The Guide to the Best WordPress Themes (Updated 2024)

Are you about to create a website with WordPress and are you looking for which theme to associate with it? This can be a difficult choice given the multitude of themes available on the famous CMS.

You may not know where to look and, above all, where to find themes that are free. To help you in this quest, we offer you in this article a summary of the best WordPress themes for 2024.

In this way, you will discover the best free designs compatible with WordPress, as well as their characteristics to be sure that they best suit your project.

What are the best free themes for WordPress?

If you are just starting out in website creation, or simply your budget is a little tight, there is no point in using a paid theme for your WordPress site. Indeed, a host of free and high-quality templates are at your disposal. You just have to find them.

To save you precious hours of research, we have created for you a top 10 of the best free themes for WordPress in 2024:

• Astra
• Neve
• OceanWP
• Hestia
• Airi
• Sydney
• GeneratePress
• StoreFront
• Shapely
• ColorMag

In the remainder of this article, we will present each of these themes to you, so that you can get a clear idea of ​​them.

1) Astra

Whether you want to create a blog, a showcase site or an online store, the first theme in our comparison will delight you. Astra is probably the most successful among the free WordPress themes, and it's not just thanks to its adaptability to all types of websites.

Indeed, this theme also offers you a very advanced level of customization. You will be able to choose the colors, fonts, or even the display of the menus of your site. In the same way, you can integrate a host of tools into the Astra theme, such as:

• WooCommerce: the famous e-commerce plugin,to create an online store.
• Elementor: which allows you to create your site using the drag and drop technique, for greater ease.
• BeaverBuilder: which is also a page builder that works on the drag/drop principle.

After several tests on our side, we can say that Astra offers good performance. It is light and fast, while allowing you to integrate the tools of your choice. However, it is good to note that a paid version of this theme exists.

The free version is therefore not the most qualitative of the two. The latter still deserves your full attention, because of the characteristics that we have just listed.

2) Neve

Another theme that is very interesting among the free solutions for WordPress is Neve. Neve offers you multiple possibilities, and seems to be aimed in particular at beginners, whether for the creation of a personal, professional site, or an e-store.

This theme is very easy to use and customize. In addition, it is compatible with mobile media (thanks to the AMP format) and allows you to boost your SEO with dedicated parameters in order to climb in search engine results.

The design is sober and modern, and gives you access to numerous demos to learn how to use it in a fun way. Also, you will be able to integrate the main page builders available, such as Gutenberg, used by WordPress.

All settings are accessible from a single panel, making your task even easier. But make no mistake, while Neve is suitable for the most novice users, it is also suitable for experts, as its performance is not at all impacted by its ease of use.

As you will have understood, Neve is an excellent solution that can adapt to all types of projects and all WordPress users.

3) OceanWP

The free theme for WordPress that we are going to tell you about now is OceanWP. OceanWP is very successful since it now has more than 3 million downloads for all kinds of websites.

The main positive point of this theme lies in the multitude of features that it offers you in its free version, while many of them are usually reserved for premium versions. In the same way, with OceanWP, you will be able to use different tools such as:

• Elementor and BeaverBuilder which we talked about above, in the part dedicated to Astra.
• Divi, a powerful editor based on the principle of “WYSIWYG” for “What You See Is What You Get”, allowing you to have a direct overview of your pages.
• Visual Composer, a famous page builder for WordPress.

Your OceanWP theme will be very customizable with the aim of offering you a unique result perfectly adapted to your needs. In addition, OceanWP gives you very good performance and great adaptability, as with the WooCommerce plugin for example, if you want to do online business.

However, it is good to note that although the free version of OceanWP is very satisfactory and of good quality, there is also a paid version which offers you more possibilities.

4) Hestia

The free theme for WordPress Hestia is also very interesting. This is why we are talking about it in this article presenting the best options for 2024. Even if this theme is not particularly recent, it is still very successful: its overall rating of 4.5/5 is there to attest to this.

Hestia was initially designed to make creation easier for beginners, but more experienced users will also find what they are looking for due to the many advantages it offers.

First of all, Hestia displays a simplistic dashboard, but not incomplete. Managing your site is made easier and you don't get lost in multiple options.

Additionally, Hestia does not require a page builder. This is an advantage, but know that you can still pair it with Elementor if you wish. We can also mention the fact that the Hestia theme offers an elegant and harmonious design.

