Cool free and premium Wordpress themes
WordPress users have thousands of themes to choose from. We hunt out the best of the best free and premium themes so you don’t have to. You can thank us later.
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Best one-column Wordpress themes
Simplr: It doesn’t get much simpler than this. The front page of this Wordpress template displays just a single post.
Flirtatia: Sassy and simple. White-and-grey with blog navigation and archives at the bottom of the template’s main column.
Day Dream: Blue and white, with a page navigation bar above the fold and weblog categories and archives at the bottom.
Vostok: Less is more. Vostok is a clean and elegant one-column Wordpress template which keeps the focus on your words, images and videos rather than on any design elements. It uses light text on a dark background to great effect.
PocketT: PocketT is a crisp, clear one-column theme with clear navigation across the top and an ‘about’ box built in above the main content of the blog.
DePo Skinny: A super-simple but powerful Wordpress theme with one 500-pixel-wide column. It accommodates categories and tags easily, and features a row of Flickr images across the top.
Fontella: Large fonts and a simple design that highlights a single weblog post at the top, and then recent posts and categories in a three-column footer. Perfect for blogs with good content but low turnover.
Tiny Studio: Tiny Studio is a stylish, narrow, one-column Wordpress theme with an illustrated header, neat navigation bar and simple overall presentation.
Stilbruch: Dark, creative and individual, with a distinctive splash of colour, Stilbruch is an eye-catching one-column Wordpress theme.
Rio: A sexy and modern yet remarkably simple Wordpress theme with a large header image, a simple text navigation bar and one column. Easy to customise.
Summernight: Summernight has attitude. It’s a dark, youthful, one-column theme that screams for attention.
Tao of You: An attractive, minimalist, single-column theme with large headlines and a big, fat two-column footer.
Best two-column Wordpress themes
BlueSensation: A professional-looking blog template well suited to those looking to monetize their site, with numerous ad spaces built in. Oh, and it’s blue.
Simplifi: A minimalist, clean two-column WordPress theme with a number of colour schemes and the sidebar on the left of the main content column.
WordPress Fun: A grungy, two-column weblog theme, WordPress Fun is stylish and modern, and includes a neat featured posts list in the left-hand sidebar.
Copyblogger: Ultra-clean code with detailed comments makes this an easy Wordpress template to work with. Custom stylesheets, killer comments and search engine-friendly code make this one of the best.
Salmon: A beautiful colour palette, rounded corners, and an eye for the details makes this weblog theme stand out from the pack.
Minyx 2.0 Lite: Contemporary green, blue and orange template with stylish horizontal page navigation and wide sidebar.
K2: K2 is more than a theme. It’s an advanced Wordpress template that allows for a whole range of hacking. Out of the box, it’s simple and stylish.
Skittlish: Let your users choose between fixed and fluid width, and seven bright colours for the sidebar.
Tranquility White: Very plain and easily customisable white-and-green theme with an impressive Flash animation in the header.
Geezeo: The eye is drawn straight to the content thanks to this clean grey, blue and black design with neat support for asides in the main column.
Elite: Very readable layout with sidebar on the left and white text on grey background. Clean and sleek Wordpress template. No images.
Cutline: Easily customisable, black and white theme with large header image and navigation bar. Theme author has provided a lot of online tips for tinkering with the theme.
Upstart Blogger Minim: Minimalist, fast-loading, ad-friendly blue-and-white Wordpress theme. Just add your own header image.
Natural Essence: Natural earthy colours, large header image and big footer make this a simple, effective theme.
281: One of the cleanest, fastest-loading themes you’ll find. A great base to work off.
Cold Blue: Beautiful typography and nice blue colour tones make this Web 2.0 style theme stand out from the crowd.
Simplicity: The content comes first in this clear, simple Wordpress theme. Choose from light-on-dark or dark-on-light colour combinations.
Dropshadow: Modern, elegant, professional-looking blog template.
Margot: Clean, text-based, fixed-width Wordpress theme with Widgets and rounded corners. Highly readable text.
IAMWW W2 DnD: A confusing name but a clean, grid layout with blue and grey on white design.
Blueprint-WP: Blueprint-WP is a simple, clean two-column Wordpress theme with a white content area and a grey sidebar. It’s a very traditional blog look but has considerable flexibility.
