Starting with WordPress can be as easy as it could get, and on top of it all, you can install WordPress for free, though you will need to pay for hosting and domain to get your site properly up and running.
Expenses will include premium themes and plugins as well, both crucial components of WordPress to add design and functionality to your website. To cut down some expenses at least in the beginning, we are going to provide a list with the best free themes that you can use to power your site.
The list will include all the best WordPress themes you can install for free right out of the WordPress repository and which share versatility and functionality at their core system. The list will be diverse, meaning you can find free themes for a variety of niche websites. Pick the one that suits you best.
Hestia - Free WordPress Theme
Hestia is a powerful and popular free theme in the WordPress repository that allows great extendibility and simple, straightforward design. With its sleek and polished one-page design, the Hestia theme will grab the hearts of many on first impressions. The theme is flexible and offers a great deal of functionality, which would make the perfect choice for startups, corporate businesses, firms, and creative agencies.
One of the best features of Hestia is the Elementor integration, top-of-the-line drag-and-drop content builder, that aims to make website building easy and accessible to even those with no knowledge of coding.
Hestia inherits a clean and elegant interface and the ability to build pages within minutes is mind-blowing. The theme comes with ready-made page templates that you can import with a simple click. Edit and customize the pages by dragging and dropping elements, and voila, your site will be ready to be published.
Best Features of Hestia
- Elementor Integration – The Hestia theme incorporates Elementor, the drag&drop page builder to easily craft and design pages and comes with a user-friendly interface suitable for all web creators.
- WooCommerce Support – The Hestia theme support WooCommerce the leading WordPress plugin for eCommerce sites. You can create beautiful online stores for your business.
- Pre-designed demos – The beautiful set of pre-made demos are there to help you build a site in no time, you if you just need a guiding point for your design.
- Customization Options– Powerful front page options and customization
- Documentation – The theme offers plenty of videos and documentation to help you along the process of building your site.
Astra - The Popular WordPress Theme
Next on the list, we included Astra, a lightweight and flexible theme that is very popular among WordPress users, mainly due to its amazing performance and the free-of-charge policy. Astra is made for speed. You can customize your website and build just anything you aim for, no coding needed.
Astra Theme is compatible with the best page builders for WordPress websites such as Elementor and Beaver Builder. In terms of customization, you can adjust your site’s crucial aspect via the WordPress Theme Customizer.
Your expertise and skill background shall not be a problem with the Astra theme since it offers pre-made templates and designed to set you up quickly. If you install the Astra Starter Templates, you an import a bountiful of templates and pre-build websites.
Besides seamless integration with page builders, the Astra theme proves to smoothly integrate WooCommerce as well, thus allowing you to create beautiful online stores and manage your online business with ease.
Best Features of Astra
- Amazing Speed – The Astra theme is a lightweight and bloated-free theme that offers great performance for any website.
- Responsive Design – Astra theme comes fully responsive making your website look great on all devices.
- Developer Friendly – The Astra theme offers clean extendable code, a feature that might amaze those with more experience.
- Full & Seamless Integration – Astra offers full integration with top-notch plugins from WordPress like Elementor, Beaver Builder, WwooCommerce, LearnDash, Yoast, and many more.
- Lightweight Theme – One of the most desirable traits of Astra is that it is a modular theme. They provide free plugins designed specifically for Astra, and you can choose to install and activate either one.
Airi - Clean-Design WordPress Theme
Airi is a free, clean, and minimal WordPress theme that provides beautiful and spacious design, mainly made of white spaces and unambiguous typography, thus emphasising content much clearer. The beautiful and minimal layout makes Airi he perfect choice for freelancers, agencies, startups, and small business. But, if you are looking to create more than that, you can extend Airi’s functionality using Elementor page builder.
All theme options are located in the powerful Theme Customizer allowing you to change the colors, typography, background to your site and adapt your style ot it. Demo importer is another cool feature worth-mentioning, you can easily import ready-made demos and get started with your website in no time. Ad to top it all off, the theme is 100% translation ready and contains all the files to make the translation process a breeze.
Best Features of Airi
- Theme Customizer – Airi holds powerful theme options that allow you to customize your website properly and create any site you put your mind to.
- Pre-made Demos made with Elementor – This includes some amazing pre-designed demos created exclusively with the powerful page builder Elementor.
- Reliable Support – The team behind Airi makes sure to help their users understand their themes and help them with any stagnations they experience. They also provide a support forum that Airi users can find helpful pieces of information.
- WooCommerce Support – Airi theme provides great support to WooCommerce making it possible to create online stores for your business.
