Are you trying to build your dream blog? And tired of looking for the right WordPress blog theme? Here is the handpicked list of 35+ best WordPress blog themes for bloggers in 2016.
The presentation is crucial to your blog’s success, as they can capture visitors’ attention and persuade them to act. With stories consist of long copy text, typography becomes the most important element in design for representing an eye friendly blog post. Lazy loading images, caching and script minification for faster load time, SEO friendly tags and HTML hierarchy are also recommended for a better WordPress blog. Mobile responsiveness became a part of must have feature for a blog especially since google has updated their page ranking algorithm with mobile responsiveness.
There are many attributes to check on when selecting a theme for your blog. A perfect WordPress theme with clean UI, good user experience, and necessary compatibility among thousands of WordPress themes. If the thought of having to scroll through the WordPress theme directory gives you a headache, worry not.
I’ve cut through the muck just for you. Here you’ll find a couple of blog themes which are featured last year and still being maintained plus a whole crop of new ones. Once you’re done browsing this list, I’m certain you’ll want to make at least 30 new blogs. Am I the only one who wants to redesign the personal blog every time I meet with a new theme I like? Whatever. On with the list!
YellowStone
Simply the best of the best. Install, activate and have a blog you have really wanted.
This blazing fast responsive WordPress blog theme is powered by the most sophisticated CSS framework twitter bootstrap. It’s a stylish, lightweight, clean and modern blog theme for creative bloggers. This is one of the best WordPress blog themes in 2016.
YelloStone is crafted especially for bloggers in mind. Impress your readers and visitors with aesthetic design, nice typographic rhythm, and clean design. It has stunning sliders, usable dynamic promo boxes, advertisement widgets, color options in customized and much more.
The theme will delight you when you start using. Very flexible and powerful theme with many useful options. The theme is very fast, responsive and very easy to customize. You can customize it easily with just a click of a mouse. It has numerous features, robust options.
With YellowStone, the focus is always Content First. So if you are planning to redesign your existing blog or start a new one, this is the ultimate solution for you.
Active Installs: 5,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Writr
For creating a minimal personal blog, Writer is a good choice. This minimalist content-oriented theme sports a style reminiscent of Tumblr and allows your content to stand front and center. It comes with six built-in color schemes including the default turquoise plus green, gray, blue, red, and purple.
It also has modern typographic style, multiple post types, a spot to display your Gravatar, and a left sidebar that keeps navigation close at hand but out of the way. Popularity brings it in the top chart of free & premium best WordPress blog themes in 2016.
Active Installs: 5,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Typefocus
Here’s an elegant theme that’s actually very simple and uses the magic of typographic to draw readers in and keep them on the site for a long time. It’s optimized for readability, which is kind of an important thing when establishing a blog.
Typefocus adapts to mobile phones, tablets and desktop screens in a snap to create an easy-on-the-eyes reading experience. Allows for keeping either a fixed left sidebar or a scrollable one, Can be customized with an array of color schemes available in the customizer
Active Installs: 700+
Live Demo Free Download
Clear Tranquil
Clear Tranquil is a Highwind Child Theme developed by Jameskoster that offers a clean reading space for visitors to your site. It’s so simple and offers bold headings and body text that’s easy to read for long periods of time. It keeps the optimum line length for long reads and includes a responsive design so readers can read from any device and screen size with no problems.
This theme also includes a fixed burger navigation menu that expands when clicked but can stay out of the way when reading. It’s distraction-free and perfect for bloggers who want to highlight their words and nothing more.
Active Installs: 200+
Live Demo Free Download
Ryu
Another good theme to choose from Automattic. Ryu is a clutter-free theme for the personal blog website. It has great readability with a bigger typographic style, and the one-column layout is perfect for displaying large images properly.
It has a burger toggle widgets area at the top panel, and you have the control to show/hide that. Also, you will find the social media links and a search field there. The most amazing feature is, the theme will automatically match the background color to the featured image for an image post.
Active Installs: 2,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Syntax
The syntax is a theme developed by Automattic that designed with flexible reading in mind for your visitors. It offers large headers and body text that’s easy to read for long periods of time. It’s ideal for long reads and includes a responsive design so readers can jump from device to device with no problems.