Its configuration is simple and the templates it offers can be adapted to a blog, a showcase site or even an online store. In addition, Hestia offers you two extensions:

• Orbit Fox, to access multiple functions of your site's home page.
• Pirate Forms, to create an attractive contact form.

5) Airi

For the rest of our selection of the best free themes suitable for WordPress, we will focus on Airi. This theme is quite recent and its design is clear, refined and the typographies are very clear. This will allow your readers to focus on the content without being distracted by the form.

You can add a banner image as a header, or add a history of your business for example, such as a section dedicated to testimonials from former customers or recommendations that you may have received over time.

If Airi seems to particularly target businesses, this theme also adapts very well to a particular use, in particular thanks to the Elementor interface (based on the drag and drop principle). Indeed, Airi comes with the Elemento tool to make it easier for you to create and especially personalize.

You can also add other plugins such as WooCommerce if you want to sell products through your site. In the same way, you will have the Live Customizer so you can act on the fonts, backgrounds, or even colors of your design.

In addition, this excellent theme turns out to be responsive and offers good performance (especially in terms of SEO). Aria is ready to be translated into multiple languages. You will understand that these options are not negligible, especially for a free theme.

6) Sydney

Whatever type of website you want to create, the free theme for WordPress Sydney will meet your needs. Indeed, like the other options that we have already presented to you in our ranking of the best 2024 themes, Sydney can integrate the plugins necessary for all types of site, from the blog to the online store.

The Sydney theme has many features, such as:

• It is responsive, which means that it adapts to all types of screen for always optimal display (on computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.).
• Dedicated Elementor blocks, to make it easier for you to create with the famous page builder.
• Theme customization using the WordPress Customizer tool.
• Managing fonts using Google Fonts. Everything is integrated into Sydney (you have access to more than 600 fonts).
• A Slider for the header of your website.
• This theme is translation ready, which is a big advantage for a 100% free theme. You will therefore be able to have it in French.

You can also note that Sydney has a paid version which allows you to go further. However, its free version seems more than sufficient for the majority of websites.

7) GeneratePress

To continue our overview of the best free themes for WordPress, we will now look at the GeneratePress theme. The latter is one of the highest rated themes among free WordPress themes and allows you to create any type of website.

GeneratePress has several advantages. It is very light, which allows it to be quick to charge. This is a good point regarding search engine optimization but also the user experience of your visitors.

In addition, this theme is very modular, which allows you to best adapt it to what you want to do. For example, you will have access to nine areas reserved for widgets, in order to add the tools/menus of your choice to your site.

Note in this regard that GeneratePress is compatible with the majority of WordPress extensions. However, we noticed that the free version of GeneratePress is perhaps a little less comprehensive than other previously featured themes such as Neve or Astra.

Indeed, to have access to already created templates or personalized assistance, you will have to opt for the paid version of GeneratePress. However, if the options in the free version are enough for you, don't hesitate. Even via this post, this theme remains one of the best.

8) StoreFront

With StoreFront, we are interested in a free theme for WordPress which is more oriented towards an online store. This theme may already be familiar to you, since it is the official theme used by the famous WooCommerce plugin.

You can therefore imagine that StoreFront is not only very aesthetically pleasing, but that it also has the functionalities necessary for the successful management of an online store. Indeed, StoreFront has all the basic functions in a modular and fairly easy to access environment.

You will not need shortcodes, page builders or sliders. As a result, your use will be as simple as possible and above all, you will be able to concentrate on the essential: your business.

Several Storefront templates will be made available to you to personalize your online store. Obviously, the design is responsive, which is a good point. However, we have one note to make about the free StoreFront theme: many of the tools you can add to it are paid.

Even if StoreFront's free solution is largely satisfactory, you may be frustrated by wanting to add a few widgets that will turn out to be paid for.

9) Shapely

We come to the free theme for WordPress Shapely. You will see that the latter well deserves its place in our top 10. Indeed, it is surely one of the most advanced free themes for WordPress. It is responsive and you can use it with WooCommerce.

Like all the themes in our comparison, Shapely is quite customizable since you can manage the colors, fonts and other aspects of the display of your website. The vast majority of WordPress plugins are compatible with this theme.

