20 Best Free Ghost Themes Beautifully Designed With Simplicity In Mind 2023
Whether you want to start with Ghost or switch to it, these free Ghost themes will help you tremendously. There is something for everyone, regardless of your meticulous taste.
Ghost is a Node.js supported open-source blogging platform for those who aren’t appealed to the bloatedness of WordPress. The slogan of Ghost is to help others choose a less clutter-filled blogging platform for simple content publishing needs. A determined favorite amongst the web developer and software engineer communities.
Anyone running a WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger blog can easily migrate their existing blogs to Ghost. You can find documentation for these migrations on the Ghost Documentation page, but the process is seamless, so anyone can execute it comfortably.
We understand this. And because we do, we wanted to give back to the community and help those trying to transfer to Ghost and existing Ghost bloggers looking to change their blog style. But, moving from your favorite content platform to a new one might mean you must give up a few things. Maybe it’s widgets, but more than likely, it will be your blog theme.
We gathered the most comprehensive collection of the best free Ghost themes out in the wild. These themes range from minimal to multi-purpose, which can be used to host news and other trending content.
Best Free Ghost Themes
1. Attila
Attila is a minimal Ghost theme that resembles Medium.com design in some ways. It is a mobile responsive theme that fits writers, bloggers, and programmers who need a simple platform to share their thoughts. The parallax feature allows you to specify visual cover content for each post to add that extra flavor. At the end of each post, there’s room for displaying the content author information and social media sharing buttons. You can even enable Disqus comments to get that community aspect going. Some while ago, we published a post about the best jQuery progress bar plugins, and Attila is a theme that utilizes one of those plugins to display the progress of content being read at the top of the page. Coders can enjoy syntax highlighting for their code on an automated basis, so paste the code, and that’s it.
2. Vapor
We will see quite a few minimal Ghost themes in this list; it’s what Ghost stands for — a minimalistic approach to blogging. Vapor features a minimal layout that’s more focused on the typography appearance than the positioning of everything else. You can add cover images and play with Google Fonts to change up the font appearance of your content, and the modern feel is quite evident. At the end of each post, there’s space to show sharing buttons, author info, and implement Disqus comments to increase your readers’ engagement.
3. Saga
Ghost has also found great support from people who are into photography, as Ghost makes it easy to build templates that can display visual content in grid-like layouts. Saga is one of those themes with full focus on photographic content. The main page is a Pinterest-like layout for displaying your latest posts. In contrast, the content pages feature a full-width featured image with a minimalistic content layout that can describe your latest work. Some changes to the style will be necessary if you wish to add things like author info or social media buttons—all easy to do.
4. Crisp
Crisp is a lightweight Ghost theme that’s an excellent fit for individuals and authors who want to create a portfolio-like website, focusing only on content. It has a left-hand sidebar that you can use to outline your site’s mission, display a social media widget, and menu links to promote your more important pages. Great for sharing those insightful programming posts that only require a white background. Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons power social sharing, and Disqus implementation is native.
5. ABC Theme
Julian Ćwirko has published some genuinely amazing Ghost themes for everyone, and ABC Theme is among the best ones he has come up with. ABC Theme features many modern web development integrations, such as the Foundation Framework, SASS for styling, and the Highlight.js library for displaying your code. This theme is a fantastic fit for developers who know their way around the latest front-end tools. A tremendous theme lets you use custom Foundation elements within your content posts, allowing you to reach beyond the ordinary functionality of Ghost themes.
6. Ghostium
While we did say that there’s a theme in this post that looks an awful lot similar to Medium’s design, Ghostium is the one that’s entirely based on the UX & UI patterns of Medium’s style, and the result is nothing short of stunning. Great font choices and text alignment make Ghostium an excellent platform for bloggers and programmers who wish to share their thoughts and focus on content to ensure a maximum readability rate. Ghostium works with cross-devices. All content loads asynchronously, so there’s no jumping between pages. For highlighting code, Ghostium uses Prism. Those active on social media can enjoy an in-built integration for Twitter Cards, and also OpenGraph — so all your posts will look great on social media websites.
7. Dawn
To start a blog with a twist, you better peek at Dawn. This free Ghost theme follows all the lates trends and regulations of the web. In other words, it performs very well across all devices and web browsers. Every reader will enjoy skimming through you content, happy to come back for more.
Some highlights include a load more button, subscription, pop-up search bar, and more. There are also some excellent styling features to create an outcome that suits your fashion best. However, it has an immaculate and minimal default view, which caters to different tastes.
8. Edge
With Edge, you can establish a stunning online portfolio website. Regardless of your profession, Edge caters to your needs easily. Freelancers, photographers and other creative minds, Edge is for everyone. And if you are searching for a Ghost theme with a minimalistic look, look no further. Edge is here to do the trick.
Excellent project page, handy navbar, social media buttons, and different styling options are all the different features of Edge. Of course, the layout is perfectly in-tune with smartphones, tablets, and desktops. For a quick online portfolio fix, Edge is the right answer.
