WordPress

The 7 Best WordPress Themes for Blogs

November 13, 2018

Most lists of the best WordPress themes for blogs will give you too many options. What good is a list of 30 WordPress themes to help you make a decision?

Of course, you can scan through the 40,000 themes on ThemeForest. Or, we could help you with some curation!

This post will outline what we consider the 7 best WordPress themes for your WordPress blog and you can choose your own adventure. Basically, we’re all looking for something specific. What are you looking for?

The Top 7 WordPress Themes for Blogs

Depending on your category, here are the top six WordPress themes for blogs:

  1. Modernize
  2. CityLogic
  3. Public Opinion
  4. Hueman
  5. Striker
  6. Optimizer
  7. Newspaper

1. Modernize (for Minimalists)

Screen Shot 2018 11 12 at 7.57.52 PM

MInimalism is in. Especially for writers who just want to focus on writing, it’s nice to have a WordPress blog theme that doesn’t get in the way. It just acts as a necessary liaison to deliver your content to the masses (or the niches, I don’t know what you write about).

While simplistic design is the trend now and you won’t have trouble finding simplistic WordPress themes, Modernize is one of my favorites in the category.

The nice thing about Modernize is that it was made for bloggers, and it was made to be clean and elegant looking.

It’s not crazy customizable, but it’s easy enough to add some WordPress tools like social share icons and web forms if you need to.

2. CityLogic (for Customizers)

CityLogic is on the other side of the spectrum.

Where many blog themes are aiming for simplicity, this one is aiming for customizability. Its design is a lot “louder” than the previous theme, as well, though still quite modest and good looking.

They describe themselves as having “eye-catching design makes it a great choice for creating any website from travel to business to food, decor, lifestyle, weddings, sports and more.”

It also integrates smoothly with tools like WooCommerce, WPForms and Recent Posts Widget Extended, and it works well with SiteOrigin’s Page Builder plugin. Basically, you can make this theme into anything that suits your purposes, and you can do so with very little to zero technical knowledge.

3. Public Opinion (for Monetizers)

Public Opinion is a popular WordPress theme for blogs, magazines, publications, and any high traffic site that like to monetize their traffic.

It’s super customizable while at the same time providing you a good backbone for design, always maintaining that professional content publication site look and feel. You can hook it up with plenty of useful widgets and custom modules, or you can pretty much just get started publishing right out of the box with little up front work.

The coolest part though is that the theme has built in advertising space and the ability to set up membership sites. If you want to run a premium content site, this is a good theme for the job.

4. Hueman (for High Scale Publishers)

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Of course, Public Opinion is a great option for large scale content publishers as well. But it’s got a special design that seems most focused on magazines, and it has a very specific look and feel.

If you want another great option for large scale publishing, complete with great navigation and content architecture structuring, Hueman is excellent.

It’s quite popular, with 70,000+ active installation, though it gives you enough flexibility to customize the site to your own specifications. Yes, you can use this theme and look totally unique.

Overall, in terms of look, feel, and capabilities, it’s a theme that was definitely built for powerhouse blogs looking to grow and bring in the traffic. If that’s you, give it a spin.

5. Striker (for Free and Simple Sites)

Just want to get up and running quickly without much hassle? Don’t have a big budget for WordPress themes?

True, there are many free (or at least freemium) WordPress blog themes out there, and there are quite a few simplistically designed ones. But for the most frictionless starting experience, I’d check out Striker.

Striker is pretty barebones, but if you just want to start writing and building an audience, it’s going to get the job done. I look at it as a good starter theme. If you’ve got a project you want to noodle around with before investing time and dollars, this is a good one for the job.

6. Optimizer (Unique WordPress Blog Themes)

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I’ll be honest, this one is semi-misleading. The real answer is that you can make almost any WordPress theme look unique with enough customization (except for the most barebones minimalist themes probably).

The easy answer is that Optimizer is a really easy theme to customize, and you can undoubtedly design it to look unique, even if you’re not very technical.

Another benefit to this one: it’s free.

It’s one of my favorite themes for any purpose, but in particular for bloggers. It’s just got everything you need, plus an incredibly easy to use visual editor, so you can design things to make your site look unique with little to no coding ability.

7. Newspaper

If you’re looking for a theme that looks great out the box, Newspaper is the way to go. It’s also easy to use, and popular (though still quite customizable so you don’t have to look like every other blog out there). Lilach Bullock has this to say about the Newspaper theme:

“There are a lot of amazing themes out there, but when it comes to blogs, I’m partial to the Newspaper theme. It’s no surprise it’s one of the more popular themes out there; it’s super quick, it looks beautiful and there are so many beautiful templates to choose from, no matter what your topic of choice is.”

Conclusion

There a million WordPress themes out there, and to be honest, any of them will work for your blog. But most of them aren’t the ideal solution for your blog, especially because everyone has different purposes.

Of course, this list of WordPress blog themes isn’t complete or comprehensive; it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to help you make a choice. We’ve covered six key specialties, and I can’t imagine you’ll go wrong with choosing any of the above.

Do feel free to comment below if we’ve egregiously missed any great addition to the list, though.

I saved 1 hour uploading this post from Google Docs to WordPress using Wordable.

Jim Berg
Jim is the editor-in-chief at Wordable.
Jim Berg
Jim is the editor-in-chief at Wordable.