With Shapely, you can also benefit from numerous options for the home page of your website. We are thinking, for example, of adding different sections for testimonials, a portfolio, or even frames dedicated to products or services.

You will have understood, the free Shapely theme is one of the best for your WordPress site.

10) ColorMag

The last free WordPress theme that we want to introduce to you in this article is called ColorMag. The latter offers you very good performance, in particular a loading time of your website of less than a second, which makes it particularly interesting.

Also, another of the advantages of ColorMag lies in its compatibility with a large number of page builders. This includes:

• BeaverBuilder
• Gutenberg
• Elementor
• SiteOrigin
• Brizy

The design of the ColorMag theme is quite original and can be adapted to your desires thanks to around fifteen areas dedicated to widgets, or even a choice of no less than 15 different templates.

In addition, social icons are at your disposal and you can add them to your site as you see fit so that your visitors can share your content on social networks.

Finally, thanks to the integration of the WPML plugin, you will be able, in a very simple way, to translate your theme for multilingual versions.

Like many of the other themes in this comparison, ColorMag exists in a premium (and therefore paid) version to offer you more features, such as a greater number of templates or widgets, but also advanced customer support.

For your WordPress design, which hosting should you choose?

You now have all the information to choose a quality free WordPress theme that meets your needs. If you haven't done so yet, you need to find hosting to start creating your site with WordPress.

We can help you here too. To do this, we present to you the Hostinger web host, one of the highest quality on the market, and fully optimized for WordPress. The offers of thisspecialized host for WordPressinclude a free domain name, anti-DDoS protection, uptime close to 100% and even free SSL certificates.

There are three of these, which we will briefly explain to you.

• Premium,displayed at €2.99 per month, is the most popular subscription. Here you can manage up to 100 websites and your storage space is 100GB.
• Business isat the monthly price of €4.49and is aimed more at businesses, notably with 200 GB storage and unlimited bandwidth.
• Cloud Startup goes further,all for €9.99 per month. Here you can host up to 300 websites or take advantage of a WordPress staging tool.

© Hostinger

As we have stated, all of these subscriptions give you access to hosting optimized for the use of the famous WordPress CMS.

This means that the features of your hosting will allow you to get the most out of your site, but also to install the CMS in a simplified and automatic way, in just a few clicks.

Host your WordPress site with Hostinger

Conclusion: the best WordPress themes

Our ranking of the best free themes for WordPress is coming to an end, and we hope that it has helped or reassured you in your choice. Given the quantity of themes available, this selection will at least have enlightened you on the possibilities available to you.

Please note that to explore WordPress themes in more detail, you can find demos of them directly on their respective sites. You will thus be able to see the results you can obtain, or even test them.

All you have to do is choose the theme that will be your ally for the creation of your WordPress website and embark on the adventure.

Now that we have reviewed the best free themes for your WordPress site and you know the best of the hosting solutions available on the market, we want to answer some of the most frequently asked questions on this subject.

Are all WordPress themes free?

There is indeed a very large choice of free themes for WordPress. However, not all of them are. There are several nuances. We can differentiate three types:

• Completely free themes that offer you all their features without paying a cent. This is the case for some listed in our 2024.
• So-called “freemium” themes, that is to say they have a basic version which is free but also a more advanced version which is paid. Several of the themes in this top are part of this category.
• Premium themes, therefore paid, which cannot be accessed in exchange for an annual, monthly, or other payment.

What is the best free WordPress theme?

Unsurprisingly, the free theme we think is best for your WordPress site is number 1 in this ranking: Astra. Indeed, this theme is very qualitative. It is notably optimized for SEO, it offers good performance and opens up wide possibilities for personalization.

Is there a free WordPress theme that is customizable?

As you have seen in this article, all WordPress themes (free or not) are customizable. The question is to what extent. In fact, some offer to personalize more aspects of your site. At this level, the free themes in our top that allow you the most in-depth customization are Astra, OceanWP and Hestia.

Which WordPress theme is best suited to novices?

All the free themes for WordPress presented in this comparison are very accessible, even for the most novice people. If WordPress was a slightly difficult tool to learn in its early days, it is now suitable for everyone, even people who are just starting out, thanks to a large number of successive improvements. This is reflected in the themes it has, which can be used by anyone.