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
Satorii: A single-column WordPress theme with a minimalist, elegant and clean style.
Simplr: It doesn’t get much simpler than this – white, minimalist, flexible.
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.
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.
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
Inuit Types: This is a rare gem – a simply stunning theme that’s half blog, half magazine site.
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.
Sugar Cane: An eye-catching two-column WordPress theme with beautiful typography, great use of images and a distinctive style.
A Minor Incident: A stylish, minimalist theme featuring light text on a dark background and beautiful typography.
Titan: A refined and super clean two-column WordPress blog theme with impressive typography and a delicious ‘fat’ footer.
Typebased: A gorgeous free personal blog design theme, with a very clean and elegant style.
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.
Nouice: An elegant two-column WordPress theme with a simple design highlighting posts in a way that’s somewhat reminiscent of a Polaroid photograph.
Modern Clix: A beautiful blog theme built using a grid and featuring a generous use of whitespace and a strong focus on typography.
Simple White: Simple White is – surprise, surprise – a simple, white, very easy to read WordPress theme. Lovely in its minimalism.
Flow: A highly readable blog layout with minimalist stylings.
Elegant Grunge: This is just what the name suggests: an elegant two-column WordPress theme with some grungy overtones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Springloaded: A professionally designed and coded two-column Wordpress theme with beautiful 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.
Colourise: A gorgeous, two-column Wordpress theme with an ultra large header image, a dark backdrop and a fat footer.
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.
Gotham Nights: Boasts a multi-coloured header/background image, lovely typography, oodles of white space and a tabbed box in the sidebar.
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.
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.
HelloBlogger : HelloBlogger isn’t flashy; it’s a simple, clean, two-column WordPress theme with a splash of colour.
Best three-column Wordpress themes
MassivePress: A three-column, widget-enabled WordPress theme featuring thumbnails for each post, giving the site a mixed look - half magazine site, half weblog.
Carrington: A complex, multi-layered WordPress theme that looks good out of the box and offers a multitude of advanced customisations for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper.
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.
Oulipo: A clean, minimal, widget-ready WordPress theme with great typography and a grid-based layout.
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.
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.
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.
Gumball Special: A funky, colourful magazine-style theme that highlights recent posts using images alongside short blurbs.
Magazeen: A stunning, modern magazine-style theme with a contemporary look and feel – it wouldn’t look out of place as a premium theme but is free.
Upstart Blogger Swiss: A simple, elegant magazine-style theme with international typographic style and all the focus on the writing.
Yamidoo Magazine: A clever theme boasting a stylish ‘featured content’ section, lots of highlight images and a content-packed homepage.
Massive News: A highly appealing magazine-style Wordpress theme with considerable additional functionality built in.
Equilibrium: A gorgeous, minimalist magazine-style WordPress theme making excellent use of images to highlight recent posts on the front page.
Sirup: Features an elegant and functional magazine-style layout; with some tweaking it’d make a gorgeous website.
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.
Mimbo: A classy magazine-style WordPress theme with built-in ad space, thumbnail functionality and an easy to navigate design.
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.
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.
Web News: A neat and tidy three-column, magazine-style WordPress theme featuring thumbnails on the homepage.
The Stars: A sexy magazine-style WordPress theme ideal for fashion, lifestyle, entertainment, gossip or lifestyle websites.
Best photo gallery Wordpress themes
Zack 990: If you like the Boston Globe’s Big Picture photography blog, you’ll love the Zack 990 WordPress theme, which showcases images as wide as 990 pixels.
Snapshot: A full-featured WordPress theme that offers the chance to create a photo showcase, portfolio site or design gallery.
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.
Ocular Professor: A stunning photo gallery-style WordPress theme that offers a gorgeous showcase for any photoblogger.
Monotone: A unique photo blogging theme where the background colours of the theme automatically change to complement those in your images.
Revolution Album: Those looking for an eye-catching, photo blogging theme need look no further. ($US59.99)
Revolution Chrome: A modern, functional and beautiful WordPress theme designed for showcasing photos and videos at large sizes. ($US59.99)
White Canvas: A simple, stylish photo blogging theme for WordPress, providing a stark white frame for your images; it also comes in a black version. ($US59.99)
ShutterThemes: If you’re a photographer wanting to showcase your works in a stylish and professional manner with plenty of options and a minimum of fuss, the five photo gallery themes from ShutterThemes could be just what you’re after. ($US29.95 each)
Modularity: A highly customisable multimedia theme for Wordpress with a simple layout but powerful options. ($US75)
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.
Crafty Cart: A groovy and fun, retro-styled free WordPress theme designed as an easy way to create an online shop.
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.
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.
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
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. ($US87)
Lifestyle: A neat three-column magazine-style WordPress theme perfectly suited to websites covering lifestyle and beauty subjects. ($US59.99)
Metro: A stylish newspaper-themed design with a rotating featured content front and centre, and both recent articles and videos showcased on the homepage ($US59.99).
Church: It may be designed specifically with churches in mind but this magazine-style WordPress theme is stylish and funky enough to serve many other purposes. ($US59.99)
Abstract: A beautifully illustrated, colourful and flexible theme that resulted from a collaboration with well-known web designer Veerle Pieters. ($US70)
WPUnlimited: An advanced WordPress theme offering complete customisation of the site layout, fonts and colours without any need for coding. ($US59)
PureType: A clean and sophisticated CSS-based WordPress theme with a strong type-based layout. ($US19.95)
Clean Slate: A feature-packed WordPress theme that’s centred around a scrolling ‘featured posts’ section and features plenty of white space and stylish typography. ($US25)
Foreword Thinking: A flexible and colourful three-column homepage design, with a modern magazine-style layout. ($US70)
Groovy Video: A colourful, funky videoblogging theme with 17 colour schemes and a star rating system built in. ($US70)
Geometric: A contemporary theme with a well-structured homepage combining a blog and a design portfolio, and plenty of flexibility thanks to the wonders of widgets. ($US70)
Basic: A gorgeous theme with a traditional weblog layout on the homepage but featuring excellent attention to detail throughout the design. ($US19.95)
Urban Elements: An advanced WordPress blog theme making good use of images accompanying posts and offering a wide array of customisation options.
