25+ Best Free WordPress Themes for Various Niches [UPDATED 2022]

There are over 9000 free WordPress themes on wordpress.org. But which one is for you?

Now, when you want to create a WordPress website you will need to:

• Figure out the domain name then purchase the domain. You could use BrandRoot for inspiration.
• Buy a website hosting plan.
• Choose a free WordPress theme.

This means that you will still have some costs with the domain and web hosting. Now, you should be aware that most of the times free WordPress themes provide no support. If you want to have access to support, you will need to buy a paid plan. But don’t worry, prices can be a bargain (most of the time).

Now how should you pick a lucky theme winner?

How to choose your free WordPress theme

• Go to wordpress.org/themes and take a look at the listed WordPress themes. You can filter them by date, popularity, or features.

Maybe you want a theme that has a grid layout and is good for photography. Use the filter to uncover such free WordPress themes.

• Given that these themes are free, you should look for one that has as many options as possible. To make the most out of a free theme version and customize your website accordingly, you should search for an extended range of customizations. For example, I’m looking at the Dhimay theme. In the wordpress.org description there’s a link to its demo.Take a look at the demo or live preview to see if you like the design. But, besides that, check the theme’s description both on wordpress.org and its official website, and analyze the available customizations.
• Read the theme’s reviews on wordpress.org.
• Make sure that the theme was updated in the last 6 months, like this one. Mesmerize was updated in May 2022.
• Check whether the theme has available templates. For example, the Colibri theme has 90+ free and paid templates.
• Check if there are premium plans for the theme, in case you will want to make an upgrade to access extra features. Premium plans also have support included.
• Make sure that the theme is mobile responsive. You can take a look at the demo from tablet and a mobile device and see if it adapts to various screens.
• As important as mobile responsiveness, the speed of a website loading is crucial to that website performance. You have to look for a theme that has clean code behind it, so it doesn’t hinder website loading time.
• You should consider the theme compatibility with other popular plugins, such as those dedicated to integration of a contact form into the website (e.g. Contact Form 7), or of a newsletter (e.g. MailChimp).

Now, we compiled a list of 25+ great free WordPress themes.

And here it goes:

25+ great free WordPress themes for various niches

1. Storefront – free WordPress theme for online stores

Storefront, as the name itself says it, is a free theme for e-commerce. In WordPress, you can crate online stores using the WooCommerce plugin, and Storefront is the official free WordPress theme for WooCommerce stores.

Features of Storefront:

• You have 2 options for the website general layout.
• As it is an e-commerce theme, you have the possibility to customize buttons for the entire shop. You can make them prominent with the help of colors for the text and background, and some additional features the theme provides.
• The typography options are useful in that they can help you make the most important content stand out and be readily noticed by users (heading, texts and links can have the colors you give them, from the Customizer).

2. Colibri – free multipurpose WordPress theme

Colibri is a free multi-purpose theme that gives you a lot of control over design, unlike most of the free WordPress themes out there. Furthermore, Colibri is in the top 20 most popular WordPress themes of all time.

During the Colibri theme installation and activation, you will be recommended to install the Colibri page builder. This builder will level up the theme’s Customizer, giving it lots of powerful features, and allowing you to create Colibri sites by drag and drop.

Features of Colibri:

• 90+ free and pro template sites for a variety of niches. Whether you start a site from scratch or a predesigned template, you can easily customize it until you reach pixel-perfection.
• 150+ predefined blocks that you can customize however you see fit.  A few examples include: about blocks, features, services, team, testimonials, portfolio, contact blocks, etc.
• 40+ drag and drop components that you can use to create completely custom blocks or customize the existing ones.
• Website editing from header to footer in a single interface.
• Mobile-responsiveness.
• Easy to use and intuitive interface.

3. Mesmerize: free multipurpose WordPress theme

Mesmerize is a free multi-purpose theme designed to build a website in no time. It is one of the best choices regarding the variety of customization options (video background, slideshow background, gradient overlays, etc.).

Features of Mesmerize:

• It has many content blocks you can add into a page and combine to have the perfect presentation.
• Mesmerize has plenty of customization options for the header (which is of key importance in catching users’ attention).
• The theme provides options for differentiating among front-page navigation, inner pages navigation and mobile navigation.
• Mesmerize is mobile responsive, so it displays correctly on mobile and tablet.

