If you’re building a WordPress site, particularly for the first time, remember that less is more. Using a minimal WordPress theme can be a quick way to grow your business quickly.
Minimalism is a design style that emphasizes simplicity, balance, alignment, and contrast. In web design, this translates into lots of white space, large images, and little text. But also to only offer the features and content a user needs to accomplish a specific task, like signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase.
Let’s take a look at some of the best free minimalistic WordPress themes below.
Best Free Minimalistic WordPress Themes
- Blocksy
- Astra
- Qi Theme
- Phlox
- Bricksy
- Simple Responsive Blogily
- Superb eCommerce
- Superb Pixels
- Minimalistblogger
- Minimalist Blog
- The Optimizer
- Concept Lite
- Pure
- Squarex Lite
- Square
- Olsen Light
- Maker
- Anariel Lite
- Simple Business
- Kerinci Lite
- Minimalist
- MinimalistBlogger
- Eiasi
- Gridly
- Simple Persona
- NS Minimal
- Pro Blogg
- Spacious
- Shopper
- Djario
- Resi
- Morning Time Lite
- DW Minion
- The Minimal
- Freedom
- Limpia
- Chosen
- Sparkling
- Responsive Brix
- Luna
- Activello
- Intuitive
- Explore
- Kokoro Lite
- WallPress
- Suffice
- Patch Lite
- Courtyard
- Kent
- Education Minimal
- Store WP
- Divi
- Cortado
- Organizer
- Timeless Minimal
- Sten
- Negai
- Bibimbap
- Twenty Twenty-Three
- CTLG
- Rishi
1. Blocksy
Blocksy is a free WordPress theme that’s clean, customizable, and fast-loading. It comes with six starter sites, each of which offers a minimalist design for different business niches and purposes. There is an app, charity, travel, shop, and blog starter site, among others. Built for the Gutenberg editor and compatible with the most popular WordPress page builders, it is highly customizable.
2. Astra
Downloaded more than one million times from the official WordPress directory, Astra is one of the most popular minimalist WordPress themes.
With Astra's simple and user-friendly settings, you can create and customize an elegant website with only the most necessary features and design elements. Astra is also lightweight and fast, requiring less than 50KB of resources and loading under half a second.
3. Qi Theme
Qi Theme comes from the Qode Interactive workshop, known for its penchant for minimalism. It’s no surprise then that it packs many distinctly clean, breathable, and minimalist layouts.
The theme also comes with 150 demos, many of which (especially those designed for portfolios, art shops, and studios) are characterized by vast areas of empty space, sharp, thin interface lines, hidden menus, and sophisticated typography choices.
Qi Theme is fully responsive, lightweight, and fast, and includes 100+ exclusive, highly customizable Elementor widgets to extend the functionality of your website.
4. Phlox
Phlox is a top-rated minimalist theme in the WordPress directory. Its lightweight and modern design is ideal for almost any type of website, including agency, news, food, travel, photography, blog, and portfolio. What sets Phlox apart from other WordPress themes are its demo sites, which suit a range of business niches and can be installed in one click. It’s also fast-loading and has 30 exclusive widgets and elements for customizing your site.
5. Bricksy
Bricksy is a minimal WordPress theme that lets you design your site using the Full-Site Editing feature in the native WordPress editor (Gutenberg). This means that you can use blocks and block patterns to customize every part of your site, from the header all the way down to the footer. While you have all of the power you need to design your site from scratch, Bricksy also comes with four importable starter sites, all of which have a nice minimalist look.
6. Simple Responsive Blogily
Simple Responsive Blogily is a clean and minimal WordPress theme designed for bloggers who want a simple yet elegant website. The theme features a responsive design, ensuring that your website will look great on any device.
The theme offers several customization options, including custom colors, fonts, and page layouts, allowing users to tailor their website to their individual preferences. The theme also includes several widget areas, enabling users to add various widgets and components to their website, such as social media links, email opt-ins, and related post sections.
Responsive Blogily is optimized for SEO, ensuring that your website will rank well in search engine results. The theme includes several built-in features, such as a contact form, social media integration, and support for various post formats, including galleries, videos, and audio.
7. Superb eCommerce
Superb eCommerce is a cutting-edge and contemporary WordPress theme that has been designed specifically for online stores and e-commerce websites. This powerful theme features a responsive design that ensures your website will look fantastic on any device, providing an excellent user experience for your customers.
