As a blogger, you want your website to reflect your unique voice and style. You also want visitors to have a positive experience navigating your site — that is, reading posts with ease, searching for topics of interest, and discovering other content that makes them excited to return.
A WordPress blogging theme can help you achieve the exact look, feel, design, and layout you envision, without the need for coding.We’ve curated this list of our favorite free WordPress themes for bloggers like yourself — in no particular order — to consider using for your website.
1. Astra
Astra is a fast and lightweight theme that’s suitable for a variety of use cases. This flexible foundation makes Astra a quality option to consider when building a blog. The theme comes with several ready-to-use blog websites that can be imported, modified, and used out of the box.
Many bloggers get by just fine with the limited customization options for backgrounds, typography, and spacing within the free version of Astra. But for several advanced features like auto-loading previous posts, adding author sections, and removing featured image padding, you’d need to opt for the Pro or Agency plan.
Astra is one of the fastest themes available, and its compatibility with all major page builders (such as Elementor, Beaver, and Brizy) make it a great option for bloggers.
2. Kadence
Kadence is a lightweight and fully-featured WordPress theme that makes creating beautiful fast-loading and accessible websites a breeze. It features an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop header and footer builder to build any type of header in minutes.
For bloggers, Kadence stands out because of its clean blog styling, including featured image placements and sticky sidebar options. Additionally, Kadence has a deep integration with the core block editor, so your content will match what you see in the admin panel.
3. Blog Way
Blog Way is a simple and professional theme. It's clean, well-coded, and has a modern layout. Blog Way is especially great for blogs, news sites, and travel sites. It has multiple customizable features and ensures high-quality performance to help boost your site traffic. Blog Way also comes with an option to change the color of your entire site and offers social links for you to connect your site with your social accounts.
4. Simple
Simple is a free WordPress theme developed by Themify and built for, well, simplicity. Simple is designed so customers can buy items directly from your WordPress website without being redirected to Shopify, but you can run a regular blog on it as well. Creating your design or online store is easy with the drag and drop interface through Themify Builder, which comes with the theme.
5. Mesmerize
Mesmerize is all about giving you customizability without the hassle. Start with a pre-built homepage and use the five header designs, slideshow capabilities, gradient overlays, and more to make the look and feel your own. In addition, there are 30 ready-to-use content sections for you to build pages quickly and easily... not to mention the helpful drag-and-drop features. It's mobile-responsive, and it works well with WooCommerce should you ever need to set up a store.
6. Kale
Kale is built for food bloggers. You can choose from a number of feed displays to organize your written content and images of the dishes you’re featuring. The built-in social media sidebar menus and icons make it easy for your visitors to locate, view, and follow your accounts.
7. Avant
Avant comes with seven different header styles, three footer styles, five blog layout templates, full site color settings, and much more built neatly into the WordPress Customizer. Avant integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and page builders like Elementor or SiteOrigin.
8. Blossom Feminine
Blossom Feminine is a free WordPress theme that you can use to create a fashion, lifestyle, journal, travel, beauty, or food blog. The theme is mobile-friendly, search engine optimized, and fast. In addition, the theme is WooCommerce compatible, translation ready, and comes with regular updates.
9. Blossom Fashion
Blossom Fashion is perfect for building a stylish blog without spending a penny. While free, the theme offers premium features like WooCommerce compatibility, font choosing options, an advertisement widget, Instagram section, and more. The theme makes sure it is easy to use and comes with extensive documentation, and there's always support if you need more help.
10. Blossom Travel
Blossom Travel is a fast-loading and mobile-friendly WordPress theme for travel blogs. The theme blends accessible design with extensive features like social media integrations, theme color options, and lightbox image styling. Moreover, Blossom Travel has an Instagram section, email subscription section, and social media widgets so visitors can easily connect with you. Best of all is its HTML map section so that your visitors can visualize where you've traveled.
11. Blossom Pin
The Blossom Pin theme features a Pinterest-style design, using a vibrant masonry layout with three posts/page layout options. Its infinite scroll lets visitors browse without distraction. The theme is SEO-optimized and easily customizable: Choose from many different colors and hundreds of Google fonts.