4. Elevate – free block-based WordPress theme (multipurpose)

Elevate is a free WordPress theme that was launched at the end of 2021. It is block-based, meaning that you will customize it inside the Default WordPress Editor, unlike most of the themes presented in this article. The other themes work with the WordPress Customizer.

Long story short, there are two main ways of customizing websites in WordPress:

• using the Customizer – this is how Colibri, Mesmerize, Astra and other older and popular themes work,
• using the Default Editor aka Block Editor aka Gutenberg Editor. This new experience became the default in 2018. But, the experience is still basic, this is why products such as Kubio were born, to level it up, in order to give WordPress users more control over their designs.

What’s great about it is that it recommends the installation of Kubio during its activation. Kubio is a magnificent website builder that will enrich the Elevate theme with amazing features.

Now, let’s see how the features of the Kubio & Elevate combo look like:

• Designer-made starter sites.
• 170+ ready-made sections split across various categories: team, clients, portfolio, features, etc.
• 50+ fully customizable blocks. You can easily drag and drop blocks such as headers, tabs, accordions, sliders, carousels, and many more, then customize them as you see fit in the upgraded Block Editor.
• Font-sizes can be expressed in PX, REM and EM.
• Use shape dividers, overlays, section overlaps, and parallax to create websites that are easy to remember.
• You can create your own color palette then use it globally across the site.
• Mobile responsiveness. Customize colors, backgrounds, text, spacing, and other settings across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Instant preview available.
• Full-site editing, meaning that you can edit a whole website in a single interface, without having to go back and forth to the WordPress dashboard to make header, footer, sidebar, and other edits.

5. Astra: free WordPress theme (multipurpose)

Astra is a good choice as a theme for any niche, e-commerce included. That’s why it comprises features destined both to creating a strong brand online, and to maximize conversions.

Features of Astra:

• Several layouts available.
• Different customization options for the header, footer, blog, sidebar, etc.
• Fast and lightweight theme.
• With the help of the free Custom Fonts plugin, you can import and use any custom font you like.
• Font-sizes can be expressed in both PX and EM.
• Typography presets are a ready set of font options for text and headings. ​​
• You can create your own color palette then use it globally across the site.
• WooCommerce-ready.

6. Colormag: free WordPress theme for magazine-style websites

Even if Colormag fits perfectly magazine-style websites, it can be customized to adapt to other niches as well. It comes with a wide range of features, making it ideal to customize a website into every detail.

Features of Colormag:

• Flexible & highly customizable theme,
• 25+ ready-to-use starter sites for various type of magazines,
• Growing template library,
• WooCommerce and Gutenberg ready,
• Search engine optimized,
• Responsive design.

7. OnePress: free one-page WordPress theme

OnePress is an elegant theme that will help you create one-page websites. It is useful both for business websites and freelance portfolios.

Features of OnePress:

• Advanced theme Customizer,
• Custom page templates,
• Custom theme widgets,
• Custom content blocks: company info, services, clients, videos, gallery, latest posts from the blog, contact form,
• Mobile responsive: OnePress adapts to several devices and screen sizes like Desktop, laptops, tablets & smartphones,
• Translation-ready.

8. Hueman: good choice for magazine-style WordPress websites

Hueman is a free WordPress theme that works great with magazine-style sites and blogs.

Features of Hueman:

• Dynamic sidebars and widgets,
• It offers the possibility to add an advertisement widget in Header, for website owners that plan to include ads in their pages.
• The Header menus can be adjusted for proper display on mobile devices, a search button can be added to these menus, and you can change their display based on scroll behavior.
• Perfect display on all devices,
• Ready for WooCommerce,
• Translation ready.

9. Spacious: minimalist multipurpose free WordPress theme for small businesses

Spacious is a multipurpose theme you can easily adapt to the niche of your business. It’s a perfect match for small businesses. It has a clean, minimalist design that works well for presentation sites.

Features of Spacious:

• 30+ ready-to-use starter sites for a variety of niches.
  You can customize the layout, independently for posts, pages, and site-wide.
• Advanced typography customiations,
• Woocommerce-ready,
• Search engine optimized,
• Mobile responsive,
• Compatible with the most popular page builders out there,
• Gutenberg-ready,

10. Responsive: multipurpose WordPress theme

Responsive, as the name says it, outshines many others by its mobile-responsiveness. It has a grid system that helps it better perform at this point.