Prisa2: Are you looking for a stylish two-column Wordpress theme with plenty of white space and a Web 2.0 feel? Then Prisa2 might just be the answer to your prayers.
Cubismo: Cubismo is a clean and simple, widget-ready, two-column Wordpress theme. The layout includes a horizontal menu, highlighted page navigation and also a page menu in the footer.
Lemon Twist: The colours are actually more lime than lemon, but regardless, Lemon Twist is an impressive two-column template boasting tabbed navigation, a clear layout and stylish typography.
Elixir: A well-designed dark, two-column Wordpress theme with a splash of bright colour (and I do mean bright) in the header area. Choose from five colour variations.
Plane Jane: Plane Jane is a simple but sharp two-column theme with light text on a dark background, drawing a little inspiration from well-known Mac website Daring Fireball.
GimpStyle: There’s nothing flashy or fancy about the GimpStyle theme for Wordpress - but that’s what makes it great. It’s a minimal, stylish white and grey two-column theme that will allow the stories and images you post to shine.
The Azure Hut: A clean two-column design, featuring a distinct split between the content (with a white background on the right) and navigation (set against azure blue on the left).
45 Degrees: A classic two-column Wordpress theme with a traditional weblog layout that could serve almost any purpose you want to put it to.
Modicus Remix: Modicus Remix is a stylish, minimalist, two-column Wordpress theme that uses classic colours, smart navigation and a weblog-style layout.
Olegario: A mix of serif and sans serif fonts, large headlines, lots of white space and a distinctive left sidebar are the hallmarks of this stylish two-column Wordpress theme.
Abstractia: Attention to small detail and beautiful typography set this template apart from the hordes of two-column Wordpress themes.
MNML: A dark two-column theme with a hint of the tumblelog about it. The theme has some neat features, including asides and a quick-post box that appears at the top of the home page if you’re logged in to the site.
Paper Trail: Paper Trail is a stylish two-column Wordpress theme with fancy Flash headlines for posts and the weblog title.
Balance: Balance White and Balance Black are contemporary, two-column Wordpress themes offering a choice of dark or light background colours.
Springloaded: A professionally designed and coded two-column Wordpress theme with beautifully styling and great attention to detail.
Textback: Amy and Pink are bringing ‘text back’ with this distinctive, minimalist two-column theme in white and grey.
WPCandy: Sweet, stylish, two-column Wordpress theme with a hint of the Web 2.0 about it, created by the site of the same name.
Colourise: A gorgeous, two-column Wordpress theme with an ultra large header image, a dark backdrop and a fat footer.
Author’s Grid: Clean and minimalist are two words that come to mind when viewing the Author’s Grid Wordpress theme. Stylish and professional are two more.
Brodie: A black-and-white, two-column Wordpress theme with a pseudo-newspaper feel and excellent typography.
Danvers: A simple but stylish header and immaculately styled typography distinguish Danvers from the standard crop of two-column Wordpress themes.
Press Box: A simple but striking theme that’s half blog, half magazine-style site. It’s a modern theme with a lot of options, and comes in both free and paid versions.
Crystal 1.0: A very usable, dark, two-column Wordpress theme built off the back of the popular Hemingway style.
Corporate Sandbox: A clean, minimalist theme, ideal for corporate blogs.
Oh My Grid: A grid-based, two-column Wordpress theme with a large header and a simple but contemporary and stylish layout.
WP Bats: WP Bats is a two-column theme largely inspired by the design of the New York Times’ blogs.
Gotham Nights: Boasts a multi-coloured header/background image, lovely typography, oodles of white space and a tabbed box in the sidebar.
Dark Hut: An elegant, stylish and easy to read theme, with the focus immediately placed on the content of the site.
KISS Styled: Since this theme’s name is short for ‘keep it simple, stupid’, as you might imagine it’s very, very clean and very, very simple.
Winter Styled: A back-to-basics theme with a neat top navigation featuring links built into an introductory paragraph.
Keesheep: Orange. Contemporary. Easy to read. Those are the key factors that make Keesheep worthy of a place on bestwpthemes.com.
Andrea: Blue, modern and funky, this is a Wordpress theme that stands out from the pack due to its great colour choices and lovely typography.
Charade: Charade is a professional-looking, Web 2.0 style weblog theme with a blue-and-white colour scheme, clear typography and a wide right-hand sidebar.
