July 22nd, 2019 | Updated on January 23rd, 2023
Blogging is a passion for those who know how to express their thoughts and ideas. People set up their blogs and gather audiences who love to hear what they have to offer.
With platforms like WordPress around it becomes easy for you to choose themes matching your niche. However, you cannot just choose any theme for a blog.
There are some themes which are blog specific and we have analyzed top 10 of them. Each one of them is better than the best and we have scrutinized them on the basis of their features and benefits.
If you have thought of a certain style in mind it would be easy for you to take a final call. You can compare two or three themes to finally choose one that should be extremely useful and give your blog the much-needed recognition.
1. Hestia
Hestia is a modern WordPress theme for professionals. It fits creative business, small businesses (restaurants, wedding planners, sport/medical shops), startups, corporate businesses, online agencies and firms, portfolios, ecommerce (WooCommerce), and freelancers. It has a multipurpose one-page design, widgetized footer, blog/news page and a clean look, is compatible with: Flat Parallax Slider, Photo Gallery, Travel Map and Elementor Page Builder . The theme is responsive, WPML, Retina ready, SEO friendly, and uses Material Kit for design.
Review: webmatros
This in-depth Hestia theme review expands on my extensive WordPress theme comparison What’s the Fastest WordPress Theme for Your Page Builder?
In that comparison, Hestia didn’t do too well. In fact: it came in last, performance-wise!
Fortunately, ThemeIsle (the makers of Hestia) were quick to shoot me an email, wanting to find the cause and fix it.
Although ThemeIsle is a capable and reputable WordPress theme company, I honestly didn’t expect them to be able to improve Hestia’s performance much.
2. OceanWP
OceanWP is the perfect theme for your project. Lightweight and highly extendable, it will enable you to create almost any type of website such a blog, portfolio, business website and WooCommerce storefront with a beautiful & professional design. Very fast, responsive, RTL & translation ready, best SEO practices, unique WooCommerce features to increase conversion and much more.
You can even edit the settings on tablet & mobile so your site looks good on every device. Work with the most popular page builders as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, Visual Composer, Divi, SiteOrigin, etc… Developers will love his extensible codebase making it a joy to customize and extend. Best friend of Elementor & WooCommerce. Looking for a Multi-Purpose theme?
Review: WPCRAFTER
OceanWP is the most feature-packed free theme that is available.
For a theme that work with any page builder, it has some innovative features that I have never seen in a theme. Primarily it’s strength is with e-commerce websites and has all the feature that you would normally expect to pay for.
If you are new to WordPress, the customizer options and the option boxes found in each post/page can be overwhelming and hard to make sense of at times.
3. modernize
modernize is a modern, simple and beautiful WordPress theme. I made it for blogging. Customizer, social menu icon, several templates, logo addition, switching function between one column and two columns, etc. are also available.
Review: envatomarket
Modernize is a new era of wordpress theme. You can discover many new awesome features in this theme. For example ‘Page Builder’, it allow you to create page easily by drag-drop module. Moreover, it comes with many options on that 🙂 Also, to change color elements, it won’t be a big deal anymore, with our new admin panel, you can access to almost of all elements color. Admin panel in this theme is a real feature rich. You can also create unlimited sidebar, choosing over 350 fonts or if you want to use your own, we provide a cufon uploader. Modernize has 15 predefined background pattern but if you want to use your own background, again, we have a custom background uploader. You can also translate each elements to your language via this admin panel.
4. Ribosome
Ribosome is a Gutenberg ready theme with a clear and neat design, easy to use and customize. Some its features are: header image or logo, custom theme color (blue, green, orange, pink or red), right sidebar or left, excerpts or entire entries on homepage, main menu on the left or centered, six different Google Fonts, thumbnails rounded or squared, two widgets areas (beginning and end of posts), related posts, customization panel, fully responsive, custom header, custom background and more. Translation Ready (English and spanish integrated). Required WordPress 4.1+.
Review: wpbeginner
Ribosome is a magazine style free WordPress blog theme. It comes with a custom header, custom background, and unlimited colors. It has a single navigation menu and a social menu on the top.