This theme also includes a fixed toggle navigation menu that expands when clicked but can stay out of the way when reading. It’s distraction-free and perfect for writers who want to highlight their words and nothing more.
Active Installs: 2,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Sapor
Another minimal theme from Automattic. Sapor is a two column blogging theme with a lot of possibilities. It offers custom background and header style and sticky posts. Perfect for photo and travel blogging. Sapor is fully responsive and works perfectly on all screen sizes. It is translation ready and also includes RTL supports so that you can create your posts in multiple languages. It includes a left sidebar with essential widgets.
Active Installs: 800+
Live Demo Free Download
Libretto
With retro flavor and classic style, this theme makes your blog look special. Carefully typographic details make the theme ideal for showcasing long form writing interspersed with beautiful images and inspiring quotes. This theme includes a variety of theme options with color customization controls. It also supports several post formats and sticky posts.
If you like the classic retro flavor, this could be the active theme in your WordPress blog.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Hexa
Hexa is a colorful blogging theme: lightweight, straightforward, and fun. It offers a stylish color scheme, and hexagonal geometric touches throughout to add interest and individuality to your blog. Headlines are large and in charge, the text is easy to read, and images are bold and enticing. It is the kind of theme that keeps your blog simple and make it stand out to your readers.
It includes multiple post format, sticky posts, featured images, digitized areas, social icons, custom menu support, plus support for a custom header and background.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Libre
Clean, minimal, perfect. A stylish, classic look for your personal blog or long-form writing blog. It supports several post format including a fancy pull quote and plenty of space for your content to shine. The use of ‘serif’ font face makes the italic texts even cooler.
The main navigation bar stays fixed to the top and out of the way while your visitors read, keeping your most important content at hand, while three footer widget areas give your secondary content a comfortable home.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Minnow
If you want to put your social presence front and center, this themes allows you to do that by displaying your social links menu prominently below the site title and logo. It has a sliding panel with burger menu button. Fancy read more links nicely used as separators between posts in homepage. Smart and clear typography with sans-serif family makes your blog look modern and elegant. If you are in love with minimalism, this is the theme for you.
Active Installs: 2,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Twenty Sixteen
The modernized pre-installed WordPress theme, which takes the nice typography, even more, white space, and minimalistic sidebar of the previous incarnation a step forward.
This theme includes everything we’ve come to expect from a blogging theme–a large horizontal masthead with a right sidebar that works perfectly for blogs and websites. It includes custom color options, pre-selected color schemes, and multiple post formats. Plus, it looks really nice, which is kind of the whole point, and most importantly I use it on my own blog 🙂
Active Installs: 1+ million
Live Demo Free Download
Omega
Omega comes with a semantic foundation for SEO best practices. Omega theme is designed to be simple, yet powerful, flexible to make a decent blog. It has microformats, supports sticky posts and flexible header.
If you are a developer you can create any site you want via omega child theme. The framework allows theme designers to build child themes quickly without having to code complex functionality for features.
Active Installs: 10,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Nouveau Riche
A simple WordPress blogging theme focused on typography and long blog posts. You can have a custom header, post formats (video,audio,gallery,aside and standard). It has a fixed burger menu for the side panel so that the main navigation always stays close to hand and the main content remains focused. Theme colors are easily customizable using the customizer.
Active Installs: 600+
Live Demo Free Download
Zoomify
The Minimalist of minimalism! This WordPress blog theme designed with as minimal element as possible for a blog. It has a burger menu for a slide down top navigation panel. Clean clean clean, that’s all I have to say for this theme. If you are a minimalist you will love it.
Active Installs: 900+
Live Demo Free Download
Hueman
A complete WordPress theme for blogs and magazine websites. It’s been designed to beautifully display pictures and text content, and engineered with a sophisticated user experience. It has 445+ five-star ratings that certainly explain how good this theme is. If you are planning to make a blog with two sidebars and many widgets this is the perfect theme for you.