30April: A flexible weblog theme for WordPress that showcases some static about text front and centre, with a useful widgetized right sidebar and beautiful typography in the weblog below.
Thematic: A powerful open-source theme designed as a starting point for simple customisation, which also happens to look pretty darn good out of the box.
Natural Power: Rounded corners mightn’t be as trendy as they were a year or two ago but as implemented in the Natural Power WordPress theme with a dark background and crisp, clear design, they still look fresh and impressive.
Lightning: A simple but extremely stylish two-column WordPress theme which could easily be customised to create a unique and powerful blog site.
Una: A professional-looking, two-column, blog-style WordPress theme with a clean and organised layout and a brown colour scheme.
HelloBlogger : HelloBlogger isn’t flashy; it’s a simple, clean, two-column WordPress theme with a splash of colour.
Best three-column Wordpress themes
Fervens: Curvy, fresh and flexible, Fervens is a high-quality three-column weblog theme with a choice between three layouts.
Whitespace: One of professional theme creator Brian Gardner’s free themes, Whitespace is a minimalistic, white theme. Very clean, although the columns could probably use slightly wider margins.
Depo Clean: A minimalist, flexible, ad-ready Wordpress theme with Flickr integration. Some hand-coding required to personalise the footer, but this actually makes it more flexible.
Illacrimo: Two Widget-ready sidebars and a highly legible layout make this blue coloured theme a winner.
Grid Focus: Black-and-white theme with useful navigation bars and a modern grid layout.
Silhouette: A clean, contemporary, grey-and-white theme with a nice page navigation bar. Also available as a two-column theme.
Blue Zinfandel: Print-inspired two or three-column theme useful for online newspapers and magazines - or just a professional blog.
Rihanna: Rihanna is a three-column Wordpress theme with the central column devoted to the main content. Think white. Think Web 2.0. Think lightweight.
Agneka Simple: An extremely simple but at the same time elegant three-column Wordpress theme. Nice attention to small details such as stripped-back sidebars inside posts.
Neoclassical: A simple and elegant template system that offers classical styling, rich typography and huge random header images.
WP Premium: Despite the name, WP Premium is a free theme. But it does offer some impressive ‘premium’ features, including the option to choose between two or three columns.
Futurosity Eos: A sophisticated Wordpress theme with a minimal three-column design and the flexibility to create a magazine-style site.
Sans-serif Racer: A minimalist three-column, fluid-layout WordPress theme which uses one theme color, default sans-serif typeface and no images. Smart styling.
Hunsecker: The appeal of this theme is all about light text on a dark background, lovely typography, a nice sense of space and a unique three-column layout.
Revolution Blog: A stylish, free theme with the option to choose between three different traditional blog-style layouts.
MassivePress: A three-column, widget-enabled WordPress theme featuring thumbnails for each post, giving the site a mixed look - half magazine site, half weblog.
WP-Polaroid: A modern, funky design perfect for a personal website, with pink and blue versions.
Firebug: Dark yet colourful, the Firebug WordPress theme has two widget-ready sidebars, space allocated for ads and social tagging options built into the posts.
quickpress: A clean, simple, ad-ready three-column WordPress theme, which should be easy to customise into your own look and feel.
Best magazine-style Wordpress themes
The Morning After: The Morning After is a brilliant free Wordpress theme designed for magazine-style websites. It’s one of the best, if not the single best, free magazine templates available.
Overstand: A fabulous magazine-style layout, Overstand is free from clutter and highlights content beautifully using a combination of white space, large slugs, neat headlines and thumbnail images.
Futurosity Aperio: An exceptional and unique web magazine-style Wordpress theme displaying an image for each post, and laying the text over the top of the image.
Branford Magazine: A widget-ready, three-column magazine theme with a professional, newspapery look and feel.
The Unstandard: As the name suggests, this is not your standard Wordpress theme. The Unstandard breaks the blog mould, presenting an image-heavy homepage with headline text set over the top of each image.
Massive News: A highly appealing magazine-style Wordpress theme with considerable additional functionality built in, including an automated rotator for featured content.
Thunderbolt: A savvy, grid-aligned, magazine-style Wordpress theme with plenty of white space, impressive typography and sensible use of images.
Wynton Magazine: An image-heavy, magazine-style Wordpress theme with a simple but effective layout.