It comes with a two column layout with sidebar on the right. Ribosome has six different Google Fonts, round or square thumbnails, two widgets areas at beginning and end of posts, perfect for displaying ads
5. Writee
Writee is an elegant free personal WordPress blog theme and well suited for personal, food, travel, fashion, corporate, or any other amazing blog. Writee is fully responsive and mobile friendly. The theme features pixel perfect design and includes 3 custom widgets, Customizer Options, full-width/boxed slider to showcase your content with style. Writee is translation ready and supports the following languages AR_ARABIC, DE_GERMAN, ES_spanish, FR_french, IT_itnalian, RU_Russian, ZH_CHINES.
Review: wpbeginner
Writee is a free WordPress theme suitable for personal websites, travel, and adventure blogs. It features a large slider on top using featured images from blog posts. It comes with multiple templates and custom widgets among many other features.
6. Verbosa
Are you a writer? An author? Or maybe a photographer? An artist? Perhaps you do online reviews? Or are you just casually blogging about music, movies and such? Do you like to ramble on? Are you a creator? Do you generate content of any kind? Are we asking too many questions? Is this too much? Have we crossed the line? Well then you should give Verbosa a try as she may have all the tools needed to assist you and your creativity.
Review: GEETHEMES
Verbosa is all about elegant typography, efficient use of contrast, spacing and simplicity. We used all the tricks at our disposal to improve legibility, create emphasis and generate a proper design flow that would make your content more inviting to be read.
Verbosa is also truly responsive, with a fluid layout, uses microformats and microdata for best SEO results, takes great advantage of featured images, supports Google fonts, has social menus with over 100 social icons, is translation ready and supports RTL languages. And everything’s editable via the customizer with well over 100 options! And as an extra, we’ve coded in a fresh and exquisite perfume that will follow you everywhere once you install the theme!.
7. Revive
Revive is a Multi Purpose Theme with a Magazine Layout which can be easily optimized for other purposes too. This theme comes integrated with Font Awesome Icons, Multiple Blog Layouts, Sidebar Customizations and much more. Built on the Bootstrap 3.0 Framework, Revive has brilliant Responsive performance on Mobile and Tablet Devices as well.
Review: wpbeginner
Revive is a beautiful free blog theme for WordPress. It features a magazine style layout with a large header image and your featured content displayed in a posts grid. It comes integrated with Font Awesome icons and supports multiple blog layouts.
8. Scratchpad
A colorful theme for collecting your ideas.
Review: wpbeginner
Scratchpad is an illustrative and colorful WordPress blog theme. It uses a set of patterns, drawings, and styles to create a beautiful and fun look. It supports multiple post formats and displays them beautifully. It has a sidebar on the right and another at the bottom.
9. Nitro
Nitro is a Premium Quality Design with one of the best Performance scores. Its extremely fast loading and Uses very few Third Party Scripts. Its designed to work with WooCommerce to give you the finest eCommerce sites. And it has multiple options to showcase your content so that you can highlight your best, easily.
Review: CollectiveRay
E-commerce site maintenance is a tricky task. You set your site up, have your best-selling stuff displayed carefully, create thoughtful checkout and thank you pages, bang your head a little over messages and colours, and after all the pain, you find out, it’s just not really making you happy! There is still something more that can be done, improved, tweaked or may be just trashed out of that site!
Despite the ocean-volume of WordPress templates coming into the market these days, and a large proportion of them, claiming to be built with ecommerce in mind, you and I, both know, how many sick hours we spend tweaking codes, just to make sure, that faux-fur cardigan is rotated properly on every mouse-over.
10. MadHat
MadHat is a Multi Purpose Theme with a Black/White Layout which can be easily optimized for other purposes too. This theme comes integrated with Font Awesome Icons, Multiple Blog Layouts, Sidebar Customizations and much more. Built on the Bootstrap 3.0 Framework, MadHat has brilliant Responsive performance on Mobile and Tablet Devices as well.
Review: wpbeginner
MadHat is built on Bootstrap framework, and it is a multi-purpose WordPress theme featuring a black and white layout which can be easily customized. It comes with Font Awesome icons, multiple blog layouts, and sidebar customizations.