Active Installs: 70,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Dazzling
If you have the plan to sell something along with your blog, Dazzling is a good choice. It shipped with pre-packed woo commerce support for selling digital or physical products. This clean. Modern, minimal and fully responsive flat designed WordPress theme is well suited for blogs, static and e-commerce websites. Powered by bootstrap 3, this theme has a rich option panel. Customizable with unlimited color options, slider, call for action buttons, several widget areas and much more that can be adjusted via Theme Options. This theme is also available in multiple languages including Mexican Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Persian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Turkish and Polish. It is probably the best free WordPress theme built for eStores and business websites.
Active Installs: 10,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Medium
This theme includes a full-screen navigation with the beauty of burger menu button at the top. clean, simple, translation ready and elegant Twitter bootstrap based responsive WordPress theme mainly designed for professional bloggers and writers. It also includes AJAX based search. Has theme options to manage logo, favicon, and footer text. Not a bad choice for the super minimal modern blog.
Active Installs: 200+
Live Demo Free Download
Grigsby
A gallery theme inspired by Pinterest. Simple and beautiful way to showcase photo collection. It fits with any screen size with the power of responsiveness and optimized for retina displays. Very easy to use. A good choice for photography blogs.
Active Installs: 8,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Readit
This theme is optimized for readability and has a clean modern design. It comes with a unique blog entry design that is perfect for visual readers and brings them right into the content. It includes a full-screen slide down menu with an animated burger toggle button. Also includes a right sidebar with multiple widgets. Good choice for a straightforward minimal blog.
Active Installs: 500+
Live Demo Free Download
Keepwriting
It is the theme for the blogger who needs a place to get the thoughts down on a page. This blog template that puts your content front and center without bogging you down with a ton of unnecessary features. It comes with stylish typography, a lightweight build, fast loading times, and a responsive layout. Simplicity is the most highlighted feature in this theme. Try it, you may like its simplicity.
Active Installs: 900+
Live Demo Free Download
Simppeli
I like this theme because its layout looks like a clean notebook just with the contents. The formatting is simple and all about the content. If you want to share your content with minimal distraction and in a classic way, this theme is a good choice.
The typography is easy on the eyes and you still have a fair amount of control over the appearance of your site with customization options for the background, header, and menu, plus sticky posts, microformats, and featured images. This theme is responsive, accessibility and translation ready.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Vanilla Milkshake
What catches my eyes in this theme is the shiny slim yellow divider under the header. Best for simple blogging websites. This theme put content first and if you’re managing a personal blog or a barebones online publication, themes like Vanilla Milkshake makes that task a whole lot easier. For a starter blogger, it provides a good end result without trying too hard.
This minimal theme can be modified to use custom colors and you can toggle between a responsive or fixed layout. It also has a right sidebar, support for RTL languages, and is both accessibility and translation ready. A very good WordPress theme in the list of best WordPress blog themes in 2016.
Active Installs: 500+
Live Demo Free Download
Vitro
A seriously classy theme with card style blog posts. It’s ideal for blogging and includes all the features you need to get your content out there like large featured images, sticky posts, and a stylish right sidebar that includes your widgets, a search bar, and attractive social icons.
This theme is responsive and you have control over how the header and menu appears. Vito is a two-column theme and is also translation ready. It also includes a right sidebar with social media links and other widgets.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Kihon
Kihon is another basic blogging theme that’s very simple in its design. It supports sticky posts, standard two column layout with a right sidebar. Flexible and customizable so you can make your own blog theme.
You can customize the header, including its size, add a custom logo, add custom colors and accent colors, change up the menus, and more. It also supports widgets and features a responsive layout, and supports featured images. Most of all, it’s free 🙂
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Quidus
The old fashion design style and simplicity make it stand out from the other themes on this list. This theme supports large featured images, easy color customization and allows you to customize numerous aspects. It includes integration with ‘Shortcodes Ultimate’ so you can have a premium looking site for free.
This responsive WordPress theme is built on the Bootstrap framework. It includes color pickers for selecting primary and accent colors all across your site, supports social icons, and includes lovely color accents on the navigation menu in the sidebar. This theme also has e-commerce support with woo commerce. Good choice for a heavy duty blogs website.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Aries
Another good option for building a blog with the beauty of modern burger pull down navigation. This theme is fully responsive and shipped with 7 built in skins so you can create the custom look you want. It also has the facility to create custom color schemes with fullscreen background images and accent colors.