Magadine: A three-column magazine-style theme with vibrant colours, excellent for highlighting a large number of featured posts containing images.
Brightness: The Brightness WordPress theme is nothing short of stunning; it’s half magazine, half blog and is reminiscent of some of the best professional, modern blog designs around.
Hamasaki: A beautiful magazine-style WordPress theme that perfectly showcases recent articles, provides ad space and simple navigation.
Best photo gallery Wordpress themes
Polaroid: As the name suggests, this is a Polaroid-inspired WordPress photoblog theme; it’s clean and beautiful.
Spotless: A white, clean, simple WordPress photoblog theme. Your photos occupy the centre of the page, surrounded by some minimal navigation.
Nishita: A simple yet beautiful photo blogging theme for Wordpress, with a white and grey colour scheme.
Professor: Professor isn’t designed specifically as a photo blog but this brown-tinged, two-column Wordpress theme displays images with such effect that that’s probably what it’s best used for.
Monotone: A unique photo blogging theme where the background colours of the theme automatically change to complement those in your images.
ShutterThemes: If you’re a photographer wanting to showcase your works in a stylish and professional manner with plenty of options and a minimum of fuss, the five photo gallery themes from ShutterThemes could be just what you’re after. ($US29.95 each)
Best specialised Wordpress themes
WP CODA: A unique WordPress theme with a fluid slider providing navigation between key website pages, which could be useful for small business websites.
Tumblelog for Wordpress: Tumblelog for Wordpress, as the name suggests, turns your Wordpress installation into a tumblelog engine, creating a custom page in your admin section for posting photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts and video, and automatically formating each type of post.
Sharpfolio: It’s designed to show off a professional portfolio, but photobloggers should also check out this Wordpress theme.
LaunchPad: A domain parking Wordpress theme that creates a homepage saying “Welcome to ‘X’ site” and asking visitors to sign up for RSS or email alerts so they know when the site launches.
Braintied: A one-column theme with no sidebar, no widgets, no archives and no categories. And yet it’s a beautiful theme that could easily fill a number of specific uses.
WP Contact Manager: This theme turns your Wordpress installation into a contact manager, so you can add contacts through the regular admin interface, tag contacts, search them and more.
Massive News Mobile Edition: This lightweight theme is optimised to make your Wordpress-powered website new best friends with the iPhone and iPod Touch.
WP Touch: Do you want your Wordpress site to appear sexy and be easy to read on the iPhone and iPod Touch without affecting how it looks in a normal browser? Then this is the theme for you.
Videographer: A free Wordpress theme designed to create a YouTube-like site showcasing a range of video content.
Prologue: Prologue allows a group of people to use Wordpress to create a Twitter-like stream of what they’re currently doing.
Notepad: A minimalist, clear WordPress theme designed to host a small business or brochure-ware type website; it comes in 13 colour combinations.
Portfolio: A sleek and sexy but somewhat flawed WordPress theme making it easy for photographers or designers to create a site showcasing their latest work.
Linquist: An elegant and minimalist theme purely oriented towards the creation of portfolio websites showcasing photos, artworks or visual designs.
JobPress: A unique WordPress theme that allows you to easily run a paid job classifieds board on your website.
CSSEY: Anyone looking to create a screenshot gallery, CSS gallery or any other gallery-type site should check out the CSSEY WordPress theme.
Best Premium (Paid) Wordpress Themes
On Demand: Creates a stunning multimedia website, with huge image previews and a beautiful video showcase – giving your site a real wow factor.
Papercut: A stunning grungy news theme with alternating stylesheets, built-in widgets, and layout control via a neat theme options page.
