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You’ve signed up for hosting, registered your domain, and set up WordPress. Now it’s time to choose a theme so you can design a beautiful blog. To help you find the right one, I’ve collected and reviewed the 11 best WordPress themes for blogs.
I chose these themes based on their overall appearance, design capabilities, and ease of use. I selected both paid and free WordPress themes for blogs, so you can pick the best one for your budget.
While a free theme can be sufficient, note that it will have more limitations than a theme you buy.
Best WordPress Themes For Blogging (paid)
As with anything else in life, you get what you pay for. While you can certainly design a good-looking blog with a free theme, you won’t have nearly as many options for customization.
By going with a paid theme, you’ll have more control over the look, feel, and functionality of your site. That’s why I’m starting the list with the WordPress themes for blogs that you can purchase.
1. Divi Theme
The Divi Theme is one of the most popular WordPress themes for blogging. It comes with easy-to-create design templates, which can be customized to fit your preferences. It also comes with more than 40 elements to choose from, such as sliders, call to actions, testimonials, galleries, forms, and so much more.
What I love about the Divi Theme
Personally, I love how neat and streamlined this theme is, as well as its easy drag-and-drop builder. Its popularity speaks for itself; as of February 2021, the Divi Theme has been downloaded over 701,600 times, a true testimony of its quality.
But since its customization options are endless, you don’t have to worry about your Divi-themed blog looking the same as anyone else’s. The Divi Theme helps you design a website that grabs a reader’s attention and keeps it on your blog.
Divi Pricing
The Divi Theme isn’t the most affordable theme out there, but if you pay for it once, you can use it on unlimited websites. As of the time of writing, you can purchase the Divi theme for $89 per year or $249 for lifetime access.
2. Bluchic themes
Bluchic themes are my number one recommendation if you’re looking to design a blog with a more feminine style. Bluchic is run by a husband and wife design team that offers a lot of support for their various themes.
You have several to choose from, including themes that are best for blogs and others that are best for bloggers who also sell services, such as coaching. For example, the Olivie WordPress Theme by Bluchic is designed for engagement, beauty, responsiveness, and stylishness.
Bluchic themes come with step-by-step installation and customization tutorials, lifetime template updates, email support, and beautiful designs. You can either install the theme yourself or pay an extra fee to have the developers install it for you within 24 hours after purchase.
Bluchic also offers add-on templates available for purchase, including social media graphics, landing pages, and more.
What I love about Bluchic themes
Simply put, I love how pretty Bluchic themes are. They’re like candy for your eyes. If you’re looking for a more feminine theme, Bluchic themes are definitely worth considering. Plus, they’re easy to build and customize with your unique logo and brand colors.
As mentioned, I also like that Bluchic sells add-on templates that you can purchase when you’re ready to build out landing pages and other features. By going with their templates, you can make sure your website has a cohesive look and feel.
Bluchic pricing
The prices for Bluchic themes range from $79 to $129. For an extra fee, Bluchic also offers additional bonuses when you purchase a theme, such as its website launch checklist, brand style guide, and list of recommended business tools and tech.
3. Thrive Themes
Thrive Themes offers conversion-focused themes and plugins to launch your blogging career. It provides you with all the necessary tools to convert your visitors into subscribers and customers.
Thrive Themes also come with a drag and drop editor for WordPress, allowing you to build your blog in a matter of minutes.
To boost engagement on your website, Thrive Themes lets you create customized quizzes that generate valuable visitor insights, build a segmented email list, and increase your social following.
What I love about Thrive Themes
Thrive Suite is one of my favorite features from Thrive Themes. It’s basically a subscription-based package that comes with several tools to boost your blogging career. Some features of Thrive Suite include:
- Thrive theme builder
- Thrive Architect for creating landing pages and funnels
- Thrive Leads for building email lists
- Thrive Quiz builder
- Thrive Apprentice for creating online courses
- Thrive Comments for increasing visitor engagement through comments
- Thrive Ultimatum for creating countdown timers and ultimatums
- Thrive Ovation to collect and display conversion boosting testimonials
- Thrive Optimize to deploy conversion boosting landing page tests
Thrive Themes pricing
Thrive Themes’s lowest price is $19 per month and is billed annually for a total of $228. Another alternative is the $30 per month option, billed quarterly for a total of $90.
4. Writing theme
Just as the name suggests, the Writing Theme is ideal for blogs that are centered on storytelling. It comes with at least 24 social share icons to help promote your written content. It can also be translated into any language.
What I love about the Writing theme
Its simplicity. This theme is so simple and minimal. It gives you the feeling of reading through a book or magazine. No interruptions; just blocks of free-flowing content. This popular theme has been purchased almost 4,000 times on theme marketplace, Themeforest.
Writing theme pricing
The Writing Theme costs $49 on Themeforest and is updated regularly. It’s compatible with almost every browser out there.
6. Soledad Themes
Soledad Themes give you access to a variety multi-purpose themes, allowing you to find the one best suited to your blog type. Whether you’re blogging about technology, entertainment, food, travel or any other niche, there’s a Soledad theme for you to try.
