10 Best and Free WordPress Themes in 2022

by Sharon
08.06.2022

Are you looking for the best premium-like free WordPress themes to give your website that polished and professional look? Luckily, there are tons of fantastic free WordPress themes that can save you money while still making your site look like you hired a professional web designer.

There are plenty of beautiful free themes that are just as good as paid-for premium themes. You don’t have to pay anything at all to get a powerful, good-looking theme for your site. In this article, we will share some truly mind-blowing premium-like free WordPress themes.

Whether you’re looking for the best WordPress themes for business, the best WordPress themes for blogs, or just a beautiful and affordable website for any purpose, these powerful themes have people raving and are worth a look:

 

1. Astra

Astra is a highly customizable WordPress theme that has many amazing features. It’s super lightweight, and the developers say that, with default WordPress data, a website using Astra should load in less than half a second. They’ve taken a number of steps to achieve this, including disabling jQuery and keeping resources under 50kb. One thing that distinguishes Astra from many other designs is its native support for popular WordPress page builders. It integrates beautifully with page builders such as WPBakery Page Builder (formerly Visual Composer), Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, Brizy, and Gutenberg. The support for page builders is a major selling point for Astra, as there are many WordPress themes that haven’t been designed with modern page builders in mind. This can result in situations where a stylish page created by a page builder doesn’t fit in well with the activated WordPress theme. When it comes to design, Astra has you covered. Anyone, regardless of their technical experience, can customize their website design through the WordPress theme customizer.

 

2. OceanWP

OceanWP theme is a popular way to get the most out of the website you are building. The free version alone has been installed on over 400,000 sites. OceanWP is a multipurpose theme with excellent loading times that has excellent support for third-party plugins and drag-and-drop page builders. OceanWP offers a lot of great functionality out of the box, and its features can also be enhanced using free and premium plugin extensions. More theme designs are also available if you upgrade to the OceanWP Core Extensions Bundle. The theme places most design and styling options in the WordPress theme customizer so you can see how modifications look in real-time. Beginners will appreciate how much this helps when making changes. WooCommerce integration is fantastic, with many WooCommerce tweaks built directly into the website — for example, the design has a shopping cart popup and shopping cart floating bar. There’s also a quick-view mode that lets a customer see a product without leaving the page. There are more than 20 plugin extensions available for OceanWP, and these can be used to add more styling options, additional widgets for page builders, new custom post types, and more.

 

3. Neve

Neve brands itself as “a lightweight theme built for speed in the new WordPress era”. And that’s a pretty good idea of what you get with Neve. It all starts with a lightweight focus – out of the box, Neve comes in at just 200 KB on a fresh WordPress installation. While it’s totally fine to build your site from scratch using Neve’s options, you can also skip that process and import demo sites with just a few clicks. Most of these sites are built with Elementor, though the original layout also comes in a Gutenberg block editor version if you’d prefer that approach. In addition to demo sites built with Elementor, Neve is just generally built to be compatible with all WordPress page builders. Neve comes with tons of different layout options in the WordPress Customizer. The free version of the theme is packed with features that allow you to easily create a modern-looking website. There are plenty of starter sites to choose from and the customization options are very thorough, even on the free version of the theme.

 

4. Hestia

Hestia is a popular WordPress theme developed by Theme Isle. It is a one-page theme with vast customization features, built with page builder compatibility in mind. Hestia is compatible with all major page builders in the market such as Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, etc. While it allows you to create a fully-featured front page with ease, it lacks a little bit in other departments, especially in terms of customization features. For example, it’s quite limited in the number of header and footer layouts. It also has an underwhelming number of site demos to play with. Its color options are a little bit lacking compared to the likes of Astra and GeneratePress. But the developers have already emphasized that it’s a one-page theme, so it only makes sense that most of its features are for creating a great front page or single-page website. You can easily customize everything in one place – the default WordPress customizer. Unlike other themes where there’s a separate admin page for the theme’s options, everything from typography to front page section options can be found and customized here. It comes with a built-in Font Awesome icon feature. You can easily customize the color of the icon via the section’s color picker.

 

5. Blocksy

Blocksy is a lightweight, feature-rich, and block-based WordPress theme with all the essential features that you need for your website. Whether you want to create a blog, start an eCommerce store, design a landing page, or create websites for business agencies and corporate firms, Blocksy can be the right solution. We all know Gutenberg is the future of WordPress and it’s going to stay here for a long time. As the name denotes Blocksy has a great focus on the WordPress Gutenberg editor. It is going to give you a solid block editor experience with a block-based design. If you are a Gutenberg fan, you will love Blocksy. And Blocksy comes with the native lazy-loading system for faster site loading. It is ranked at the top in most speed testing tools like Pingdom and Gtmetrix. With your website built with Blocksy, you don’t have to optimize much to get the expected site speed. When it comes to customizing your websites, Blocksy stays at the top. It offers intuitive options to customize every part of your website. Get full control over the layout settings, header, footer, sidebars, pagination, single pages, and lots more. You can take care of every part of your website with Blocksy and its advanced customizer.