- Translation Ready – The theme comes translation-ready, and can be translated into different languages that your audience speaks.
OceanWP - Fast WordPress Theme
OceanWP is another lightweight and highly extensible WordPress theme that would make the perfect choice for just about any websIte and comes with a beautiful and clean design.
The theme includes several options to embody your website, tons of customization tools, multiple widget regions, and a responsive design to be matched on all devices. Besides all the great features the themes come bundled with there are a dozen extensions you can install to raise the functionality out of this theme and import delightful pre-made demos with just a simple click.
The theme excels in performance as well, due to its lightweight nature, thus making the theme a top speed accelerator. On top of that, the OceanWP theme comes SEO and eCommerce ready, meaning you can create top ranking websites and online stores without a problem, all for free of cost.
Best Features of OceanWP
- eCommerce Ready – The theme comes with some in-built state-of-the-art features for creating online stores like the Native Cart Popup or the Off-Canvas Filter. All these features and more will provide the creation of amazing shops.
- List of Extensions – OceanWP will extend its functionality by providing a dozen of extensions you can install to expand further the theme’s capabilities.
- Compatible with all the popular Page Builders – The theme’s flexibility also relies on the fact that you can use this theme to build your website with all the top-notch website builders and manage to do that hassle fee due to its compatibility with each of them.
- Developer Friendly – OceanWP is built on a clean and extensible codebase, which makes it a delight for developers to customize and extend the theme’s functionality and support.
- Creative Demos – The list of amazing demos is bountiful with OceanWP, you can easily install and insert them to your website with just a click, just like you can customize and personalize them with the tools it offers.
Neve - Lightweight WordPress Theme
Next on the list of the best WordPress theme, we have included the Neve theme, a highly popular, free and functional theme that is built on the premises to be a multi-purpose theme, and that will serve many niche websites.
Due to its all-inclusive nature, the Neve theme can be used perfectly for businesses as well as for creative-based websites like portfolios of blogs.
Neve comes with a one-page layout and enchanting design to makes that first impression on your visitors spectacular.
You don’t have to worry about building your site with Neve since it comes fully compatible with the most popular drag and drops page builders that make the entire experience feel like a breeze. The Neve theme also offers the possibility to build mega menus within your site, for you to easily organize and navigate users throughout your website.
And to top it all off, the theme is fully customized for speed and performance as well as to look great on different devices. If anything goes wrong while working with the theme, you can always turn to their documentation and forums that are created to ease the process for beginners and those who are just starting out to leave a mark on the web world.
Best Features of Neve
- Fast and Lightweight – The Neve theme is made for speed and performance. It is lightweight and bloated-free, making it perfect for sites that rely on speed.
- Customize Header and Footer – Withe Nee theme you are able to customize and design your header and footer areas easily with drag&drop components.
- Importable Demo Sites– If you don’t want to start your website from scratch you can always import pre-made websites with a single click.
- Mobile Optimized and AMP Compatible – Besides the fact that you can customize your website for mobiles and tablets, the theme also distributes your site as native Accelerated Mobile Pages. This makes your website load fast even on the mobile web.
- Edit and Customize your Content – Neve theme will allow you to add, design, and customize your content into your website easily and comes fully compatible with all the famous page builders, also Gutenberg.
GeneratePress - The WordPress Theme
GeneratePress is a huge deal among WordPress users, as it is a free, simple, sleek, and modern theme that promises speed and performance right out-of-the-box. Generate Press is an outstanding theme and when combined with powerful page builders like Elementor its strength knows no limit.
The theme can relate to every WordPress users, beginners can easily install the theme and start their website, but also developers will love it for its lightweight, clean code, and highly customizable features. GeneratePress will prove to be a rock-solid choice for just about anyone that’s looking to create a functional website of any type.
You can use the Customizer to adjust the theme’s color and typography or control your site’s layout on mobiles and desktops to tweak all the padding or margins you’d like or even change the sidebar layout however you like.
The GeneratePress free theme offers a great deal f amazing features that will help elevate your website further, it comes with nine widget areas that you can get creative with, navigation menus, drop-down menus, and many more, only if you dare to explore. And if all these features aren’t enough, you can extend the theme’s functionality using, although that will require some serious tech-savvy skills.
Best Features of Generate Press
- Lightweight and Mobile Responsive – This theme is designed for top-notch performance due to being so lightweight that the default WordPress installation is less than 30kb. You can add further functionality via their extensions.
