21 Free WordPress Blog Themes for 2024 (Expert Pick)

Are you a blogger searching for the best free WordPress blog themes for your site? If yes, your search ends here.

Blogging is a great way to connect with your passions. It’s also one of the most effective ways to share your ideas with the rest of the world.

While the whole blogging thing is up to you, it is also important that your blog is eye-catching, professional, easy to read, and well-organized.

WordPress blogging themes can help you in doing exactly that.

Fortunately, many excellent blog themes are available for free, so you won’t have to spend any money on them.

So, in this article, we’ll explore some of the best free WordPress blog themes that will match your blog’s content and character.

For those in a hurry, here are our top recommendations.

• Astra: If you want a highly customizable blog design, Astra is an excellent option. It’s lightweight and integrates seamlessly with popular drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, giving you tons of control over your blog’s look and feel.
• GeneratePress: If blazing-fast loading speed is your priority, GeneratePress is a great option. It’s built with a clean code, ensuring your blog ranks well in search engines. Plus, it offers enough customization to create a unique blog design.
• Blocksy: Built specifically for the Gutenberg editor, Blocksy offers a user-friendly interface and beautiful pre-built blocks to get you started quickly, making it great for those new to WordPress.

Start Blogging With WordPress

WordPress is the best blogging platform for starting your blog. It allows you a great deal of freedom, flexibility, and control.

One of the key advantages of WordPress is its open-source nature, which means it’s free to use. It also provides a vast library of free templates (themes) and extensions (plugins) to help you grow your blog faster.

Note: When we refer to WordPress, we’re talking about the self-hosted WordPress.org, not the hosted WordPress.com. Check out our complete guide on WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

While many WordPress themes are free, you will need to get a domain name for your website. This is the internet address for your site.

You’ll also need WordPress hosting. This is where your website is hosted online.

We recommend Bluehost for WordPress hosting and domain registration. They are an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Once your website is up and running, it’s time to pick a theme. There are many great premium themes available. However, there are also excellent free themes that will help you limit the cost of creating a WordPress site.

Now, let’s look at some of the best free WordPress blog themes you can install on your site.

21 Best Free WordPress Themes for Blog

Here’s a list of the 21 free blog themes for wordpress to create a responsive and fully functional blog.

1. Astra

Astra is a lightweight, highly customizable, and one of the best WordPress themes for your blog. It is also one of the most popular free WordPress themes on WordPress.org, with over 1+ million active installations.

With Astra, you have a plethora of starter sites at your disposal, perfect for personal blogs, portfolios, business blogs, and even eCommerce websites. These templates are not just responsive but also work seamlessly with popular page builders. Astra also supports Gutenberg and offers an extensive library of free starter templates, empowering you to easily create custom layouts and automatically manage Gutenberg blocks’ styling and spacing.

That’s not all. With the Live Customizer option, you can also make your blog look exactly the way you want. You can easily customize layout settings, colors & typography, blog posts & archive pages, design, etc. Besides, it has a responsive design, which means it works perfectly on any device.

Want to sell digital products on your blog? Don’t worry. Astra seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, one of the best eCommerce plugins, to help you build an online store and make money blogging.

Above all, Astra prioritizes performance. It only requires 50 KB of resources, which helps ensure a fast page load time.

For more, read our complete Astra theme review.

Get Astra

2. OceanWP

OceanWP is a multipurpose WordPress theme suitable for personal blogging, portfolios, and online stores. It has a full-width header image that can be placed on the homepage to highlight a product or showcase featured content.

The theme can be customized using the WordPress Customizer. It is possible to adjust the overall layout of your blog and adjust the header padding to fit different screen sizes. Furthermore, this is a fully responsive theme.

If you like to use a page builder to design your site, OceanWP works well with Brizy, Thrive Architect, and Divi. This WordPress theme also includes several free extensions to enhance the site’s functionality.

In addition, OceanWP offers eCommerce built-in features if you want to launch a business on your blogging website. They provide you the option of modifying the checkout page, the number of cross-sells, and up-sells.

