Since its launch in 2003 WordPress is a website builder and Content Management System (CMS) tool which is popular among bloggers and businesses. In fact, an estimated two out of every five websites on the internet use WordPress. Although many WordPress themes are free, you will need to pay for a domain name for your site and also need WordPress web hosting.
Is WordPress good for a small business website? The answer is yes, besides allowing users to create any type of website from scratch without needing to know code WordPress comes with more than 55,000 plugins, extensions, themes, and tools for literally any type of website. In fact, the versatility of its themes makes it easy for users to tweak the look, feel, and functionality of their website or blog. With so many options and features, if you don’t know much about it, getting the answer to what is WordPress will better help you understand themes.
How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your Blog
Like most of the tools available in WordPress blog themes can be either free or paid. Most WordPress themes can be tweaked through the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors, where users see the changes being made in real-time as they configure them. With the extensive choice of WordPress themes available ( over 11,000 by the last count on ThemeForest) choosing a theme that is the right fit for you might seem overwhelming. But there are a few rules of thumb that you can follow when it comes to choosing your blog theme.
Readability: the obvious reason for having a blog is to engage with people through content as such your blog’s visitors should find it to navigate through your blog with ease. This entails that you choose the right font type; that your theme allows plenty of whitespaces; have an appealing and appropriate design; accommodate graphics; and other elements that make it easy on the eyes.
Allows Customization: to attract visitors you will need the theme of your blog to be aligned with your particular theme, the color of your stories, blog design, and tone of your desired content. Having a theme that can bring out your unique flavor of content will make your blog stand out from the competition. But be careful to not stack way too many features into your blog as it may lead your blog to load longer driving away visitors.
Mobile-Friendly: An important objective of a blog is to maximize each. Besides desktops, more and more people are using mobile devices and tablets to search on the internet. By having a blog that is optimized for mobile viewing you increase your chances of capturing more visitors.
Supports plugins: The real appeal of WordPress comes with versatile plugins that make it possible for you to do anything with your WordPress site. Make sure that the theme you choose supports all popular plugins.
21 Best WordPress Blog Themes in 2022
Below are some of the best WordPress themes for blogs in 2022.
1. Astra
Astra is a lightweight (uses less than 50 KB of resources) and is a fully customizable WordPress theme for recipes, food, or restaurant blogs. It cuts into website design time by using pixel-perfect ready-to-use website demos from its library. In addition, it seamlessly integrates with popular WordPress page builders such as WPBakery Page Builder, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, Elementor, Divi Builder, Brizy, and Gutenberg.
Price: Astra offers a free version with limited features while its paid starts with the Astra Pro plan that costs $49 per year and offers advanced header and footer builder; advanced blog layouts; advanced typography; mega menu; WooCommerce controls; premium support; unlimited website usage and more.
2. Thrive
Thrive is a full-fledged WordPress theme and site builder. It offers powerful theme options and theme-building capabilities for business blogs. With it, users can visually create and customize headers, footers, blog post templates, sidebars, multiple blog post layouts, category pages, search pages, 404s, and more- without having to use code. This huge selling point is its marketing capabilities that offer calls to action, email opt-in forms, sales funnel, custom author boxes and blog posts, and more and launch your blog or a site in under 15 minutes.
Price: Thrive Suite is billed $19 per month (billed annually) and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee; the ability to install on up to 25 Websites; unlimited support; and unlimited updates.
3. Blossom Fashion Pro
Blossom Fashion Pro is a popular WordPress theme for fashion blogs and blogs. It lets you easily customize your blog using typography and color features. It comes with an Instagram section to showcase your Instagram account for additional impact among followers. Additional feature includes an advertisement, a newsletter section, mobile-friendly and responsive, SEO friendly, and speed optimized.
Price: A Free is available while the Pro version costs with a $ 59 price tag and with WooCommerce compatibility, AdSense optimized advertisement spots, unlimited scrolling, affiliate to promote a clothing line, and more.