Features of Responsive:

• Built with a very lightweight framework, it loads within 0.9 seconds,
• You can enable sections such as an About section, a Testimonials section, a Team section, a Contact section.
• Ready to use websites available,
• Choose how your website looks by controlling the layout of site container, blog, single post and page templates,
• Use default typography or create custom type by customizing fonts, sizes, styles and weights,
• Make site elements pop out by customizing background, text, link, and button colors,
• WooCommerce-ready,.

11. Total – multipurpose WordPress theme

Total is a good choice for presentation websites. It is modern and has lots of features that make up a clean and elegant design.

Features of Total:

• It has a drag and drop editor,
• 24 custom widgets available,
• Interactions and animations available,
• It has 18 sections for the homepage, you can choose to display/disable according to your wishes,
• Advanced typography for header elements,
• 4 blog layouts & fully customizable single pages,
• The sections you can use for the homepage: About us section with progress bar, clients’ logo gallery, featured section and services section with icons, portfolio section, team section with links to social media profiles, counter section, testimonial section, blog section that displays 3, 6 or 9 posts, a CTA section.

12. Customify: flexible multipurpose WordPress theme

Customify is a very flexible multi-purpose theme, that can be used for building almost any kind of website.

Features of Customify:

• It has a Theme Customizer Booster, with plenty of customization options that take your website to the next level.
• It perfectly integrates with website builders, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, Divi, etc.
• Its uniqueness resides in the Customify Header and Footer builders, that smooth the process of customizing headers and footers to the minutest detail.
• It is adaptable to any niche, so you can choose Customify to create a business website, a portfolio website, an online store, education websites, agencies, consulting websites, etc.
• Moreover, Customify is compatible with popular plugins, such as WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, etc.

13. Flash: multipurpose WordPress theme

Flash is created by ThemeGrill, a WordPress theme development company that has a proven record of releasing great WordPress themes.

Features of Flash:

• Easy customization,
• 15+ ready-to-use starter sites for a variety of purposes,
• Fully compatible with WooCommerce,
• Compatible with popular page builders.

14. OceanWP: popular multipurpose WordPress theme

Ocean is a lightweight and beginner-friendly WordPress theme. Being a versatile theme, it allows its users to create to create almost any type of website such a blog, portfolio, business website, and online stores. It has over 5 million downloads.

Ocean’s features:

• You can choose from 220+ modern WordPress templates or build a site from scratch,
• Create custom headers, footers and sections. Easy implementation on both global and individual page level,
• Control the layout of your page, disable or enable theme sections with a few simple clicks,
• Apply your favorite colors to all sections, or choose among hundred integrated Google fonts. Different typography settings for different sections and areas,
• 7 free header styles available,
• Increase sales by enabling the Multi-Step or distraction-free checkout for your Woo store.

15. Neve – very popular WordPress theme

Neve is built by the ThemeIsle team, and it ranks among the top 10 most popular free WordPress themes on wordpress.org.

Features of Neve:

• Control  over the website layout,
• Custom design of header and footer,
• Seamless integration with the most popular page builders,
• Control over the color palette,
• 100+ ready-to-import  starter sites,
• WooCommerce-ready.

16. GeneratePress – among the most popular WordPress themes

GeneratePress is an excellent free theme for building a website, in any niche. It is suitable for business websites, portfolios, landing pages, agencies, etc. It focuses on speed and accessibility.

Features of GeneratePress:

• Extensive library of professionally designed websites,
• Compatible with the most popular page builders out there,
• GeneratePress follows WCAG 2.0 standards, making it an accessible theme,
• Intuitive and easy to use.

17. Evolve

Evolve is a fully customizable WordPress theme, that is also fast and lightweight.

Features of Evolve:

• You have a custom front-page builder: you can choose what elements to display, and their order; you can add custom content to the homepage;
• You can enable the option to have a sticky header (when users scroll down the page, the Header sticks to the top).
• For more complex websites, you can include breadcrumbs and facilitate navigation within the site pages.
• You also have a bootstrap slider and a parallax slider you can use for enhanced design of your website pages.
• The theme is integrated with WooCommerce, so you can use Evolve to build an online store and start selling online.

18. Accelerate – minimalistic WordPress theme

Accelerate is a simple-to-use free theme you can use to build any kind of website: business, portfolio, agency, landing page, education, blog, personal, travel, etc.

Features of Accelerate:

• You can customize up to 5 widget areas,
• Search engine optimized,
• Advanced typography options,
• Advanced color controls,
• Fully compatible with WooCommerce,
• Compatible with popular page builders.

