WordPress blog themes: the best templates

To create a WordPress blog, you’ll need a suitable WordPress theme. There are thousands of themes out there for WordPress bloggers (also called templates). Many are free, but depending on your re­quire­ments, you should also take the cost of your theme into account when cal­cu­lat­ing the costs of your WordPress project.

To help, we’ve put together an overview of suitable WordPress blog templates.

(Status: November 2021)

The free CMS WordPress lets you create, manage, and rank blog pages without much pro­gram­ming know-how. If you don’t want to con­tinu­ously update your page, you can learn more about WordPress Hosting from IONOS.

The overall look of a WordPress blog is ul­ti­mately based on the chosen theme, which can be cus­tom­ised – either through a paid, premium version or with a little know-how of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Our guide on the best WordPress themes will put you on the right path.

The WordPress community has made thousands of helpful materials available in the form of WordPress plugins. This will save you a bunch of work, for example by:

• Providing WordPress backups,
• in­teg­rat­ing your Instagram account,
• creating stunning WordPress image galleries or
• by designing simple WordPress contact forms.

Chat modules are also becoming ever more common on webpages and blogs. These, too, can be in­teg­rated with the help of WordPress chat plugins.

With small ex­cep­tions, you can access the full range of functions of themes for WordPress blogs with paid premium versions. Before choosing a theme, you should take a close look at the often plentiful demos available to make a qualified decision. Changing a theme involves a workload that should not be un­der­es­tim­ated.

The use of paid templates for WordPress blogs is almost always bound to special license con­di­tions. For example, to the spe­cific­a­tion, for how many websites a theme may be used or whether you can also sell your own products on the site. A close look at the license agreement before buying can save you sub­sequent (legal) trouble.

The name TheB­log­ger already tells you who the template is geared towards. All demos feature a very appealing design but still convey a sense of min­im­al­ism. A video on the provider’s page il­lus­trates the pos­sib­il­it­ies of the so-called live cus­tom­iser – an overall helpful resource. In the premium version, an online shop is supported with Woo­Com­merce, but ups the license cost by around £1,500.

Swedish designer Anders Norén has pro­grammed an ex­cep­tion­al portfolio of WordPress templates not only for blogs. The themes are all free of charge. If you like, you can show your ap­pre­ci­ation with a donation – and most of these themes are worth it!

The WordPress blog theme Davis is probably what comes to mind when you consider an extremely ‘clean’ and ‘light­weight’ theme. The func­tion­al­ity is based on only three PHP files! No frills, no over­loaded colours, no ty­po­graph­ic ex­tra­vag­ances – the ZIP file has a size of only 71 kilobytes. Ad­just­ments are possible via ‘Ad­di­tion­al CSS’ in the cus­tom­iser. As such, this theme is intended as a kind of basic template to expand on and customise, a blank canvas so to speak – open-source at its best!

The features that this WordPress blog template offers is really something to behold. It includes an appealing Masonry layout and im­press­ive hover effects for the images. The layout can be set with sidebar or as full-page width. Besides SEO support, free WordPress blog theme updates are also included. This can be used to create an appealing blog, es­pe­cially if you like to work with images a lot. All relevant social media channels can be in­teg­rated ef­fort­lessly.

From the same provider as Black and White comes the blog template Bloggr for WordPress. The name (almost) says it all. This WordPress blog theme is also free of charge and has a similar look to a colourful well-presented magazine. The full-width layout for posts ensures a reader-friendly display, and the blogger can ‘blow off steam’ with Google Fonts. Many available short­codes allow the insertion of layout columns (!), ac­cor­di­ons, buttons, sliders, and much more. An appealing and im­press­ive variety.

There’s a reason why the WordPress theme OceanWP is one of the most popular, even among bloggers. Basically, the theme is already a page builder but with an un­sur­mount­able variety of cus­tom­isa­tion options. Demo content for a page can be directly imported into the basic template. The in­di­vidu­al elements of the blog layout can be defined with various settings. For example, for the page header there are eight different modes. The theme impresses with fast loading times and Woo­Com­merce support. The provider also holds a large portfolio of free and paid ex­ten­sions, of which many bloggers use the free Ocean Extra plugin. The available lifetime licenses for various modules are more intended for digital agencies.

This paid WordPress theme is a good choice es­pe­cially for photo, video, and/or travel bloggers who value good design. Dealing with the theme in the WordPress backend is not quite as intuitive as with other themes, but you’ll get the hang of it, es­pe­cially with the good demo content and really fast support that usually helps within hours. The live cus­tom­iser supports fast and re­spons­ive results.

Min­im­al­ism and tidiness combine with very clean pro­gram­ming in this theme. For un­dis­turbed legib­il­ity, there are full-width pages and extensive design options and font variety. However, the colours can only be adjusted via the in­di­vidu­al CSS.

The WordPress blog template MH Magazine lite is very popular for a reason. It’s an almost perfect solution for bloggers who want to maintain an editorial standard. Subject areas like news, politics, sports, travel, or lifestyle can all be catered to. The layout offers space for ad­vert­isers – this can become a source of income not to be un­der­es­tim­ated as a blog grows. Then, it may also be worth upgrading to the premium version with many ad­di­tion­al features.

If you know exactly what the design of your blog should look like, then you customise your template yourself with so-called page builders. Page builders let you design web pages by po­s­i­tion­ing various pre­fab­ric­ated elements at the desired positions via drag & drop. The extensive pro­gram­ming work required by de­velopers for this kind of creative freedom comes at a price, though.

You should also keep in mind that creative freedom isn’t auto­mat­ic­ally as­so­ci­ated with a perfect result. Page builders are well suited if you already have a corporate design that you can ‘shimmy along’ for your blog. Examples of themes that offer this include Divi, Elementor, or Beaver Builder. Our guide on WordPress page builders gives you further insights into the technical and design pos­sib­il­it­ies of a cus­tom­ised WordPress blog.

Rules also apply to bloggers, es­pe­cially if legally required dis­clos­ures apply to you under the General Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion (GDPR):

• an Impressum or Imprint should be included,
• a Privacy Policy is a re­quire­ment,
• as well as a clear notice, when a user visits the blog, of how cookies are handled.

Generally speaking, WordPress blog themes already in­cor­por­ate these legal re­quire­ments into their page designs. The cookie notice issue can also be solved with a WordPress cookie plugin.

To build trust, it’s a good idea to have an About Me page – or an About Us page. This builds up sympathy and is an easy way to present your com­pet­en­cies. So: Let’s blog!