4. Newspaper
Newspaper is a fan-favorite among WordPress bloggers for its ability to make it easy to redesign blog pages. It comes with prebuilt elements; load time optimization, SEO optimized content management, and responsiveness on all devices. In addition, it is integrated with Instagram, bbPress Forum, BuddyPress, and WooCommerce.
Price: Newspaper’s license comes at a cost of $59.
5. Divi
Divi is another popular WordPress theme used for corporate blogs. Its website building platform replaces the standard WordPress post editor with a vastly superior visual editor. The drag-and-drop website builder along with over 166 layout packs helps you to customize blogs and websites without needing any custom code.
Price: Divi is available for $89 a year.
6. Writing
Writing theme offers a minimalist blog design that is both clean and simple. It features a classic blog layout, is easy to set up helping users to experiment with blog styles and formats. It also offers enhanced readability, is SEO friendly which is perfect for bloggers.
Price: Writing Theme is available on ThemeForest for $49.
7. Morning Time Lite
Morning Time Lite is a popular theme for writers for those who like to share short blogs and quick news updates. This theme comes with a clean code that ensures speedy loading. Besides a responsive design, it allows you to create your custom logo for your blog. Additional tools under its hood include multilanguage-ready, unlimited color schemes, custom share buttons, and simple installation.
Price: Morning Time Lite is free.
8. MoneyFlow
MoneyFlow best perk is that this theme integrates with Google AdSense making it ideal for those seeking digital products online. It comes with featured posts and a slider section to your blog page with a seamless AdSense integration. This SEO-friendly theme, responsive on all devices, integrates with WooCommerce as well.
Price: MoneyFlow is available for $59 from MyThemeShop.
9. Foodie Pro
Foodie Pro is a stylish WordPress theme for food blogs. This minimalist food blog theme prominently features images for your posts. The theme loads fast, has a clean design, and has plenty of color and typography options.
Price: Foodie Pro is available for $75.
10. Soledad
Soledad is a popular blog theme that offers an online magazine feel. It comes with over 60,000 homepage demos, multiple templates for different post types, an 40+ custom elements, is SEO-friendly and responsive on all devices.
Price: The Soledad theme is available for $59.
11. Florentine
Florentine is another blog theme for food and recipes. The theme has a handy recipe formatter. It comes with a good selection of colors and layout options while also offering shortcodes to create recipes and integrate with social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest.
Price: This theme is available on Themeforest for $59
12. Elegant
Elegant WordPress theme is a minimalist multipurpose blog theme. This minimalistic design focuses on typography and is popular among bloggers, artists, writers, and photographers. This theme is responsive, comes with a drag-and-drop builder to customize pages, manage multiple layout options, image filters, and more.
Price: The Elegant is available for $59.
13. Typology
Typology is WordPress blog theme is a text-based minimalistic theme that focuses entirely on text content. It’s is a good blog theme option for bloggers who want to focus on typography, color, and composition more than images. With it you can customize content displays and choose from a selection of layouts. While Typology has quite a few more features, it looks so great out-of-box, do you really want to change it that much? If you want a minimalist theme for writing, go check it out.
Price: This theme is available on Themeforest for $49
14. OceanWP
OceanWP is a multipurpose blog theme that comes with some great customization options. This WordPress theme offers fast-loading, the user-friendly theme comes with a large selection of templates. With this theme, you have a choice of plugin extensions available to help you add more styling options, custom widgets, post types, and more.
Price: OceanWP theme is available for $ 71 in yearly subscriptions.
15. Jevelin
Jevelin is a simple creative multipurpose blog WordPress theme. It comes with a selection of pre-built templates that can apply for portfolios, online shops, corporations, events and more. Besides seamlessly integrating with WooCommerce, it is compatible with most contact form plugins, including Contact Form 7 while also allowing you to share your location on Google Maps in real-time.
Price: The Javelin theme is available for $59.