 

6. Kadence

Kadence is a multipurpose WordPress theme that is available for free download and also offers a pro version that opens up more possibilities. The name of the theme shop is also Kadence, and the Kadence theme is their cornerstone product. While there are countless free themes out there, Kadence stands out as one of the best. Not only is it a lightweight theme that helps your site to load quickly, but it also offers far more design and customization features than you’ll find with most free themes. In fact, the customization capabilities are what truly make Kadence stand out. Since Kadence is available in both free and pro versions, you would probably expect the free version to be very limited, but that’s not the case at all. The free theme is quite capable and will meet the needs of many users. You’ll also have control over the elements that are shown in the footer and the design of those elements. Simply drag and drop the elements that you want to include and then you can use the design tab to control the way they look. When you install and activate Kadence, you’ll be asked if you’d like to also install a plugin with free starter templates. These templates make it faster and easier to get your site set up quickly, and just like the extensive customization options, they exceed what you would expect from a free theme or plugin.

 

7. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a multipurpose WordPress theme, which means that you can adapt it to any website niche. According to WordPress.org, GeneratePress is active on over 400,000 sites and has also managed to maintain an incredible 5-star rating on over 1300 reviews. The core GeneratePress theme is 100% free. And then there’s also a GeneratePress Premium version. GeneratePress Premium is technically a plugin that you install alongside the free theme. It extends the theme with even more functionality. GeneratePress is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to be able to customize and control exactly how their site looks. You can make GeneratePress do pretty much anything. And because GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the site that you build will have a great foundation to make it load fast. While GeneratePress has gotten a lot easier to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebone when you first install it. Across all of its features, GeneratePress always has a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, which is about as small as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress themes are still 200+ kB. And some poorly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB! GeneratePress also has no code dependencies, which helps you avoid the render-blocking error that Google Page speed Insights often mentions.

 

8. Storefront

The storefront was designed to be a minimal WordPress theme that you build upon using child themes. Due to this, the core version of the theme has a simple minimalistic design when you initially activate it. Through the WordPress theme customizer, you can easily change colors and see changes in real-time, however, you’ll need to make modifications yourself or purchase the Storefront Powerpack plugin if you want to put your own mark on the theme. Developers will love the barebones nature of Storefront and appreciate that actions and filters can be added to pages using Storefront Hooks. By using Storefront, you can be assured of seamless integration with the core version of WooCommerce and WooCommerce plugins extensions. This is something you are not always guaranteed with WordPress themes that state they are “WooCommerce-Friendly”. In the WordPress theme customizer, you’ll find a host of options spread across a dozen categories, however, you’re quite limited with what you can do with the core version of Storefront. Beyond managing widgets and menus, all you can do is change the sidebar position and change the color of backgrounds and fonts.

 

9. Zakra

Zakra is one of the best free WordPress themes that’s designed to make your website as beautiful and professional as possible. You can easily customize and modify the theme with the help of its customizer. It’s a lightweight theme that’s built with a lightweight framework. This means you get a website with super-fast performance. Also, it’s fully optimized for performance with proven results in Google, Pingdom, etc. Besides that, you get access to many free starter sites with Zakra. There are 65+ innovative demo sites that can be used for portfolio websites, business websites, WooCommerce stores, etc. You can also use them on niche-based sites such as Cafe, Spa, Education, Charity, Yoga, Wedding, Dentist, etc. Zakra WordPress multipurpose theme comes with a variety of features that makes it so powerful. Naturally, you get multiple layouts and color options for styling your business website. But that’s just one of the many awesome features you’ll find in Zakra. And Zakra demos are the ready-made starter sites that you can import to your website and customize later according to your preference. When you import demo content to your website, you don’t need to build your website from scratch which saves additional time and effort.

 

10. Shapely

Shapely is considered a powerful, clean, and beautiful full-width free WordPress theme. It’s made for the business, company, and corporate website with many amazing features. There are homepage widgets that you can add special features for your website like Portfolio, Testimonials, Service, Parallax Sections, and so on. It’s compatible with One-click demo import so that you can rapidly turn your website into a beautiful page like the demo. And by using Customizer and the Dashboard, editing Sharply is never a difficult task for all users with helpful documentation and enthusiastic support from the author. It comes with a homepage, a blog page, and a portfolio demo installed, and you can customize them quickly and easily. Its modern design makes it apt for almost any type of website, and since it is customizable, you can turn up the flashiness or simplify the design as you see fit. Shapely has a sharp and modern design that can match any type of site. If you’re looking for a bold theme that can also get the message across without looking too flashy or overwhelming, Shapely is perfect for you!

And there you have it! You now know your options for the best WordPress themes around.
 

Great, I Have a Theme. What’s Next?

Now that you have selected your free WordPress theme, you should consider choosing WordPress Care services to optimize and secure your website. Don’t forget to check out PrettyWP‘s Care plans!

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