Get OceanWP

3. Neve

The next free WordPress blog theme on the list is Neve, a user-friendly option suited for eCommerce and corporate sites.

However, what differentiates this WordPress theme is its emphasis on speed and efficiency. Its overall install size is under 28 KB, and it can load in as little as 0.6 seconds on a standard install.

Furthermore, it is compatible with almost all of the most popular page builders, eliminating the need for coding skills as a barrier to creating the perfect website. Additionally, its one-click demo layouts make it simple to get up and run quickly.

Neve is the perfect free blog theme if you want to build your WordPress blog to your exact specifications.

Plus, this theme supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve the user experience on mobile devices.

Get Neve

4. Hestia

Hestia is the best one-page WordPress theme for blog owners searching for simplicity while having access to many customization options.

Hestia’s ready-made designs allow you to start your blog in minutes. You may use Material Kit to customize these designs to match the style and content of your site without having to change the code.

This free WordPress blog theme follows the material design concept. Therefore, it has clean lines and vibrant colors. It is also retina-ready, so your blog will look amazing on high-resolution displays.

Get Hestia

5. Blocksy

Blocksy is another excellent free multipurpose theme that is ideal for creating a blog site. It has many WordPress templates that are good for creating a blog, each with several customization options.

For example, you’ll have access to a free header and footer builder, which you can use to create your own custom areas. Having said that, if design isn’t your thing, you may also select from nine pre-made headers.

You can also archive your old blog posts using one of five layout options. In addition to your blog, you can use WooCommerce to create an online shop to sell products and make money.

Get Blocksy

6. GuCherry Blog

GuCherry Blog theme is ideal for blogging niches such as food, travel, beauty, and lifestyle.

It offers an eye-catching slider at the top and a variety of widgets that make it simple to add content to your sidebar and other widgetized areas on your site.

Additionally, this theme has lots of space for ad display, making it simple to monetize your blog with ad networks like Google AdSense. GuCherry Blog theme supports several post types; make your posts more engaging by using videos, audio, and written content.

In terms of customization, the theme is simple to use and allows you to add your own header image or logo, change colors, and change fonts. The GuCherry Blog also has a unique social media widget and a built-in related posts display to keep visitors on your site longer.

Get GuCherry Blog

7. Hueman

Hueman is the best free WordPress blog theme, with a modern design that is flexible and simple to use. This theme includes a grid layout that is ideal for a content-heavy website.

Its various customization options allow you to choose how to display content on your website. You can use a full-width layout or up to two sidebars on each side.

In addition, Hueman doesn’t limit the number of widget sidebars you can have on your website. You are free to add a widget area to a page, article, or section, including a full-width header that is great for displaying an advertisement banner.

This theme also has a flexible design and color choices, allowing you to select primary and secondary accent colors and a topbar, footer, and header image.

Hueman, guaranteed to be retina-ready and highly responsive, can simply scale down from a full-HD resolution to properly fit mobile devices. Additionally, this blog theme supports ten different WordPress post formats, giving you various ways to show content.

Get Hueman

8. Olsen Light

Olsen Light is a great choice if you want to start a lifestyle blog.

This WordPress blog theme contains various social media features, including sharing options for 15 social networks. There is also an Instagram integration function that displays your Instagram posts in an interactive slider.

Olsen Light uses WordPress’s built-in customizer to let you easily customize the site’s design, from selecting a color scheme and background image to creating a logo and a site favicon.

It also offers three custom widgets for displaying the author profile, latest posts, and social media icons, making your site’s visual design more appealing.

Further, this theme is translation-ready and works with the most essential WordPress plugins, including Yoast SEO, WPML, and WPForms, to improve the functionality of your site.

Get Olsen Light

9. Zakra

Zakra is definitely one of the best themes if you want to build a free WordPress blog. It features a large collection of free blog templates for a number of site ideas. This covers health, restaurant, and travel-related blogs.

Furthermore, it can be customized for any blogging niche using the Elementor page builder. Combined with its in-build customization options, Zakra allows you to create any type of blog without needing technical expertise.