9. Wave
You better take a peek at Wave for every blogger and podcaster out there. This remarkable free Ghost theme will get you moving in the right direction in the snap of a finger. Instead of doing the task from the ground up, create a professional outcome with Wave. It rocks many goodies out of the box to offer you to kick-start your project.
Due to the clean and simple appearance, everything you plan to publish will appear stunningly. Even though you can improve Wave’s default settings, many will still want to use it as is. Wave is very inspiring with its current configurations.
A great alternative to Wave are these podcasting WordPress themes.
10. Mnml
Mnml is a lightweight, fully responsive, content-oriented Ghost theme with excellent typography choices. A responsive typographic scale and a wise line length selection is why Mnml can achieve such a high-level content experience. To make posts look more appealing on the homepage, Mnml is in-built with a thumbnails feature, similar to what you would see in WordPress, for example; well, the same anyway. The performance tweaks are another feature that keeps Ghost bloggers attracted to this theme. All thumbnails are resized in accordance to the device, scripts, and also styles are loaded on an asynchronous basis, same goes for the comment section. Beauty and speed together are rare, but Mnml has achieved that feat.
11. Ghostwriter
Ghostwriter focuses on typography to deliver a smooth content reading experience. It’s also built with AJAX principles to provide a smooth transition experience between browsing posts and other site pages. Uses SASS for styling, and the required files are provided. It works and looks great on mobile devices. Has featured content support. The other thing we enjoyed is that you can specify (feature posts) a single homepage post and then use the menu to direct users to the site’s archives, allowing you always to promote the latest most exciting content on the homepage. This theme best fits startups that only make product announcements on their blogs.
12. Massively
Massively is a jaw-dropping, impactful, creative-looking free Ghost theme for all bloggers and journalists. It is a tool everyone can practice and experience an end product that will amaze and inspire every visitor. If you want to create an online hub for your compelling articles, you will achieve excellent results using Massively.
The whole design is based around a full-screen image that levels up the overall appearance of your blog. You can also style and fine-tune the default look of Massively and personalize it to the very last detail.
Other goodies of Massively are parallax and scrolling effects, social media icons, predefined elements, and a scroll-down button. Regardless of your passion, you can bring a blog that will turn heads to fruition Massively.
13. Editorial
That said, if you want to dive into the blogging space, make it happen with the help of Editorial and all the amazingness it has in store for you. Editorial – hence the name – is a free Ghost theme that suits news-focused websites best. With the clean and creative design, the experience of browsing through your content will be an enjoyable one. Keep in mind, whether you dig the out-of-the-box look or you would like to modify it, both work. Editorial is a free and open-source alternative that caters to any taste without a hitch.
The layout is 100% mobile-friendly, cross-browser compatible, and retina-ready. You do not have to worry about the technicalities and excellent performance; the Editorial takes care of it for your convenience. One cool feature of the theme is the sticky sidebar menu, which keeps navigability functions present.
14. London
London is another striking, eye-catchy, modern free Ghost theme primarily focusing on text and image content. Instead of running a blog or a news site that follows the traditional look, you can easily take things into your hands using London. This impressive web design will spice things up with its creativity.
If you do not know it, you would like London’s theme first to build a designer’s portfolio. Well, that’s not the case. Still, if you want to shine extra on the image content, that’s when London comes into play. You also get an about page, social media buttons, and quite a collection of elements and components in the kit. Couple it with compelling texts, and you have a winning combination.
15. The Shell
The Shell, as the name implies, is an excellent theme for the hacker type! It’s dark, uses specialized font types, and is somewhat straightforward. The theme is built using pure CSS, so you can quickly adjust the CSS to reflect your desires at any given point. Has support for Google Analytics, Disqus comments, and code highlighting. What more could a developer ask for?
16. Odin
Casper is the default Ghost theme, and Odin is a fork of Casper that builds upon some necessary features for developers who wish to get into the blogging sphere and need a flexible way to share articles with code snippets. Odin also supports Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons, but more than that, it supports all the libraries you can use for building a community site in seconds.
17. Coder
Coder is a minimal Ghost theme for coders! The left sidebar is for displaying your logo and info about yourself. At the same time, the content pages allow a single thumbnail per post, great typography choices, and a straightforward feel of sharing content as you go. Syntax highlighting looks impressive on the white background.
18. Uno Zen
Uno Zen is an HTML5 and CSS3 built Ghost theme with a different approach to displaying content. The homepage is a full-width page where you can specify a background image, your portfolio photo, some social media icons, and navigation items, such as Posts. Once clicking on Posts, a new page slides out from the right side of the homepage. All the content posts become accessible by their titles and publish dates. The style is quite simple. It’s robotic in some ways. Uno Zen is another beautiful fit for developers looking to share their portfolio, ideas, and insights.