12. Elegant Pink
Another dynamic Pinterest-like layout, Elegant Pink is a free and beautifully designed theme combining soft colors with a simple and clean layout to present your blog to the world. Elegant Pink also has a slider section above the masonry-design post on the homepage.
13. Writee
Writee is ideal for photography or image-heavy blogs — the theme has a slider hero image feature which allows you to include several full-width images. Writee also makes managing an online store simple with its WooCommerce integration.
14. Hemingway
Hemingway is a simple two-column blogging theme that keeps your content organized and easy to read. It includes a parallax scrolling feature, which adds an interactive, video-like experience to your blog pages. Hemingway’s translation-ready feature comes with pre-made language files so your website can be automatically translated into a number of other languages with just a click.
15. Radiate
The Radiate blogging theme offers unique visuals, including a customizable, full-width hero image and primary color options so you can match your branding. If you have a WordPress.com Premium or Business account (that is, if you pay for WordPress), you can take advantage of custom Cascading Style Sheets.
16. Neve
Neve is a powerful, free WordPress theme from ThemeIsle. It offers a fully responsive mobile-first design and extensive customization options to tailor your blog to your brand image. Neve frequently updates for security and new features, and its theme options panel will help you get started out-of-the-box.
17. Bulan
Bulan offers multiple homepage layouts for your blog including full-width, boxed, narrow, and multi-column options. There are also a number of customizable sidebar and navigation configurations to enhance your blog-reading experience. Not to mention, you can install custom widgets to increase functionality.
18. Total
Total is a blogging theme with a masonry-style layout, which places your latest three, six, or nine blog posts in a grid format. There’s also a portfolio section if you want to share some of your artistic work. Total is SEO-friendly, compatible with the most popular page builder plugins, and has a one-click demo import to get you up and running fast.
19. Spacious
Spacious offers four page layouts, two templates, four blog layouts, and several custom widgets and widget areas to choose from. Building your site with Spacious is a painless process due to their downloadable demo sites that you can use for inspiration and support.
20. Blog Diary
Blog Diary is meant to be lightweight and minimalistic, perfect for trendy food or travel blogs. It comes with slider functionality and color picking options, and it is easy to get up and running on the fly. In addition, it's mobile-responsive and compatible with the Gutenberg editor.
21. Wisteria
Wisteria is a blogging theme with a minimalist design. It includes layouts tailored to a variety of blogs including lifestyle, food, fashion, marketing, and more. Wisteria is retina-ready, meaning all of your images and content will be high-definition to ensure your site has a professional look.
22. Editorial
The Editorial blog theme is visually engaging, simple to use, and flexible enough to organize large amounts of editorial content in a way that won't overwhelm readers. Editorial also comes with a variety of convenient widgets that let you easily customize your page sections, no coding needed.
23. Brilliant
Brilliant is a blog and online magazine theme that allows you to artistically pair your blog posts with photo or video content. You can add or edit your own custom logo on your homepage as well as easily customize your theme’s accent colors to match your branding. Brilliant is also translation-ready, so visitors can read your content in different languages.
24. Poseidon
If you're looking to include large, professional-looking photographs on your blog, Poseidon is the option for you — this theme offers a full-width image slideshow on the homepage. The layout is mainly white to create a spacious, organized look. Poseidon also includes completely customizable navigation bars to enhance user experience and improve your site’s configuration.
25. Author
Author is a straightforward theme suitable for all blog types from business to photography to ecommerce. Its minimalist look helps readers to easily focus on your content. What's unique about this particular theme is that it was designed not just for readability but also accessibility.
A free blogging WordPress theme will help you to create a unique, functional, and eye-catching place for your content. Each theme offers features, layouts, and styling that set them apart, so consider the overall design you’re going for on your blog to help you determine the ideal option for you.
Then, install your theme, begin to add content, and customize your site to create a great user experience that keeps readers returning for more.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