Quommunications News: With a professional-looking layout and attention to the small details, this has to be one of the best premium magazine-style Wordpress themes around, if not the best at this point in time. ($US75)
Mimbo Pro: An extremely professional magazine-style layout. The creators’ attention to detail is clear: the theme offers a lot of extras you won’t find in many premium themes, let alone in free Wordpress themes. ($US89.95)
Revolution Theme series: With eight beautifully designed Wordpress themes, the Revolution series offers something for just about every type of site: news sites, magazines, tech sites, sports sites, small businesses and more. ($US79.95)
Thesis: Chris Pearson has designed some of the slickest, most attractive free Wordpress themes doing the rounds. He’s now turned ‘pro’, introducing his first premium Wordpress theme Thesis. It’s a study in minimalism, white space, search engine optimsation and beautiful typography. ($US67)
Fresh News: This is a theme with visual punch, not to mention a lot of panache. It makes great use of images attached to posts and with 8 colour combinations, it could be used for virtually any type of blog or magazine-type website. The list of features is enormous, making this a theme truly worthy of the premium tag. ($US70)
The Block Magazine: The Block Magazine theme boasts a simple but attractive magazine-style homepage layout in blue and white tones. ($US99)
Live Wire series: This news/magazine style theme comes in three style combinations, each offering four colour options. That makes 12 choices – all of them stylish and professional. ($US70)
VideoFlick: Videobloggers take note. VideoFlick is a beautiful and effective premium theme specifically designed for video blogs or websites focused on posting video content. ($US25)
Video Elements: Video Elements is a premium Wordpress theme that should catch the eyes of video bloggers everywhere. ($US25)
Quommunications Video: An extremely professional, dark, ultra-modern theme perfect for videobloggers. Videos are featured front and centre, with details about the particular video that’s being played appearing below. ($US95)
TV.Elements: An excellent, dark, video-centric theme that makes posting videos a breeze and displays them front and centre in an attractive, modern layout. ($US50)
Premium News Gazette Edition: A slick, image-heavy magazine-style design with a large, rotating featured content box displayed front and centre, and support for ads and video. ($US70)
Newspress: A stylish and modern premium magazine-style Wordpress theme which includes beautifully displayed feature content sections, a built-in video player and integrated ads. ($US70)
Magazine News: An awesome, Web 2.0-inspired magazine-styled theme highlighting lots of content and providing built-in ad spaces. ($US49)
Content Press: A stylish magazine-style design offering treats such as customised author pages,featured articles, customized category and search results, and even a bbpress forum theme. ($US75)
Monochrome Pro: A feature complete magazine-style theme for Wordpress packaged with an AJAX post slideshow and a custom theme admin page to easily customise the design. ($US75)
TrueBlogger: TrueBlogger won’t appeal to everybody but for those attempting to become probloggers and earn an income from advertising, this might be an appealing commercial theme. ($US79.99)
Market: Allows you to easily run your own Wordpress-powered marketplace (i.e. online store). It’s easy to set up and run, and comes with numerous configuration options. ($US55)
Ecommerce: This theme uses Wordpress to set up and manage an online store, and comes with a choice of six colour styles. ($US49)
Elegant Blubs: A stylish, flexible, two-column blog theme with beautiful typography and easy ad integration, a good choice for professional or group blogs. ($US49)
Smoke Signal: A stylish, modern, two-column blog theme for WordPress reminiscent of some of the more popular graphic design blogs around today. ($US49)
Ashes: A lightweight magazine-style WordPress theme with an extra-large, tabbed main story box, dedicated ad space and a weblog style highlighting images for each post. ($US49)
Viz | Biz Portfolio: A beautiful WordPress theme designed to showcase the work of photographers or visual designers; also useful for photo bloggers. ($US79.95)
Sketch’d: A grungy weblog theme with a neat featured post highlight, excellent typography and great attention to detail. ($US49)
ProudFolio: Gives designers, developers, artists and photographers a framework for a great-looking portfolio site and a feature-rich blog. ($US70)
VibrantCMS: Offering a choice of 20 colour schemes, VibrantCMS is an elegant WordPress solution for small business owners wanting to build a modern, attractive website. ($US70)
WP Remix: An advanced WordPress theme suite offering a range of page designs and colour schemes; it’s very well designed and turns WordPress into more of a complete content management system than just a blog publishing tool.
No Good News: Uses a three-column design to create a gorgeous, modern magazine-style website that makes the content shine. ($US99)
Travailler: Designed to help create small business websites, Travailler is clean, minimal, business-like, and whip-smart. ($US38)
Best Wordpress resources
Wordpress Theme Generator: Simply choose the colours, column configuration and other settings you want and then download your own Wordpress theme ready to go.
WP Themer Kit: The WP Themer Kit simplifies the Wordpress theme creation process.
WP Layout Generator: Offers six basic layouts and provides a web interface to easily customise many different aspects of those themes, to create your own unique look.