16. Roofix
Roofix is considered to be the best SEO-optimized WordPress theme available. This theme comes with a Drag & Drop page builder included; is responsive and mobile-friendly; offers unlimited color combinations; free lifetime updates; supports most browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox and more.
Price: Roofix theme is available on ThemeForest for $35.
17. Kalium
Kalium is a WordPress blog ideal for agencies, travel agencies. hotels, startups, and more because of its colorful, youthful, and energetic theme. It comes with a page builder that helps you build pages within minutes; offers more than 15 header styles, and is SEO optimized. This theme comes with supported plugins that include WooCommerce, Loco Translate, Ninja Forms, WPForms, and many more.
Price: Kalium theme is available for $59.
18. Webify
Webify is a versatile WordPress theme for a personal blog. It comes with a good selection of ready-made templates which will get you going in little to no time. Webify allows customization through visual editing- without coding required. It is responsive, integrates with WooCommerce, Gutenberg Optimized, SEO friendly, has over 160 elements and modules, unlimited layouts, and lifetime free updates.
Price: Webify theme is available on ThemeForest for $59.
19. Buzz
Buzz blog theme is a lifestyle blog and magazine WordPress theme. This theme comes social media ready with integrated social share buttons for Instagram, Twitter, Flicker, Pinit feed widgets, and more. Its mega menu lets you display recent posts, multiple column menus and even allows you to add widgets into the menu,
Price: Buzz theme is available on ThemeForest for $49.
20. Neve
Neve is a WordPress theme that is suited for personal blogs, business sites, and online stores. This blog theme is fast and lightweight; flexible and easy to use; easy to set up and sleek designs and more. Thanks to its mobile-first approach, compatibility with the AMP plugin, and popular page-builders makes website building accessible for everyone.
Price: Neve theme is available free of charge.
21. Akea
Akea is a simple WordPress blog theme. The theme comes with three prebuilt homepages; 14 blog layouts; a color picker that lets you choose from hundreds of color elements; responsive among all devices; SEO friendly and compatibility with WooCommerce.
Price: Akea theme is available on ThemeForest for $54.
Free WordPress Blog Themes Vs. Paid Themes
If you are looking to use a WordPress blog you have a choice of either using a free WordPress theme or a paid premium WordPress theme. Free WordPress themes are generally designed and developed by independent developers, with limited or no support making though they offer some great functionalities they can be limited in terms of support, additional features, and customization for your blog or website. Besides being completely free, with no strings attached these themes can be downloaded from the official WordPress.org theme directory will have undergone an official review process.
However, premium WordPress themes come with enterprise-level support, frequent updates, robust customization options, and more – for a price though. However, as a rule of thumb, you can expect a higher level of quality blog themes from premium themes when compared with their free counterparts. But depending on your specific needs Free WordPress themes can hold their own.
What paid WordPress theme is best for blogging?
Thrive Theme is considered the best-paid WordPress theme. Thrive Theme’s builder helps you build a WordPress blog while also incorporating some powerful theme options and theme-building capabilities. Thrive’s theme builder can help you customize key theme elements like your 404, search and archive pages as well as your blog page layout. Thrive’s suite that includes Thrive’s theme builder, Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Apprentice and others offer an all-in-one toolbox to create a WordPress Website or blog that helps to converts visitors into leads and customers. With it, you can not only build a website or blog, sales funnels, email lists, campaigns, online courses, and much more.
What is the best free WordPress blog theme?
Neve’s free theme besides being a lightweight starter theme, is lightning-fast, is versatile and customization comes easy. These features make it perfect for blogs, small businesses, startups, agencies, e-commerce shops, and more. Besides fast loading capabilities, its minimalist design boosts readability and comes with SEO-optimized coding. It also integrates seamlessly with popular page builder plugins like Gutenberg, Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, Divi, and comes WooCommerce ready. Editing comes easy as you can see real-time changes when editing your theme. If you want to build your WordPress blog to your exact specifications then Neve is the best free blog theme for you.
Image: Depositphotos
This article, “Best WordPress Themes for Blogs” was first published on Small Business Trends