19. Mapache
Material Design is coming to Ghost, big time! GodoFredo delivers an incredible material design experience in the form of a Ghost theme. The design is very similar to what you can see on TechCrunch, and if something like that is calling you, definitely give Mapache a try. It looks beautiful on mobile devices and packs all the great features a fully sustainable blogging site requires.
Premium Ghost Themes
We just wrapped up our list of the best free Ghost themes, but letting won’t be easy. Not before we look deeper at what the premium Ghost themes market brings. We will count down several of the most prestigious and sought-after premium Ghost themes. These extend beyond the functionality that open-source Ghost themes have brought. Perhaps not always, but the majority of the time. The following themes pack some unique features and additions you won’t find anywhere else online.
1. Paperleaf
Paperleaf boasts a masonry grid layout that allows visitors to quickly access all your content within a single page. Even as many posts as you qualify to display on the homepage. It is a minimal theme that will work when you need a business blog, a simple blog site to share your stories, or exciting list posts. Paperleaf is the bridge for sharing your ideas with the world eloquently. The theme is fully responsive and works well on many devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. Graphics and icons are ready for high-resolution screens.
2. Aspire
Aspire is a full-scale Ghost blogging theme that you may use on blogging projects that involve media reporting, constant content updates, and generally content that aims at an interactive audience. Blog posts are carefully tailored to feature a full sidebar, content tags, author bio information, related navigation posts (previous and next), comments, and recommended content. It’s everything you would expect from a blogging theme. Has support for Twitter and Instagram feeds to display your latest social shares. Optimized for search engines.
3. BlogInn
BlogInn implies that this is a blogging theme, and it sure is. But while it is a blogging theme, it will be more suitable for those who want to share their posts in a simple blogging environment. We find it hard to imagine this theme used on sites constantly pushing out new content. It’s more of a sentimental style that will be great for sharing a post occasionally. It has the support of a modern and elegant blogging theme style. Code syntax highlighter makes this a nice choice for developers too.
FAQ: Free Ghost Themes
Ghost is a professional publishing platform that focuses on simplicity and clarity. It’s built as an alternative to other blogging platforms to provide both writers and publishers with a more streamlined, user-friendly experience.
Ghost is unique due to its minimalist design, focus on publishing (over general website management), and its dedication to performance. Unlike some platforms that cater to a wide range of website types, Ghost concentrates specifically on bloggers and publishers.
Yes, Ghost is open-source, meaning its source code is freely available. This encourages community involvement and allows for customization and improvements from developers worldwide.
Ghost(Pro): The official hosted platform the Ghost team provides. You don’t have to worry about setup or maintenance by choosing this.
Self-hosting: You can also download Ghost and host it on your own server or select web hosting providers.
Here you can find more information on the best Ghost hosting providers.
Follow these steps to install a Ghost theme:
– Download your chosen Ghost theme (ensure it’s in a .zip format).
– Log in to your Ghost admin dashboard.
– Navigate to the “Design” section.
– Scroll down to the “Upload a Theme” button and click on it.
– Choose your downloaded .zip theme file and upload.
– Once uploaded, the theme will appear in the installed themes list. Click “Activate” to apply the theme to your blog.
Free Ghost themes often provide a clean and functional design. However, paid themes might include additional features, premium support, or unique designs. It’s essential to evaluate a theme based on your requirements, whether it’s free or paid.
You can customize your Ghost theme if you know HTML, CSS, and Handlebars (Ghost’s templating engine). Some themes also offer built-in customization options, which can be adjusted from the Ghost admin dashboard.
It’s a good practice to update your Ghost theme whenever the theme developer releases a new version, especially if it contains security patches, bug fixes, or compatibility updates for the latest Ghost version.
Absolutely! You can switch between Ghost themes with ease. However, always backup your content and settings before making significant changes to avoid potential data loss.
For free themes, support might come from community forums or the theme’s documentation. For premium themes, the theme developer usually offers dedicated support.
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You should remove “Beverly” from the list. It looks beautiful in the demo, so I paid $24 for it, only to discover it only works with Node .10… that’s SIX versions of Node ago… and it appears to be abandoned. No response from “support.” Had a nightmarish time trying to set up a server with old versions of Node, NPM, and Ghost, and even then it never looked like the demo.
Since then, I have tested nearly all of your recommendations, and the rest of them appear to be robust and work well with the latest versions of Node and Ghost. I especially like “Saga” and “Crisp.” Another free one I highly recommend is “Chopstick”. I like how it packs so much on a single page, in contrast with the ‘sparse’ look that everyone else seems to prefer.
Thanks for saving me 24 bucks
Nice list, I recently developed a Ghost Theme called Gazette.
If you like it you can include it in the list 🙂
Norbert,
Is it a free or premium theme? There is no mention for that on your website since your website is still under development.
I’m using chopstick master in may Ghost website, and then edited some thing to make it better.
Ghostscoll won’t run anymore, It’s like 6+ more years old, have a look at related github page.
Thank you for pointing that out! We have since removed this theme alongside several others.
Thank you Sir, for this wonderful collection of free Ghost themes for bloggers.