It also can be used to create single column boxed layout sites and you can also use a sidebar that supports widgets. Also, have a customizable menu, multiple post format and more.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Chicago
The Chicago menu with an accent background makes it stands out from the crowd. The theme is perfect for bloggers, also can be used for multiple purposes. It has the flexibility to customize the layout, colors, and more. It is completely responsive so it looks good on any screen sizes. It also allows for custom backgrounds, headers and a custom menu, the freedom to choose between fixed or fluid layouts, and you can add featured sliders, social icons, promotion header. It supports the native theme customizer and ready for translation.
Active Installs: 3,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Amadeus
You can say it is a free version of “YellowStone”. And one of the most popular among the best WordPress blog themes in 2016. It is Responsive and built with content in mind. The design is clean, bold and focused typography and includes a parallax header image and has support for meta slider. It also includes support for Google Fonts, social icons, custom widgets, custom colors and menus, featured images and more.
Active Installs: 9,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Amalie Lite
Built on Twenty-Fifteen it has a brand new uniquely designed look that you’re sure to appreciate. It is certainly more clean than official Twenty-Fifteen. This theme offers plenty of features and maintains a unique look that will capture your reader’s attention.
It is a feature rich free blogging theme and several interesting aesthetic touches that are sure to increase visitor on-site time. Fully responsive and it supports multiple languages.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Exposition-Lite
I am surprised to see only around 100 people are using this theme right now, but this theme is worth a lot more than only 100+ active installation. It offers a great balance between large featured images and your content. It’s ideal for writers of long-form blog posts because of it’s clean and stylish typography. Bold images that really engage readers in your story. It comes with numerous Google Font options, custom colors and a top down navigation menu that aims to be distraction free.
Other features include custom backgrounds, threaded comments, featured images, plus this theme is translation ready.
Active Installs: 100+
Live Demo Free Download
Kouki
What I love most in this theme is the animated navigation trigger button. Kouki is meant for publishers who like to display their content in a delightful and minimal way. Ideal for food blogs, photographers, minimalists, tumblelogs and everyone else who like to have a clean blog. It is minimal and infinitely stylish by offering a beautiful blend of simple typography and images.
This theme shipped with many customization options including custom colors and custom menus. It supports multiple column layouts, is responsive and supports featured images and threaded comments.
Active Installs: 900+
Live Demo Free Download
Salt
Salt is build use as a parent theme. If you are a developer it is a good solution for you to make your own child theme. It includes a responsive layout and offers full-width, two-column, & three-column layouts. You can also toggle between fixed and fluid layouts. This theme includes a left or right sidebar, social icons, custom logo, top navigation, featured images, threaded comments, sticky posts, as well as full use of the theme options panel.
Active Installs: 1,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Hew
Created by Automattic, Hew this is an attractive alternative theme. I really liked the accent colored top bar with social icons. Simple navigation button makes the top slide down widgets and menu accessible but out of the way when readers are reading. Clean typography and post formats will make your blog stands out from others.
The theme offers a custom header and custom menu and supports a one-column layout that is completely distraction-free for reading. Other features include featured images, sticky posts, and threaded comments.
Active Installs: 800+
Live Demo Free Download
Patus
Patus is actually from multipurpose family, but it works fine as a personal theme. Can be used by any kind of publisher. This theme is lightweight and fast as well as perfectly responsive so will look good on any screen size.
It has robust customization options and allows for a featured image in the header, as well as the facility to choose from the full-width or two-column layout. You can choose between a left or right sidebar and make use of the supported Post Formats, sticky posts, and featured images. A good WordPress blog theme in this list of best WordPress blog themes in 2016.
Active Installs: 4,000+
Live Demo Free Download
Your Turn – Pick from the best WordPress blog themes in 2016
If you’ve been struggling to start a blog because you couldn’t find the right theme, now you have at least one. Choose from this hand-picked list of best WordPress blog themes in 2016. Now, go forth and build you own dream blog.
But first, I want to hear from you. What’s your favorite theme on the list? Is there another free out there I missed that’s a must-see? Share below.