The Superb eCommerce theme offers an array of customization options, including custom colors, fonts, and page layouts, allowing you to create a personalized website that stands out from the crowd. It also includes several widget areas that enable you to add product categories, social media links, and customer reviews, amongst other things.
With built-in support for popular e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce, this theme is ideal for anyone looking to create an online store and sell products directly from their website. Superb eCommerce has been optimized for SEO, ensuring that your website will rank well in search engine results, driving more traffic and increasing sales.
8. Superb Pixels
Superb Pixels is a modern and visually stunning WordPress theme that is designed for bloggers and creatives. The theme features a clean and elegant layout that showcases content in an engaging and visually appealing manner. The theme is fully responsive, ensuring that your website will look great on any device.
Superb Pixels offers a range of customization options, including custom colors, fonts, and page layouts, allowing users to create a unique and personalized website. The theme also features several widget areas, allowing users to add various widgets and components to their website, such as social media links, email opt-ins, and related post sections. It's also compatible with several WordPress plugins.
The Superb Pixels theme also includes several built-in features, such as a contact form, social media integration, and support for various post formats, including galleries, videos, and audio. Additionally, the theme is optimized for SEO, ensuring that your website will rank well in search engine results.
Overall, Superb Pixels is a fantastic theme for bloggers and creatives who want a visually stunning and customizable website.
9. Minimalistblogger
MinimalistBlogger is a sleek and modern WordPress theme that offers a clean and minimalist layout for bloggers. The theme is optimized for speed and performance, ensuring that your website will load quickly and efficiently, which is essential for reducing bounce rates and improving search engine rankings.
The theme is also fully responsive, meaning that it will adapt to different screen sizes and devices, providing a consistent experience for users on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
The theme offers several customization options, including custom colors, fonts, and page layouts, allowing users to tailor their website to their individual preferences. The theme also includes several widget areas, enabling users to add various widgets and components to their website, such as social media links, email opt-ins, and related post sections.
Overall, the MinimalistBlogger theme provides a simple and user-friendly interface, making it easy for users to customize their website without requiring advanced technical knowledge.
10. Minimalist Blog
Minimalist Blog is one of the best free WordPress blog themes. It’s customizable, fully responsive, and modern, making it perfect for any kind of blog — whether that’s travel, news, personal, tech, food, or other niches. It’s also designed with the best SEO practices so your blog will load quickly.
11. The Optimizer
The Optimizer is one of the best free WordPress themes for creating a minimalist website. This highly customizable multipurpose WordPress theme is coded with HTML5 and CSS3 so that its lightweight and SEO-friendly. It offers stunning homepage sliders, boxed and full-width layouts, and dozens of premade templates.
12. Concept Lite
Concept Lite is a free, minimalistic WordPress theme offering a unique serif font and social media icons. It also comes with a powerful image slider, full-width page template, and masonry portfolio section for showcasing your images and content.
13. Pure
If you're looking for a clean and modern design to keep all the attention on your content, then Pure theme is an excellent choice. This responsive WordPress theme can make any blog or portfolio look professional on any device. In addition to offering a distraction-free experience to your readers, Pure is fast loading and SEO-friendly.
14. Squarex Lite
Squarex Lite is another minimalist theme that can be used to build a personal blog, travel blog, photography blog, portfolio, and more. The grid layout is ideal for displaying lots of images and encouraging visitors to keep scrolling down the page. With this theme, you also get a sticky header, custom header, custom background, multiple color schemes, and a lot more.
15. Square
Square is a super flexible, fully responsive, multipurpose theme that you can use to create a business site or blog. This theme is also WooCommerce-ready, so you can create an online shop to sell products or services.
16. Olsen Light
Olsen Light is a fully responsive and minimalist theme that offers a distraction-free reading experience to your readers. In addition to offering custom widgets and being translation ready, this theme is optimized for search engines, which will help your content to get higher rankings. You also have a lot of options to customize the design of this theme.
17. Maker
If you are looking for a portfolio WordPress theme, Maker is a great choice. It offers a grid-based layout with clean layout and minimalist typography. This three-column layout theme also comes with a threaded commenting option, sticky posts, a great custom menu, and much more. Maker is translation ready so you can reach any audience regardless of their native language. If you want a simple but powerful portfolio, this theme might be the one for you.
