Good User Experience (UX) is crucial for the success of your website. No user ever said, “I have no idea what the website is about, and I love it.” So to begin with, a good WordPress theme should follow the best design practices, and it’s also well-structured with a modern look to it (unless your website is specifically made for people from the 1880s). And since we live in the age of smartphones, it should be responsive so that it adapts to any screen size. All of this ensures that your visitors don’t feel like they just parachuted into a dyslexic jungle.
The Best WordPress Free and Premium Themes
Discovering the best WordPress themes for your website is not easy anymore. There are a lot of options out there and picking the perfect fit for your WordPress websites is a real challenge. We are here to help you out!
Introduction
How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme?
Choosing the best WordPress theme isn’t rocket science. But users can still end up with a bad theme and waste time figuring out how things work. And to say the least, that’s not the way you dream of spending your time.
You have a million-dollar dream, and you’d rather work on that. We, on the other hand, are boring souls who get paid to make your life easier (but secretly enjoy doing it all) so we decided to do the dirty and laborious work for you. So go ahead and search for the best WordPress theme from our list because we’ve listed the best ones after some thorough research.
But since your curiosity is getting the better of you, we’ll tell you exactly how to select the best WordPress theme so as not to end up with an undesirable one that wastes your time.
Okay, so the right WordPress theme is more than just a pretty facade. It must offer a host of useful features that adds to your visitor’s user experience and also gives you complete control over the website’s look and feel. Which WordPress theme allows you to do that? The ones that nail the following features:
Your theme’s compatibility with the latest CMS releases and plugins is almost the same as your compatibility with your partner. If you’re both compatible, life is great. If not, life is miserable. Hence, while choosing the best WordPress theme for your website, you have to make sure it’s compatible with the latest WordPress version, most popular plugins, and page builders, etc. This ensures that your website doesn’t run into any problems and you have to end up changing the whole theme at the wrong time.
The best WordPress themes have functionalities that help them stand apart and fulfill your crucial or specific needs in a crowd full of random themes in all niches. Hence, popular themes with thousands of installations and popularity meter on the high usually have unique features and address a broad spectrum of use-cases. And, of course, they are highly customizable as well so that they can adapt to your vision.
Ease of use is one of the primary attributes of the best WordPress themes. A theme may offer several features, but if it takes you 20 Google searches to change a font or if it requires a Ph.D. degree to customize a page, it’s a bad theme. No one likes to keep going to square one. In contrast, a good theme is easy to use, comes with support from theme developers or the community, and doesn’t give you a headache.
It is important for a WordPress theme to be SEO-friendly, firstly, because it helps with the SEO and secondly it helps even a beginner user to optimize the website for SEO without tweaking its files. The best WordPress theme is developed while keeping all the SEO best practices in mind and is frequently updated to accommodate the latest policies.
While this may not be a must-have for each website owner, a good WordPress theme should be multilingual regardless. Even if you don’t have a global dream, some do, and the theme should be ready to adapt to that challenge when the need arises. Hence, the ability to add a new language to your website and the availability of fonts and typefaces is another feature that makes a good theme just worth it.
Whether you decide to go for a free theme or you feel like money doesn’t belong in your wallet and decide to purchase a premium theme, it helps to read user reviews to make a final decision. User reviews not just tell you how good or bad a theme is, but they can inform you about the nitty gritty’s that you may personally care about. Hence, make sure that whatever theme you go for has enough user reviews to land it in your good books.
Everything on the internet is run by code and goes without saying but your WordPress theme was written with code as well. That means that when you tinker here and there and accidentally mess up the code, the theme can break down. So unless you’re a developer, you’d need expert support when things go south, and any theme worth its salt provides support to their users and helps them troubleshoot any problems that they might run into.
Licensing allows you to use a theme’s services like support, updates, discounts, and other tools that the creators provide. These licensing options can fall under both freemium and premium options, so you need to keep an eye on what the theme offers, because most popular themes may offer a lot of goodies within their freemium options.
The more documentation a theme offers, the easier it is for users to get started. The density of documentation of any theme reflects on its quality. This is because while most users can get started fairly easily, a lot of the time they need guidance or some sort of reference in the latter stages of a theme’s life when things can get complicated. And that’s where good or great themes shine because the documentation behind them contains all the information you need to troubleshoot or get through some configuration. So to say, a good theme will never leave you stranded when you need critical information.
- Professionally designed demos
- 50+ theme options
- eCommerce ready
- Premium sliders included
- Intuitive Fusion Builder Live
- 23 free pro demos
- tagDiv Compose included
- tagDiv Cloud Library
- Landing page elements
- No coding required
- Hooks and filters
- Translation and RTL ready
- Page builder friendly
- Layout control options
- Mobile responsive
- 10+ free starter sites
- Lightweight and easy to customize
- Works with page builders
- Gutenberg Editor compatible
- SEO and translation ready
If you’re looking for a lightweight but extensible theme to build your website, OceanWP is a great choice. With over 3,456,915 downloads, this theme is a popular choice for many hobby-users and developers alike to create their dream websites.
- Wide range of extensions
- Theme options panel
- Supports RTL texts
- Integrated SEO options
- Customized meta boxes
X Theme encompasses many carefully selected tools, widgets, and plugins that work in unison to provide you a theme that lets you design a robust and versatile website. The theme comes preloaded with premium plugins like Woo Checkout Editor, White Label, and UberMenu Exclusive, etc.
- Custom page layouts
- Shortcodes for high-end functionality
- Layout and navigation options
- Drag-and-drop page builder
- SEO and translation-ready
TheGem is an exceptional and highly versatile multi-purpose WordPress theme that offers high performance, a modern design adapted for mobile devices, and retina (HD) display ready. TheGem has all the necessary elements needed to create a spectacular corporate website.
- 400+ ready to use templates
- 150 stunning demo pages
- 20+ portfolio and gallery layouts
- Unlimited styles and designs
- User-friendly admin panel
Divi is another popular theme (12,681 reviews on Trustpilot) that offers premium features, theme templates, and drag and drop building features for easy website building. There are tonnes of other features as well that make this a great WordPress theme.
- 40+ website elements
- 800+ pre-made designs
- Global elements and styles
- Custom CSS control
- Inline text editing
- 2 homepage layouts
- 2 header layouts
- Smooth and attractive slider
- Featured area section
- Social media integration
Fast, lightweight, and highly customizable. Around 1,253,898+ websites have been built upon Astra (claim taken from their website). Like other great themes, you can design your website even if you have zero knowledge about coding or anything.
- High layout customization
- Optimized for performance
- Powerful design options
- Site layouts and typography
- Vibrant colors and backgrounds
- Pre-made demo pages
- Live WordPress customizer
- Intuitive admin panel
- Built-in e-learning system
- Compatible with third-party plugins
- 60+ full website templates
- 150+ ready-made blocks
- Shape dividers and section
- Portfolio and photo gallery
- No coding required
- 90+ ready-made shops
- 10+ premium widgets
- Full support for Elementor
- Layout builder for product pages
- XStore header templates
- 20+ pre-built demos
- myCRED Integration
- bbPress integration
- Drag and drop course builder
- Mulitple payment methods
- Group Courses feature
- Zoom and BuddyPress integration
- Point Reward System
- Statistics and payouts
- Course ratings and wishlist