- Modular Design – GeneratePress is a theme that works with 14 modules that will help leverage the functionality of the theme and help you create exceptional design. The modules will provide great assistance when designing and building your website, although they are available in the pro version.
- Fully Compatible with Page Builder and Plugins – GeneratePress values good code, that is why they made sure that the theme will be compatible with the best page builders and plugins on WordPress.
- Extensive Documentation – The best thing about GeneratePress is that they offer extensive documentation for all their users and provide help when needed.
- Free Website Templates – You can have access to the beautifully designs pre-made templates to get your website started on a clock, and they are easily imported and cusotmized to match your style.
StoreFront - WooCommerce Theme
It was about time we added a theme designed specifically for WooCommerce sites, let us introduce you to StoreFront. The theme was build by the team behind the WooCommerce plugin, and you can install it for free in the WordPress repository, and we’d expect nothing less than a lightweight, without extra bloat or features.
StoreFront’s main focus is on eCommerce, thus allowing you to build easily high-performance and functional online stores. Since the theme is developed specifically for WooCommerce, if you have activated the plugin, you will notice that the search bar and the shopping cart link will be added to the header. No need to customize anything.
Although the design and functions are basic, the theme remains a great choice for starting your online stores and the uptime is amazing, which is utmost important for eCommerce sites. The design is clean and simple, StoreFront will allow you to customize and adjust your store to match your brand.
Best Features of StoreFront
- Light and Robust Core – The StoreFront theme’s code is constantly updated to create as little disruption and friction as possible.
- Fully Responsive – The theme made sure to keep responsiveness checked on their page. When users will scroll on mobiles a secondary menu is sticky at the bottom to help them navigate the site better.
- eCommerce Homepage Template – If you want your landing page to be inclusive of your site, the theme will provide a template that will show categories, products, sales, and more.
- Easy Setup – StoreFront offers an easy setup up and you can customize your site all from the Customizer, set primary and secondary menu, and change your site’s layout to create the store you wish.
- Easily Extendable – The best thing is that the theme can easily extend its powers and offer even more possibilities to its users.
Shapely - One-Page WordPress Theme
Shapely is another free and amazing one-page theme that will allow you to create stunning landing pages or portfolio website hassle-free. Nevertheless, the list of use does not stop just there, Shapely would make the perfect choice for corporates, businesses, company websites to create establish their online presence.
Besides having a fresh and clean design the theme also comes packed with amazing features that allow you to add multiple functionality to your site. You can show your services, elevate your design with a parallax effect, show your clients gratitude with testimonials and much more.
Shapely has a dozen of options for further customization that will allow you to edit parts on your website to leave it you mark. Edit the footer copyright informations or add a hero image to grasp the attention of your visitors, the Shapely theme will give you freedom to build any kind of website you are looking for.
Best Features of Shapely
- One- Page Layout – This type of design will allow you to present all the important information nicely and beautifully and allow you to grab the attention of your visitors in the first instances.
- Support and Theme Documentation – The most important theme functions are covered withing their extensive documentation, if you still can’t find the answers you are looking for then opt for their support team.
- Compatible with the most popular Plugins – WordPress is added functionality via plugins, thus it is important the theme you choose to be compatible with the plugins you use.
- An extensive set of Features – The features included within the theme allow you to add multiple features to highlight your company’s feature, include call-to-action section and even full-width slider.
- Responsive and Flat Design – The theme is fully optimized and supports all types of devices, meaning your website will look amazing even on mobiles and tablets.
ColorMag - News and Maganzine Theme
We will continue our list with another free theme that’s a top choice for all those looking to create online magazines or newspaper sites to create engaging content. The theme will provide fresh and logically organized content to help your visitors find the news they want to read or the categories they are interested in.
ColorMag is the obvious free choice for anyone that is starting in the news business, the layout will offer spaces for ads, tags, widgets, social links integration, and even beautifully created slides.
ColorMag theme can extend to even blog sites that are content-centralized. You can customize the theme’s appearance, change the colors, the typography adjust the custom widgets. On top of that ColorMag theme come responsive, retina-ready, and SEO optimized.
Best Features of ColorMag
- Started Demos – If the default template isn’t cutting it for you, then you can either design it o match your style or use from the multiple pre-made demos each beautifully designed.
- Fully Compatible with Elementor – The theme comes on par with the best page builder Elementor with which you can design your website easily with a drag&drop interface.
- Amazing Performance – ColorMag excels at performance and speed, an important and crucial factor when working with publishing platforms.
- Singular Post System – The management of posts is another important factor among newspapers and magazines. ColorMag uses a unique post system that allows them to appear on more than one section or widget.