What I love about Soledad themes
One thing I like about Soledad themes is how diverse they are. Rather than offering a single theme, Soledad themes lets you browse a variety of designs to find the one that best matches your niche.
Soledad themes are also compatible with WooCommerce for online merchants, BBPress for creating forums, and BuddyPress plugin for social networking.
Soledad themes pricing
Soledad themes cost $59 on Themeforest. This price includes six-month support from the designers, Penci Design.
Best WordPress themes for blogs (free)
Now, let’s take a look some of the best free WordPress themes for blogs. As mentioned, free themes won’t have as many advanced features or allow for as much customization. But if you’re looking to keep costs low, they could be sufficient to design a good-looking blog.
7. Astra
Astra is one of the best free themes on WordPress for blogs. With more than 1.2 million downloads by the time of writing, Astra boasts a number of high-profile clientele include Nasa, Stanford University, CodeInWP, Liquid Web, Bob Jones University, and many others.
Even though the best features of this theme are available in its premium plan, the free version still comes with plenty of possibilities.
What I love about the Astra theme
First of all, this popular theme has the confidence of some industry-leading brands. The free version comes with in-depth articles and video tutorials for quick setup and search engine optimization.
When it comes to design, Astra supports Google fonts, responsiveness, drag and drop builders, and text transformation. You can also customize the layout of the blog by creating containers. It allows you to control the width of your content, visibility of meta titles, and the entire structure of your blog posts.
If your blog uses WooCommerce to sell products, the Astra theme has got you covered. It comes with drop down shopping carts, product structure control, breadcrumb visibility control, and more.
If you need help building different pages on your blog, this theme is compatible with leading page-building plugins such as Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, Brizy, WPBakery Visual Composer and Thrive Architect.
For speed, Astra is also compatible with plugins like WP Rocket, Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, RunCloud, WP Fastest Cache, and more. For SEO, Astra supports Rank Math, SEO Press and Yoast.
Finally, this theme is compatible with a number of contact forms tools on WordPress. These include Gravity Forms, WP Forms, WP Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms Contact Form and Contact Form.
8. aThemes
aThemes consist of powerful yet easy to use themes for any blog. You don’t need to have any coding experience to install a theme from aThemes. To find free themes for blogs on aThemes, click on the Blog tab on the aThemes website.
What I love about aThemes
aThemes come with several free WordPress blogging themes to choose from, all of which can be easily customized to suit your specific niche. Not only will you have a variety of themes to choose from, but each free theme also has a responsive design and free customer support to help you through the blog design process.
9. Satori
The multi-purpose Satori theme is one of the best WordPress themes for blogs if your blog is retina-focused. By retina focused, I mean blogs that are more focused on displaying beautiful photographs to communicate with visitors.
If you’re reviewing foods or providing recipes, showcasing your photography, or running a travel blog, this is one of the best free WordPress themes for blogs.
What I love about Satori theme
Satori allows you to showcase beautiful images and is compatible with WooCommerce. It’s easy to build a beautiful site with Satori thanks to its SiteOrigin Page Builder.
10. Writee Theme
Writee is more like a free version of the Writing theme we discussed earlier. It can be translated into at least six languages and customized to fit almost any type of blog.
This theme is best for personal blogs, where you share stories about your life, travels, and so on. If you’re looking to build a blogging business and need more advanced features, you’d probably be better off with the premium version.
What I love about Writee theme
This popular theme has been downloaded at least 30,000 times and has a lot of positive reviews online. Despite being free, the Writee theme comes with more than 600 Google fonts, icons, social media buttons, built-in related posts to reduce bounce rate, social media navigation menu, and more.
11. Admiral Theme
The Admiral theme is a solid choice for bloggers who want their blog to have a magazine-type feel. This could include blogs focused on sports, entertainment, fashion, culture or any other niche presented in a news style.
The Admiral theme features a responsive design, customizable templates, easy translation, magazine home page and customized widgets. Admiral has also been built with speed, SEO, and browser compatibility in mind.
What I love about the Admiral Theme
One thing I admire about the Admiral theme is that it gives your blog the feel of an online magazine. If you’re looking for a free theme that keeps magazine readers in mind, this one could be a good choice.
Choosing the right WordPress theme for your blog: Final thoughts
Overall, the Divi theme is my number one recommendation for bloggers looking for a premium WordPress theme. It offers lots of customization, powerful features, and easy drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy to design a beautiful site even with zero web design experience. And if you don’t like the Divi theme, your purchase also gives you free access to hundreds of other themes and templates in the Divi library.
If you’re looking to keep costs as low as possible, I recommend the Astra theme or an aThemes themes for your blog. Both give you plenty of options to find a theme you love and design a great-looking and responsive site that provides a good user experience to your readers.
Note that you can always change your theme in the future. However, I recommend choosing a theme you feel good about from the start so you don’t give yourself extra work in the future.
Are you in the process of building out your blog? Head to my guide on the best WordPress plugins to install before you launch!