18. Anariel Lite
Anariel Lite is another fantastic WordPress theme. This is an amazing free theme loaded with many advanced features to make your site stand out amongst your competitors.
This theme allows you to let your readers have a distraction-free read without overwhelming them with visuals. This theme also comes with a premium version that is packed with tons of additional features.
19. Simple Business
Simple Business is a feature-rich WordPress theme designed for business websites. Its clean and minimal design will make your site look professional on all devices. You can choose from multiple homepage layout options to present your content in the best way possible.
20. Kerinci Lite
Kerinci Lite is a great option for creating a personal, travel, or photography blog with a minimalist design. This free theme is known for its bold typography, clean lines, and shortcodes. You can also add a contact form to your site so that people can easily get in touch with you.
21. Minimalist
Minimalist is a free responsive theme by Dessign Themes. In addition to having a minimalist design with a unique vertical navigation menu, black-and-white color scheme, and clean font, this theme is also mobile- and SEO-friendly. It includes a responsive slider, custom background color, custom background image, and other theme options for customizing your site.
22. MinimalistBlogger
MinimalistBlogger is a free WordPress theme with a minimalist and responsive design. Its color scheme, simple borders, and website typography make it ideal for bloggers and magazine writers. In the sidebar, you can add widgets to display your most recent posts, ads, affiliate links, and more.
23. Eiasi
Eisai is a modern and minimalist theme for WordPress bloggers or freelancers looking to create portfolio sites. Since it’s compatible with the Gutenberg block editor, you can easily create and customize dynamic web pages with full-width images, grid layouts, or GIFs.
24. Gridly
Gridly is an excellent minimalist WordPress theme for creative blogs and portfolios. By presenting your content in a Pinterest-style grid, this theme showcases as much of your content as possible and encourages visitors to keep reading and scrolling. The theme’s simple design has unique details like a decorative typeface and image overlay zoom effect to keep visitors further engaged.
25. Simple Persona
Simple Persona is a simple and clean WordPress theme that’s ideal for professionals looking to create personal websites and blogs. It has all the sections that your visitors will expect, including an About Me, portfolio, featured articles, events, and testimonials section. These sections feature high-quality images, bold typography, lots of white space, and some pops of bright color, all the ingredients you need to make your WordPress site look professional.
26. NS Minimal
NS Minimal is a highly rated WordPress theme for bloggers. It’s lightweight, fast loading, translation ready. Build with a responsive design and according to the best SEO practices, this theme is optimized for every device, including mobile, tablet and desktop.
27. Pro Blogg
You will love this beautiful blogging theme; it's great for several different types of sites in addition to blogging. This fantastic theme can be downloaded for free. It's a modern design with amazing features and a super clean interface.
The theme comes with a great looking post slider which makes the homepage of the theme stand out, and the grid layout makes every post look unique. This theme will look flawless to every viewer.
28. Spacious
This is a great WordPress theme option for a business, portfolio or personal blogging site. The responsive theme offers fantastic options to customize your site design; four-page layouts, two-page templates, four blog display types, thirteen widget areas, five custom widgets and more.
The design is minimal for better performance and usability, and the premium features are excellent.
29. Shopper
Shopper is another excellent theme created by Dessign Themes. With its grid layout, bold typography, and color scheme, Shopper is an excellent theme for any ecommerce site. Its minimalist design will ensure your products stand out and that users only see the content and functionality they need to complete their checkout process.
30. Djario
Diarjo is a gorgeous (free) minimalist WordPress theme; it's a great option for your personal blog or portfolio website. Diarjo is a fully responsive WordPress theme based on Boostrap framework that looks great on any screen.
31. Resi
Resi is a nice design option for photographers; its simplicity showcases pictures in a clean interface that easily attracts users' attention. This theme is fully responsive and retina ready makes pictures stand out on high-resolution devices.
32. Morning Time Lite
Morning Time Lite is a free WordPress theme designed for bloggers and journalists. With this theme, you can create any type of post with a minimalist design, including image galleries, audio files, links, quotes, videos and more. Like all WPLook themes, Morning Time Lite is responsive, fast loading, and compatible with Gutenberg.
33. DW Minion
This is the mobile-friendly, minimalist theme you need to help you create an SEO-friendly blog. This theme has a powerful, premium-quality theme panel to manage every element effectively. DW Minion offers you various post formats such as standard, gallery, video, link, and quote.