19. PopularFX – popular free WordPress theme

PopularFX is a multipurpose WordPress theme that ranks among the 15 most popular theme of all time on wordpress.org.

Features of PopularFX:

• Drag and drop editor,
• 350+ website templates available,
• Animation effects available,
• Enjoy 70+ unique designing elements allows you to create any type of design,
• You have a whole set of options for color selection (primary color in website, background color, sidebar color, body text color, page titles and site title colors, etc.)
• Fully customizable widgets,
• Easily Undo, Redo your changes and travel through all your editing history with Revision Control,
• WooCommerce-ready,
• Responsive theme.

20. Kale – free food blog theme

Kale is a truly yummy WordPress theme.  It’s clean, and minimal design makes it the perfect choice for lifestyle, personal, food and recipe blogs.

Features of Kale:

• Intuitive and easy to set up,
• Various layout design options,
• Optional full-width posts and pages,
• Banner and slider options,
• Multiple blog feed displays,
• Mobile-friendly.

21. Nisarg – WordPress theme suitable for both websites and blogs

Nisarg is a free theme that you can choose for mobile-friendliness and adaptability to any kind of niche: art, design, blogs, travel, photography, etc.

Features of Nisarg:

• Custom header design,
• Unlimited colors for the header text, header background, and site background,
• Responsive design,
• Translation-ready.

22. Kadence – modern WordPress theme

Kadence is a fast, intuitive, light, and powerful WordPress theme. It is listed in the top 20 most downloaded WordPress themes of all time.

Features of Kadence:

• Drag and drop editor,
• Header builder,
• Easily modify site-wide fonts, headings, buttons, links, and much more,
• Full control over site layouts, for pages, posts, and custom post types,
• Full control over typography and colors,
• No code, ready-to-use starter site templates,
• Mobile responsive.

23. Inspiro – photo and video-focused WordPress theme

We recommend Inspiro for creative photographers and videographers that are looking for a lightweight theme to show off their portfolio.

Features of Inspiro:

• Gutenberg-ready,
• Fullscreen area that supports Vimeo, YouTube & self-hosted video background,
• No code, ready-to-use starter site templates,
• Translation-ready,
• Easy customization,
• Mobile responsive.

24. Hestia – stylish one-page theme

The theme behind Hestia also created Neve, another popular WordPress theme. Hestia is suitable for small businesses, that don’t require a complex website.

Features of Hestia:

• Easy to set up,
• Gutenberg-ready,
• Seamless integration with all popular page builders,
• No code, ready-to-use starter site templates,
• Translation-ready,
• Mobile responsive.

25. Blocksy – Gutenberg-ready WordPress theme

You can easily create any type of website with Blocsy, from business agency, shop, corporate, education, restaurant, blog, portfolio, to simple landing pages.

Features of Blocksy:

• Easy to set up,
• Gutenberg-ready,
• WooCommerce ready,
• Seamless integration with all popular page builders,
• Translation-ready,
• Hyper-intuitive options to customize and change in real time every part of your website,
• Full control over the layout settings, header, footer, sidebars, pagination, single pages, and more,
• Mobile responsive.

26. Pathway – built with the Gutenberg editor in mind

Pathway is a recently added theme to wordpress.org. What makes it special is that it is block based. It works seamlessly with Kubio page builder, so that it manages to enrich the Block Editor with tons of styling options.

Features of Pathway:

• Easy to set up,
• Drag and drop editor,
• No-code starter sites,
• Gutenberg-ready: 50+ fully customizable blocks available,
• Designer-made sections: portofolio, team, clients, features, etc.
• Full control over typography and colors,
• Hyper-intuitive options to customize every section and block.
• Mobile responsive.

How to install a WordPress theme

Let’s say you’ve chose Elevate as your theme. Let’s go ahead and install it. I’m going to show you the process below, and you can replicate it with any other theme.

Here are the steps:

1. From the WordPress Dashboard, head over to Appearance->Themes,
2. Click on the “Add New” button.
3. Type the name of your theme in the search bar on the right hand side.
4. Hover over the theme thumbnail then click on the “Install” button.
5. Click on the “Activate” button.

Now the theme is properly installed.

Some themes might require some additional plugins to be installed. In this case, Elevate will recommend installing the Kubio page builder. Just follow the installation steps in order to benefit of all the customization options.

Next, here’s an article on how to design a WordPress website

Make sure you read it in order to properly jumpstart your site.

We wish you lots of inspiration!

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