VideoFlick: Videobloggers take note: This is a beautiful and effective premium theme specifically designed for video blogs or websites focused solely on posting video content. ($US75)
TV Elements: An excellent, dark, video-centric theme specifically designed to cater for high-resolution video. ($US75)
Tubular: A dark, clear WordPress theme developed for videoblogging but also offering the ability to create a static website and blog.
On Demand: Creates a stunning multimedia website, with huge image previews and a beautiful video showcase – giving your site a real wow factor. ($US75)
TV: A great videoblogging solution for WordPress, offering up an easy way to highlight video posts from around the web. ($US59.99)
Video Elements: A premium Wordpress theme that should catch the eyes of video bloggers everywhere. ($US75)
Office: Designed with small businesses in mind, Revolution Office is a stylish, business-like WordPress theme that looks good out of the box. ($US59.99)
Elements: A dark, two-column WordPress theme with unique style that showcases images alongside the text of recent posts on the homepage. ($US59.99)
Charred: Dark and grungy but still highly usable, Charred is a two-column WordPress theme that highlights the latest posts using thumbnail images. ($US59.99)
Red Carpet: A modern, funky, magazine-style WordPress theme perfect for sites covering entertainment or celebrity gossip. ($US29)
Open Air: An ultra-modern three-column WordPress theme which gives great prominence to one featured story and includes thumbnail images for other recent stories. ($US70)
Gotham News: A clean and elegant magazine/news WordPress theme which has a strong structure and would be easy to personalise. ($US70)
Over Easy: For businesses that want a minimalist but elegant all-in-one website presence, the search for a WordPress theme is easy: Over Easy. ($US70)
Fresh News: This is a theme with visual punch, not to mention a lot of panache. It makes great use of images attached to posts and with 8 colour combinations, it could be used for virtually any type of blog or magazine-type website. The list of features is enormous, making this a theme truly worthy of the premium tag. ($US70)
Streamline: An excellent magazine-style WordPress theme with a rotating featured content box front and centre on the homepage. ($US59.95)
Papercut: A stunning grungy news theme with alternating stylesheets, built-in widgets, and layout control via a neat theme options page. ($US70)
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. ($US89.95)
Perfection: An instant classic with a lovely, clean layout, wonderful typography, and a crystal clear navigation. ($US79)
Sharp: Sharp is a very modern, eye-catching, clean and crisp two-column WordPress theme with four colour variations. ($US25)
Design Blog: A fun, creative, contemporary WordPress theme perfect for a personal blog or a magazine-style news site. ($US25)
Tribal: An original, funky WordPress blog theme with a built-in MySpace-style music player. ($US79.95)
YourFolio: A professional-looking WordPress theme designed to offer an online portfolio of work, as well as a personal blog. ($US25)
Our Community: A highly flexible WordPress theme that could easily serve to create magazine, community, or corporate websites. ($US30)
Folio: Designed as a platform for both a personal portfolio/showcase and an extremely stylish and contemporary blog. ($US25)
Renaissance: A beautifully designed three-column theme with a robust ad management system, asides and 14 widget areas. ($US55)
Credit Crunch: A three-column WordPress theme boasting a host of customisation options, as well as a modern, functional magazine-style design. ($US70)
San Francisco Tango: A stimulating three-column theme featuring an orange header, stylish navigation and integrated ad space. ($US17)
EversonNews: a fresh, clean and flexible news and magazine-style WordPress theme. ($US59)
High-Def: This theme is all about promoting multimedia, showcasing photos and in particular video in a stylish yet uncomplicated manner. ($US49)
Code Blue: A stylish, free design with a traditional blog-style layout; it’s also available in red or gray colour schemes. ($US59.99)
eVid: A high quality video blogging theme for WordPress, perfect for posting original video content or curating the best video content from around the web. ($US19.95)
Quommunications Video: An extremely professional, dark, ultra-modern theme perfect for videobloggers. Videos are featured front and centre, with details about the particular video that’s being played appearing below. ($US95)
Cafe Press: An attractive, customisable theme that provides an out-of-the-box website solution suitable for many different small businesses. ($US75)
Elite Video: A clever videoblogging theme with a video slider as the central element of the homepage. ($US50)
Perfection Grunge: Warm, engaging and funky, Perfection Grunge is a stylish three-column WordPress theme that also boasts good typography and simple navigation. ($US79)
Premium News Gazette Edition: A slick, image-heavy magazine-style design with a large, rotating featured content box displayed front and centre, and support for ads and video. ($US70)
Who’s Who: A stylish and elegant magazine-style theme for WordPress; it’s spread over three columns, uses a lot of thumbnails and features a blue and grey colour scheme.
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. ($US70)
Ocean: Ocean is a deep blue WordPress theme that mixes an underwater feel with an effective blog layout. ($US79)
Industry: Boasts distinctly modern stylings, including transparencies and rounded corners, as well as functional navigation and typography. ($US79)
Vintage: A stylish three-column WordPress theme with lovely typography and good options for ad integration. ($US79)
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.