34. The Minimal
The Minimal is a fully responsive WordPress theme designed for creating content-rich websites. Its typography is easy to read and skim. Its color scheme is mostly muted with some strategic pops of color. Its sidebar features important information and elements, including a search box, recent posts display, comments, archives, categories, and author bio. For these reasons, the Minimal is a great blogging theme.
35. Freedom
Freedom is a very attractive but simple WordPress design. If you are looking for a high quality theme, this is one to consider. This theme offers you beautiful boxed and wide layouts, an awesome slider, and much more.
36. Limpia
Limpia is a minimalist WordPress theme designed for influencers and fashion bloggers. Fully customizable and responsive, this theme is ideal for displaying high-quality images, text, and white space in a carefully maintained balance. This theme is also Gutenberg ready so you can create posts and pages quickly and easily.
37. Chosen
Chosen is a free minimalist theme coded following WordPress best practices so it’s clean and fast. With its minimalist design, you can display your content in a clean and uncluttered grid layout. This will keep all the attention on your content, and ensure it looks great on any device.
38. Sparkling
Sparkling is a simple, responsive, multipurpose WordPress theme that looks great on any site. Sparkling can be a great theme option for travel, health, business, finance, portfolio, design, art, photography, blogs, or any other personal or creative website.
39. Responsive Brix
Responsive Brix is a highly-rated minimalist WordPress theme. As indicated in its name, this free theme is fully responsive and will look great no matter what device your visitors use. It’s also created with HTML5 and CSS3 so that it’s optimized for SEO and speed. With a modern design, boxed and full-width layouts, and easy customization options, Responsive Brix is well-suited for many types of businesses, including web agencies, studios, and churches.
40. Luna
Luna is a simple, light portfolio theme that will help you to create a professional website.
If you are a creative person and want to showcase your work in style, this is a great theme option for you. It offers a number of amazing options to customize the design; for example, you can have right or left sidebars as well as a full-width layout.
41. Activello
Activello is a simple multipurpose WordPress by Colorlib. Creating using the Bootstrap framework, this clean and responsive design comes packed with features that will help you quickly and easily create a minimalist site. Among other features, a full-screen slider, retina ready design, unlimited color options, and Font Awesome icons will help showcase your work in style.
42. Intuitive
Intuitive is a clean and responsive WordPress theme that is well-suited for any corporate or business website. It comes with all the sections a business website needs, including portfolio, services, and testimonials, and elements that can take your site to the next level, such as a featured slider, dropdown menu, and threaded comments.
43. Explore
Explore is a simple WordPress theme that’s perfect for a travel blog or website. Its homepage, About page, Blog archive page, and Contact page feature the same minimalist colors, typography, and amount of text. Coded to WordPress’s standards and optimized for speed, Explore loads in less than one second, according to speed tests run by ThemeGrill.
44. Kokoro Lite
Kokoro is an elegant theme for lifestyle, fashion, and travel blogs. It offers a simple color scheme and layout for showcasing your content and high-quality images, and a sidebar where you can display recent posts, categories, tags, ads, and your Instagram feed. Its responsive design will ensure your blog looks good on any device.
45. WallPress
WallPress is a great, free WordPress theme with a Pinterest-style design that is created to make your content stand out. If you produce content regularly, this is a great theme option. The engaging design will help keep your readers busy with new content. It's a fully responsive design that will make your site look great on every device.
46. Suffice
Suffice is a free multipurpose theme by ThemeGrill. Its minimalist design and fast load time make Suffice ideal for a wide range of business websites, including construction, food, app, gym, magazine, and photography sites. Since it’s compatible with WooCommerce, it will also work for ecommerce websites.
47. Patch Lite
Patch Lite is a free minimalist blog WordPress theme focused on making your written content stand out. The simple, straightforward design helps the content of your blog take center stage, and the flexible layout can accommodate a variety of visuals.
Among the great features are the pre-designed color palettes that let you change the look of your website with a few clicks and subtle animations that entice users to click and read your content.
48. Courtyard
Courtyard is a clean and minimalistic WordPress theme designed for hotels and resorts. Its homepage has all the sections that potential or existing guests expect: one for rooms and rates, another for services, and special pricing packages. There’s testimonials, a video, and blog feed included as well. Each section features the same minimalist colors, typography, and icons as well as a careful balance of content and white space.