11. Sparkling
Sparkle has built-in tools to add payment buttons and shopping carts from the leading commerce providers, plus table, property and appointment booking. It helps you get your online business going in minutes.
With Sparkle’s built-in SEO Assistant, no special knowledge is required to get your site to be Google’s best new friend. Sparkle also codes very tightly, nerd friends will be impressed.
Sparkle can import your existing site and immediately apply all the performance and security gains. Creating a site from scratch is just plain fun and fast.
Review: WordPress
Sparkling is a clean minimal and responsive WordPress theme well suited for travel, health, business, finance, portfolio, design, art, photography, personal, ecommerce and any other creative websites and blogs. Developed using Bootstrap 3 that makes it mobile and tablets friendly. Theme comes with full-screen slider, social icon integration, author bio, popular posts widget and improved category widget. Sparkling incorporates latest web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 and is SEO friendly thanks to its clean structure and codebase. It has dozens of Theme Options based on WordPress Customizer to change theme layout, colors, fonts, slider settings and much more.
12. Dazzling
Dazzling is a clean, modern and responsive flat design WordPress theme with pixel perfect design and outstanding functionality that can compete with premium themes. It is a highly customizable theme with unlimited color variations, several widget areas, flexible featured slider and much more. Theme is developer using Bootstrap 3 which makes it fully responsive and optimized for mobile devices. Dazzling theme can be used for portfolio, business, blog, personal, travel, corporate, business services, app showcase, sales pages and much more.
Review: wptavern
Dazzling is a new free theme that landed in the WordPress Themes Directory last week. It’s based on Bootstrap 3, which makes it responsive and mobile friendly. The theme features an optional full-screen featured slider, which works well for customizing business or creative websites.
If you’re a fan of flat design with mint green accent colors, the Dazzling theme has you covered.
13 . Travelify
Travelify is a clean, simple, responsive and customizable WordPress WooCommerce theme that looks awesome on any device. It adjusts automatically to any screen size including tablets and smartphones as well as Retina displays. Theme is built using HTML5 / CSS3, and is SEO friendly. This WordPress theme was built with travel, adventures, languages and nature in mind but it can be used for anything so be creative and unleash its full potential in blogging, ecommerce, business and other websites. Along the awesome design this theme is customizable via simple but yet powerful theme options. Some of the nicest features are featured post slider, social icons, custom logo, translation ready (compatible with WPML plugin) and many more.
Review: colorlib
Travelify has proven to be the most popular travel WordPress theme released by any developer. It has been downloaded several million times and is used by countless website worldwide.
It became popular thanks to its simplicity, beautiful design and fast performance that is unparalleled. It simplicity makes it very usable tool for those using WordPress drag and drop page builders because you can start with a blank canvas and build from there.
If Travelify is not the right travel WordPress theme for you we have a plenty of other suggestions that you can find here.
If you are just thinking about building a website and you don’t have a foundation for it you might want to check our affordable WordPress hosting guide. There you will find the most cost-efficient hosting for WordPress.
14. Auberge
Auberge is responsive, retina-ready, modern restaurant, cafe and recipes blog WordPress theme. It is an ideal WordPress theme to promote your restaurants in style.
It supports Jetpack plugin to create a nested food menu (Food Menus custom post type, infinite scroll, contact form, tiled galleries, sharing buttons, related posts,…), Schema.org markup with Google recipe view, Theme Hook Alliance action hooks, translation-ready code, header slideshow, customizable colors and layout, and other cool features.
Review: WordPress
Auberge is responsive, retina-ready, modern restaurant & café & recipes blog WordPress theme. Supports Beaver Builder page builder plugin, Jetpack plugin to create nested food menus, WebMan Amplifier plugin for recipes, Schema.org markup with Google recipe view, Theme Hook Alliance action hooks, translation-ready code with support for RTL languages, header slideshow, customizable colors and layout, and other cool features.
15. Awaken
This site is using the standard WordPress Theme Unit Test Data for content. The Theme Unit Test is a series of posts and pages that match up with a checklist on the WordPress codex. You can use the data and checklist together to test your theme.
