, there are also animated statistics for whatever details you want 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.

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7. Portum Clean

Portum Clean surely is neat, rocking a contemporary and minimal design that will impress and inspire everyone visiting your page. Portum Clean is a great tool that will get you going in little to no time if you need a quick page fix. On top of that, even if you lack web development skills and have no experience, you will still get online easily. No coding and designing is involved; Portum Clean offers a codeless experience.

The cleanness of the theme brings all your content right in front of your guests’ eyes. No need to think twice, but Portum.

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8. Kale

As a blog theme for food bloggers, the Kale comes from an appropriately named plant — Kale! This gorgeous, super smooth theme is “stuffed” with features to make food blogging easy, and fun. Lifestyle bloggers and 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 online shop! Food bloggers have so much to offer and often decide to pursue a personal food brand. That being said, Kale isn’t just a theme to solve a temporary problem.

Eventually, you can configure Kale to last you for years while having an up-to-date design to match trending standards. Your published content is automatically SEO optimized, and adding an SEO plugin will increase your exposure on search result pages. The front page of Kale theme is the one part of the 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 will see what you publish immediately.

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9. Maicha

Regarding Maicha, it does not matter what kind of blog you would like to start – it works with anything. For instance, you can easily build travel, food, fashion, beauty, sport, design, and business blogs. 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, visit the live demo preview and go from there. This allows you to investigate Maicha further and see what it offers first-hand.

What’s more, Maicha also allows you to modify it according to your liking. Make sure you personalize the design to match your style precisely. Of course, you do not need coding and design knowledge, as Maicha offers a codeless editing process.

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10. 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 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 need something different 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.

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11. ColorMag

The WordPress community is in love with ColorMag — a theme well maintained by the devs. It’s one of their better themes, and not without reason. ColorMag is a stylish magazine theme available for free and paid Pro. 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. The first feature is a dedicated magazine-style layout, which focuses on attracting readership to your content. Something that we haven’t 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 link on a page is unique. And because you get more than 15+ widget-ready areas, it’s a welcome addition.

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12. Spacious

Would you prefer a theme that gives your content space? Themes can get overly cramped with unnecessary elements, obstructing the reader’s ability to engage your content. ThemeGrill has published Spacious — a multipurpose theme that welcomes business owners and bloggers with a business plan. 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 four unique layouts. Spacious uses a clean output of typography and content placement, making the theme highly readable. And 50,000+ users is more than enough to justify this theme’s popularity.

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13. Writee

Writee is a blogging theme for writers with 100% positive 5-star reviews. This visually stunning and responsive design theme has a unique personality. As such, Writee suits writers passionate about creative writing and personal blogging. Creative writers often publish more than just written text, and often expand their content to areas like video and photo. The Writee theme welcomes creative writers from all walks of life and 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.

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14. Wellington

We could revamp this roundup to include only ThemeZee themes, but where would that be fun? We respect these guys as designers and love their theme design style, but more than two should be sufficient to give you an idea of ThemeZee style. Wellington is another lovely blogging theme that utilizes a boxed design concept. Boxed design was one of the first design patterns WordPress themes ever used. And to this day, many 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 that don’t use English can easily translate Wellington into a local language. The speed is surprisingly swift! Surely, it might change with a few thousand blog posts, but that’s why you have caching plugins, which Wellington is easy to combine.

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15. Hueman

Hueman by Press Customizr introduced a new blog design concept, ultimately led the Hueman theme to attract over 100,000 users. The high-resolution design welcomes retina-friendly devices, while responsive functionality welcomes mobile readers with a high-definition display. 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 improving Hueman to be the best blogging and newspaper theme.

One thing’s for certain: Hueman redefined how bloggers look at two-sidebar templates. Perhaps you thought two sidebars were a big “no-no” in the past, 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 will work with a sophisticated (but easy to use) settings dashboard for page and post designs.

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16. Blog Way

It’s hard to describe the initial feelings about Blog Way, but they’re all positive! Think of it as 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. And, that’s the Blog Way theme! Hopefully, it makes sense, but you can 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 you couldn’t replace with existing WordPress plugins.

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17. xMag

Getting a design 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 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.

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18. Magazine Prime

The keyword “prime” in products tends to be used when the product covers 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 theme’s professional build is ready for some prime-time traffic! Magazine Prime is used by food brands, beauty publishers, and publishers with tons of new content daily. Technology blogs are another suitable fit for MPrime. Magazine Prime has a custom tutorials post type, ideal for explaining concepts through a step-by-step framework. You have multiple options from a wide range of theme options and numerous layouts that fit your necessity.

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19. Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was a super influential writer in American history. Any big-time writer will tell you that Hemingway has had little 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? The theme looks perfect in its natural setting with sharp colors, bold typography, and large images.

Hemingway theme tries to incorporate as many intuitive elements as WordPress allows. Furthermore, you can save precious time by not having to configure anything. Would you like to add a content slider? Easy, click activate. Same goes for additional content areas and widgets. And you can extend traditional post formats with video, images, and quotes.

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