49. Kent
Kent is a clean and minimalist WordPress theme created for writers and authors to publish their content. It comes with a simple, fully responsive layout that will help your users enjoy your content no matter how they view it.
50. Education Minimal
Education Minimal is a free WordPress theme designed for colleges, universities, and other organizations in the education field. With this theme, you can present lots of images and information in unique formats, from sliders to grids to videos and more. There are also several animations, including zoom on hover, image overlay zoom, and slide-in effects, to make the scrolling experience more interactive.
51. Store WP
Store WP is a minimalist WordPress theme created for online stores; it is designed to be used with the WooCommerce plugin.
This is a fully responsive design that will make your online store look great. It comes with a powerful theme options panel and it also offers a product carousel slider that will make your site look very modern and professional.
52. Divi
Divi is a versatile WordPress theme that offers easy drag-and-drop building with no coding required. It provides true visual editing, allowing you to see real-time results and customize pages using intuitive controls.
With Divi, you have full control over responsive design, extensive design options, inline text editing, saving and managing custom designs, global elements and styles, and the ability to easily undo and redo changes.
53. Cortado
Cortado is an elegant and streamlined theme perfect for restaurants and coffee shops with its subtle colors and typography. It provides step-by-step instructions and video tutorials to help you build an attractive website, and you can easily edit and personalize your homepage and site content using the WordPress Block Editor. Customize your site's header, footer, layout, fonts, and colors, and add your logo to make it uniquely yours.
54. Organizer
The Organizer theme is a versatile option designed to showcase work or serve as a blog or corporate website. With clear instructions and video tutorials, it assists you in building a website from scratch. Customize your site's layout, templates, navigation, logo, and fonts to personalize it and make it your own.
55. Timeless Minimal
Timeless Minimal is a WordPress theme perfect for bloggers and newspapers. It is the child theme of minimalistblogger from earlier on our list.
With a fast and SEO-friendly design, this version offers new features and advertisement opportunities, including a customizable sidebar for widgets, Adsense, or affiliate links. Setting up the theme is easy, and its business-friendly design ensures high visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing for newspapers or personal writing portfolios.
56. Sten
Sten is a minimal blogging theme featuring a simple index template and post templates with a sidebar. With step-by-step instructions and video tutorials, this theme can help you quickly build your minimalist website. You can easily edit and customize your site content using the WordPress Block Editor. Personalize your site by customizing the header, footer, and page layout, creating navigation menus, adding your logo, and changing fonts and colors to make it uniquely yours.
57. Negai
Negai is a bold blogging theme that embraces simplicity and minimalistic elegance with its monochromatic hues and striking aesthetic. You can easily personalize your site by customizing the header, footer, page layout, navigation menus, logo, fonts, and colors to create a unique and personalized look.
58. Bibimbap
Bibimbap is a vibrant and interactive theme specifically designed for restaurants, bakeries, and food businesses. With its playful and unique patterns, you can easily create stunning pages and launch a captivating website. There are clear step-by-step instructions to help you with every aspect of creating your website.
59. Twenty Twenty-Three
Twenty Twenty-Three is a great minimalist theme made for blog websites. With ten different styles to choose from, you can build the perfect theme for your website this year.
60. CTLG
CTLG is a WordPress block theme ideal for building lists, directories, and catalogs. It offers multiple pre-designed templates and four unique style variations. The index template showcases a full-width header, followed by a right-aligned query loop for displaying blog posts or pages and a clean full-width footer. The post and page templates maintain the same layout, ensuring consistency throughout your site.
61. Rishi Theme
Rishi Theme might surprise you on a list of minimalist themes. While it offers a wider range of designs (over 90+ starter templates!), it shines for minimalists with its core web vital optimized code. This translates to lightning-fast loading times, a key factor for a smooth user experience and SEO success.
But where Rishi Theme truly excels for minimalists is in its customization power. You can build your entire website with a focus on clean lines and simple elements. You can customize everything from headers and footers to brand colors, typography, and even the layout itself.
For those who prefer a truly minimalist layout, Rishi offers the ability to set a custom website width, allowing you to create a focused and impactful design.
Choosing Your Minimalist WordPress Theme
Any of the minimalist WordPress themes above can help you create a simple, clean website that showcases your content and delights your visitors. Once you've installed and activated a theme, you can decide what plugins you need to extend the functionality of your WordPress website.