It is worth noting that Zakra is a multipurpose theme, which means it can be used for more than simply blogging. For example, it is completely compatible with WooCommerce, so eCommerce solutions are absolutely available.

That’s not all. Zakra is optimized for speed, ensuring blazing-fast performance. Plus, zakra follows the best SEO practices and supports the SEO WordPress plugins to boost your site’s ranking.

Get Zakra

10. Go

Go by GoDaddy is a WordPress theme that is intended to be lightweight and fast to load, hence improving the user experience on your blog website. It features a clean, minimalist style and is totally responsive, so it looks good on any device.

The Go Theme uses Gutenberg to allow users to create excellent websites with a lot of freedom.

This theme is ideal for small businesses, bloggers, and anybody searching for a basic yet stylish design. It is targeted at users who want a simple theme that is easy to set up and adjust and does not require many features. It’s easy to browse, with clear calls to action to help visitors become customers.

The Go theme is also search engine friendly, which can help your website appear higher in search results and increase traffic.

Get Go

11. ColorMag

ColorMag is a magazine-style WordPress theme that shows various posts from different categories in a nice and clean design. It supports numerous widget styles, allowing you to modify how you wish to show each post.

It also allows you to give different colors to different post categories, making your website well-organized. In addition, ColorMag offers a variety of customization choices, including the ability to upload a site logo, enable a sticky menu, and choose a different layout.

This theme is a perfect solution for magazine-style and news blogs due to its dynamic and versatile design. If you want to monetize your site and offer products or services, you may create a WooCommerce page within your blog.

Get ColorMag

12. Writee

Writee is the best free WordPress blog theme made specifically for bloggers and writers, as its name suggests. The theme uses white space and bold text to draw the visitor’s attention to your content.

From choosing colors and backgrounds to including your own logo and favicon files, you can change many elements of the theme’s design. Furthermore, you can import various layout designs, such as boxes, no sidebars, and grid layouts, with a single click.

It also supports many post types, from gallery to video, making it easier to diversify your content.

Aside from that, Writee users can enable WordPress breadcrumbs on their blogs. You can also choose from a collection of over 600 Google Fonts, add social widgets, and configure pagination options.

Get Writee

13. Vilva

Vilva is a mobile-friendly multi-purpose blog theme. You can use this free blog theme to share your experiences or show your expertise in fashion, travel, beauty, fitness, food, and more.

Furthermore, Vilva allows you to easily customize your website color and typography to reflect your brand. Apart from that, Vilva even features a site logo, featured boxes, background images, Google Fonts, and more.

With Vilva, you can easily integrate Instagram into your blog, boosting your followers and expanding your reach. But it doesn’t stop there. Vilva also offers a newsletter section, a powerful tool to build your email list and foster a deeper connection with your users. This feature holds the promise of a growing and engaged audience.

Moreover, the theme is Google AdSense optimized and allows you to maximize your revenue.

Aside from that, it integrates with WooCommerce and search engine optimized to rank higher in Google.

Get Vilva

14. Poseidon

Poseidon is another theme that works well for various blogs, including personal blogs and travel blogs. Poseidon’s Magazine Posts widgets enable you to create a magazine-style homepage that displays different post categories.

This free theme also includes a full-screen post slideshow to highlight your most important content. You may customize it by adjusting the number of posts, the speed, and the animation effects.

You can also change how posts and the author’s description are displayed and how related posts are shown.

Regarding layout options, the theme has five different styles, including a featured image header, full-width, and several sidebar templates.

Get Poseidon

15. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is a free WordPress theme for blogs that is clean and simple. It has a full-width custom header at the top and uses bold headlines for post titles.

It has a left sidebar and a single navigation menu at the top. Additionally, it has special widgets for the most recent posts and comments, allowing you to display the thumbnails of recently published articles in your sidebar.

Get Lovecraft

16. Hello Elementor

Elementor has earned a reputation as the best page builder for WordPress, and it has even released its own free theme. Hello Elementor, with over a million active installations.

This is a free multipurpose theme designed to work with Elementor. As a result, you may create an amazing blog for any niche with any header or page style you can think of.