- Customizable Widget Area – The theme comes with 15+ widgets areas that are designed to let you customize the layout and control important parts of your website like the sidebar or even the ads section.
Customify - Performance Ready Theme
Customify is a free, lightweight, fast, and flexible WordPress theme that was designed with SEO, usability, and responsiveness in mind. The theme offers some great additional features that will make you think twice when choosing the right theme for your website.
Like many other themes in this compilation, Customify as well as fully compatible with popular page builders, leaving you the control to build your website, either way, you feel comfortable. The main selling point for theme despite being lightweight and fast, is also the header and footer builder, that gives you exclusive access to all parts of your website.
The large set of features this theme beholds will give you a certain sense of comfort and convenience even if you are new o WordPress, they offer pre-made demos that you can import in an instant, then proceed to edit and customize the appearance with the great set of tools Customify provides.
Best Features of Customify
- Header & Footer Builder – This is a feature that shouldn’t go by silently, this gives you the freedom to build and customize all parts of your website.
- SEO Optimize and Fast Performance – Like other lightweight themes, Customify has also managed to keep the performance at large levels. In addition to that, the theme comes SE ready for top ranking,
- Intuitive Design – The theme offers you the ability to configure and customize your website all free of code and a highly intuitive interface.
- WooCommerce Compatible – Not only you can create amazing websites, blogs, and portfolios, the theme comes fully compatible with WooCommerce allowing you to create stunning eCommerce stores for your business.
- Custom CSS – If you feel comfortable with codes, then Customify will allow you to edit, customize, and style any element on your site.
Hello Theme - The Elementor Theme
The Hello theme was developed by the team behind Elementor, the page builder that we raved about in previous posts. The theme was created specifically to work with Elementor. It is simple, basic, and lightweight, and it pairs with Elementor due to the fact that it gives spacious freedom to build all you want with its extensive set of widgets.
Elementor created the theme to optimize the websites you build with the page builder for speed and performance, and also as a way for the theme not to stagnate the process of designing sites with Elementor. You can install it for free via the WordPress repository.
The catch of the theme is that if you wish to create fully customizable websites you will need the pro version of Elementor. Although that is an added expense the plugin offers ample premium widgets and functionality, thus eliminating the possibility to use a large number of plugins. The themes come as a plain-vanilla blank canvas, though you would need to design it from scratch, or user Elementor’s template library.
Best Features of Hello Theme
- Excels at Elementor Compatibility – Obviously, the theme is made entirely for Elementor users and provides consistent compatibility with the page builder.
- Excellent for Landing Pages – If you are looking to create landing pages that load fast then Hello theme is the obvious choice.
- Full Compatibility with WordPress plugins – The Hello theme supports and is compatible with all the best and popular WordPress plugins.
- Responsive Design and RTL Ready – The themes comes ready to be exhibited on various devices and be translated into various languages.
- Performance Ready – Due to the theme being lightweight, the speed reports will be of top levels and values.
Colibri - Multi-Featured Theme
Colibri is another amazing and free WordPress theme that is a highly customizable and multi-purpose theme that can be used to create abundant types of websites and niche.
The theme comes with some amazing pre-designed homepages, header designs to choose from, and ample content blocks, all easily customizable. What sets this theme apart is that they provide their own drag&drop page builder, used to design and configure your entire website.
You can make your website stand out by adding the various customization options like video background, slider background, or header styles. Colibri is an adaptable and flexible WordPress theme that takes the Customizer to another level with amazing versatility.
Best Features of Colibri
- Great Customization Ability – You can customize and adjust your website with ease via the Customizer.
- Ample set of Features – The free themes will provide great resources of features mentioned below.
- Clean Design – The theme’s design is a huge plus when creating minima websites that won’t interfere with the content.
- Multiple Pre-Made Templates – Colibri theme will offer stunning homepages as well as 5 different header styles and a bountiful of block designs.
- Colibri Page Builder – The team behind the theme offers a capable drag&drop page builder to build websites of different profiles and niche.
Final Words
I understand the struggle of choosing the right theme for your website. A theme will play a major role in your site’s performance and will affect important aspects of your strategy. Choose wisely and consider all the best features each theme offers, then determine which offers you the most flexibility and opportunity to create the website of your dreams.
All the free themes we presented in our article will make a great choice for your website, but depending on your needs and circumstances, the evaluation process does not belong to us. We have compiled all the best free themes for you to have a starting point and to serve as a lighting guide for your final decision. Enjoy