Review: WordPress
Auberge is responsive, retina-ready, modern restaurant & café & recipes blog WordPress theme. Supports Beaver Builder page builder plugin, Jetpack plugin to create nested food menus, WebMan Amplifier plugin for recipes, Schema.org markup with Google recipe view, Theme Hook Alliance action hooks, translation-ready code with support for RTL languages, header slideshow, customizable colors and layout, and other cool features.
16. The SSMAG
SSMAG features masonry style homepage with auto resize thumbnails for the best user experience. Also comes with optimized ad spots and social share buttons in the optimal position. This template also comes with theme options integrated and is also fully responsive. If you want a professional looking theme with optimal ad placement, it for you.
Review: mytempletewordpress
The SSMAG Theme is a grid based layout theme, it’s super easy to use just plug and play. This theme was made for content creators wanting to go viral. SSMAG as a big empathise on social sharing and the design layout is also optimize to keep readers exploring your site further.
Like most themes created in 2015, SSMAG is responsive so your site will look good on all devices. Not only that but you also get, custom widgets and optimize ad placement built in. This theme also comes with social menu icons to further promote your Twitter, Facebook profiles etc. The SSMAG theme support embedded video which you can use instead of a featured image on a post page.
17. Ample
It’s time to personalize your blog with this eye-catching and professional theme. Ample is a free minimalist and multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with feature-rich options for customizing your layout and setting the right metrics for your site. Mobile device responsiveness helps your search engine results.
Building your personal brand is an essential part of running a successful online business. So, it’s necessary to customize your site, by adding a professional logo and relevant header text that will appeal to your target audience.
Review: amplemeal
We believe that health, convenience, and great taste shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. That’s why we created Ample: a satisfying, real-food meal in a bottle that combines optimal nutrition and great taste in a convenient format you can take anywhere. Using high-quality ingredients backed by sound science, our three formulas deliver a fast, easy solution for eating well on your busiest days and everywhere in between.
18. Parallax
Parallax is a free Parallax Theme perfect for WordPress websites of any niche. Includes Drag and Drop Builder for Visual Elements, so you can make each landing page stand out.
The theme has a responsive design that adapts any screen size or device.
Make your website sharp and beautiful using its Retina optimized WordPress themes that look great on phones.
Review: highonfilms
Parallax’s idea is potent, and Michael Bachochin attempts with all his might to render the film with a philosophical identity of its own. But in his effort to not convert the film into a self-expository narrative, he holds back a lot of information that makes the film disengaging in parts. He ends up providing two distinct identities to the two halves of the feature and stretches his audience through a film that is neither fully contemplative nor a fast-paced thriller with no time to breathe.
19. iFeature
iFeature is a fully-responsive, translation-ready, universal professional, free Magazine Style WordPress theme. With drag-drop options for visual elements on each page , this theme allows you to control the look and feel of every page.
The template has a responsive design that adapts any screen size or device.
This template is easily translatable into any language with WPML.
Review: wpeka
The theme design for iFeature is responsive that is, the adaptable or adjustable web design which modifies itself according to the various screen sizes of the variety of devices which is now offered by most of the WordPress themes. All the contents remain same.
The theme adjusts its resolution, image size and structure according to the devices like iPhone, Android or Kindle. With the Responsive feature, this theme is preferred by the Google Search Engine. All these websites have the same URL and HTML across all the devices.
20. e-Shopper
e-Shopper is an ECommerce WordPress Theme specially created for you to help you launch your business online. e-Shopper will help you set up an e-store very easily. You can create a stunning store with its various customizer options. This ecommerce theme comes up with a homepage, blog page, product page.
Review: estoremedia
Harvesting 1000s of Ratings & Reviews, eShopper Review Analysis unlocks authentic and unprompted consumer feedback on your products and their competitors. It returns an original and unique set of insights on consumer attitudes. The methodology is efficient and the process is fast.
Using a combination of AI, natural language processing with native language auditors, our data modeling organizes product features which are trending in Reviews, assessed by volume of mentions, by sentiment and by Star Rating. This highlights the product features your consumers really love as well as those which pose competitive threats.