It’s very easy to do. Everything is designed with an easy drag-and-drop editor that allows you to create pages without writing a single word of code. It even includes over 100 website kits to help you get a head start on your design.

Get Hello Elementor

17. Ashe

Ashe is another WordPress blog theme that is free to use. It’s a highly flexible theme that is perfect for any type of blogging website, including personal, lifestyle, food, travel, and fashion.

With Ashe, you have the power to make your website truly yours. The theme features a unique section called promo boxes, where you can showcase three eye-catching images in the header area. What’s more, Ashe offers a built-in customizer that allows you to change page layouts, colors, backgrounds, and fonts in real-time, making customization a breeze.

Aside from that, Ashe is translation-ready and comes with built-in compatibility for popular plugins like WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, MailPoet, etc.

Get Ashe

18. Kadence

Kadence is well-known as a multipurpose theme. It’s an excellent theme for WordPress blogs since it has a clean and modern design that improves readability and usability. The free version of the blog theme is fully compatible with Gutenberg, Beaver Builder, and WooCommerce.

The theme includes starter templates and a Gutenberg design library, which can be enabled with a single click. The design library includes a large number of pre-made block patterns for fast customizing layouts, making it ideal for those who like block-based editing but want classic theme versatility.

Despite its extensive feature set, Kadence is lightweight, with a pre-made beginning site homepage of 574 KB. Its efficiency allows for faster loading times and a better user experience.

For more, read our complete Kadence theme review.

Get Kadence

19. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a lightweight and well-optimized WordPress theme designed for blogging. The theme is both secure and SEO-optimized. It is also compatible with schema.org. As a result, you can modify and enhance your blog content to rank higher on search engines, which will increase the popularity of your blogs.

Furthermore, the theme has blogging-friendly features such as nine widget sections, five sidebar layouts, drop-down menus, and different navigational elements and buttons. Not to mention that you may quickly insert useful widgets, ads, and banners in various areas of your site.

For more, read out our complete GeneratePress review.

Get GeneratePress

20. HitMag

HitMag is a creative and elegant free WordPress blog theme suitable for magazines, newspapers, and personal blogs. This powerful theme has an author details box and related articles and even allows you to customize post metadata to create a full blog website.

Similarly, you get four different styles for listing your blog content. A two-column grid, a column grid, a list layout, and a huge post. Not only that, but it also offers a number of sidebar and content alignment choices for blog entries.

Overall, HitMag ensures that your blogs seem amazing, which attracts more readers to your site.

Get HitMag

21. Gist

Gist is a free minimalist WordPress blog theme. This theme includes many options for enhancing your blog and adding your own personal sense of glam to your content. You may add metadata to your content, manage copyrights, and more.

The theme is very blog-friendly, with multiple blog pages, a sticky sidebar, social media integration, etc. Furthermore, the carousel slider, sticky menus, search options, and header layouts allow you to deliver a great user experience for your readers. Above all, its lightweight framework can help your website visitors with a fast page loading speed.

Get Gist

Wrapping It Up!

WordPress is the best blogging platform for building your blog website.

It offers a number of WordPress blog themes that are specifically created to make your blogs stand out, allowing you to engage your readers in the experience of sharing your blogs.

We hope that our list of the top free WordPress themes for blogs above was helpful to you and that you’ve made your decision.

Still not sure which is the best free WordPress blogging theme?

In that case, our recommendation would be Astra – a lightweight & multipurpose WordPress theme with 240+ starter sites and powerful theme customizer options. You also have other options like GeneratePress and Blocksy.

However, you may select the one that appears to be a suitable fit for your blogging website. All of the themes mentioned above are free yet packed with outstanding features.

Plus, it also offers a pro version to take your WordPress blog to the next level.

For more, check out these other WordPress theme roundups:

• 19 Free WooCommerce Themes
• 10 Best Elementor Themes and Templates
• 10 Best Travel Blog WordPress Themes
• 17 Best Minimalist WordPress Themes

Lastly, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay updated on the latest WordPress and blogging-related articles.