Mobile devices generated approximately 59.2% of global website traffic in the fourth quarter of 2022. The numbers don't lie: Responsive WordPress themes are a must-have. If you don't update your site to look great and function seamlessly on the small screen, you risk isolating a tremendous amount of your audience.
The best responsive WordPress themes are easy to install and customize to fit your branding. Plus, they ensure that when visitors land on your site, user experience is optimized regardless of what size screen they're on. Let's walk through what exactly responsive WordPress themes are, why choosing one is crucial, and the best ones to consider. (Psst: All the options we've listed are free responsive WordPress themes.)
What are responsive WordPress themes?
When we talk about responsive WordPress themes, we're referring to themes that can adjust layout depending on the screen visitors use to access the site. Because it automatically adjusts to suit the device's screen size and resolution, it offers a seamless user experience. Plus, it's a good idea from a website owner standpoint, as you can rest assured your site will automatically resize.
You might be wondering: Aren't all WordPress themes by default responsive? The answer is no. That's why when you're selecting a site theme, be sure you check to ensure it's responsive. All the free responsive WordPress themes we identify on this list check that box.
In addition to working with responsive WordPress themes, there are additional steps you can take to ensure your site is optimized for mobile visitors, as outlined here.
Why choose mobile responsive WordPress themes?
There are a few reasons why choosing mobile responsive WordPress themes is wise. We've already hinted at the primary one: Responsive themes ensure all visitors have an enjoyable experience on your website, regardless of how they access it. However, the best responsive WordPress themes do more than that.
Another reason why choosing responsive WordPress themes is crucial is that otherwise, you'd have to spend time attempting to resize your site for different layouts yourself — or pay someone who knows how to do so, which could come with a hefty bill. With responsive themes, the work's already done for you.
Additionally, working with responsive WordPress themes is wise because it ensures that both the layout and the resolution are suitable for different screen sizes. While resolution might not seem that important at first glance, it is.
Now that we've identified what responsive WordPress themes are and why you must choose one, let's dive into the best responsive WordPress themes to help you take your site to the next level.
What are the best free responsive WordPress themes?
Here's some excellent news: the best responsive WordPress themes don't have to cost an arm and a leg. We've rounded up a variety of free responsive WordPress themes that look great and function effortlessly. Here are our favorite picks.
1. Astra
As one of the most popular WordPress themes in the official WordPress repository, Astra has a reputation for its ease of use.
In addition to being lightweight and fast-loading, Astra is fully responsive, so your site looks great regardless of screen size. The theme includes controls that allow you to manage typography, headers, and more for both desktop and mobile screens.
Astra is also known for its compatibility. It works with all major page builders and nearly every WordPress plugin, which makes it an appealing option. Whether you work with Elementor, Gutenberg, or another page builder, Astra is the way to go.
2. Blocksy
Blocksy is a free minimalist theme that's lighter and faster than most responsive WordPress themes. In addition to offering features to speed up its load time, like code splitting, Blocky comes with an array of starter sites suitable for different niches, so getting started is easy.
These starter sites — including ones for product review sites, apps, ecommerce stores, and blogs — have a clean and highly customizable design.
3. Kadence
Kadence is another prevalent theme in the WordPress repository known for its responsive design, speed, and customizability.
The theme is built to load only the resources you need on a single page, which helps improve the overall load time of your site. (If you need proof that load time matters, these statistics demonstrate how crucial it is to user experience.) In addition to speed, Kadence offers lots of customization options. You can set global color palettes, typography, and buttons to modify the design of your site easily. You can also use the theme's powerful header and footer builder to create truly unique sections on your site.
4. Sydney
Sydney is one of the most widely used free responsive WordPress themes because it features a clean design and is ideal for businesses. The theme allows you to customize your site with a color scheme, logo, sticky navigation menu, and more. It's also fully responsive, making your site look beautiful on all devices.
5. Qi Theme
If you want a theme made with design and performance in mind, look no further. Qi Theme is 100% responsive and packed with layouts created specifically for mobile.
While many themes scale down a layout for hand-held devices, Qi Theme follows the best UX practices and offers arrangements that are as engaging and dynamic on smartphones as on larger screens.
This fast and reliable theme comes with 150 demos covering all possible niches, with over 100 available for free. Even better, the theme comes with Qi Addons for Elementor, the most extensive collection of flexible, fully customizable widgets for the famous page builder.
6. Alpus
Alpus is a responsive WordPress theme specifically designed for bloggers who want to showcase their content in a minimalist and elegant way. It has a simple and clean layout, making it easy for readers to navigate through the website. The theme has several customization options, including customizable colors, fonts, and layouts, making it easy for users to adjust the theme to their preference.
Additionally, Alpus is optimized for search engines and fast loading times, which is important for SEO and enhancing the user experience. It also supports multiple post formats, including video, gallery, and audio, allowing users to add richness and diversity to their content.
Overall, Alpus is a great option for bloggers who want to create a professional, user-friendly, and customizable blog with a clean and modern design.
7. The Optimizer
The Optimizer is a fully responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme with a multipurpose design.
You can manage your site's details from the powerful theme options panel. The Optimizer theme is created with HTML5 and CSS3 to make it quick and lightweight. Also, the SEO-friendly design gives your content a boost on the search engine results page.
8. Hestia
Hestia is a simple and modern one-page WordPress theme that's ideal for online businesses and startups that want to prioritize navigational ease.
With Hestia's responsive layouts, you can quickly create and launch your site without worrying about its performance on mobile devices. It also comes with a responsive and user-friendly mega menu, which makes it easy to arrange and organize submenu content.
9. Shapely
As one of the best one-page WordPress themes for business or landing page websites, Shapely comes with everything you need to showcase your business, including widgets for adding a blog, portfolio, shop, products and services, clients, and parallax section.
Built on Bootstrap, Shapely is fully responsive and has a 12-column grid layout that's ideal for displaying lots of posts, projects, and products on the page. And did we mention it's retina-ready?
10. Simple
Simple is an attractive, free WordPress theme that will make your site look great, even on small-screen devices. As the name implies, this theme comes with a simple, clean design that is perfect for any small business website.
The Simple theme comes with an easy-to-use theme customizer, which you can use to give your site a unique look. You can also upgrade to a paid version of this theme, but the free one is beautiful, too.
11. Vertex
Vertex is one of the best free minimalist WordPress themes for creative professionals and agencies. With this theme, you have the power to showcase your content stylishly in a slider, grid, and list layout. You also get an extensive list of options for customization, including background colors and images, logos, and social sharing icons.
Like all modern themes, Vertex is fully responsive. Your site will look outstanding whether your visitors view your site on a mobile device, laptop, tablet, or desktop.
12. Ember
Ember is another stunning design that is fully responsive. The design features a responsive slider on the homepage so you can promote multiple pieces of content and help boost their visibility.
Be it the parallax background or the typography options, you have everything at your fingertips to craft your site just the way you want. The easy-to-use customizer makes the process simple.
13. Hello Elementor
Hello is a clean, lightweight theme designed to work seamlessly with the Elementor page builder plugin. The design features a responsive slider on the homepage so you can promote multiple pieces of content and help boost their visibility.
Be it the parallax background or the typography options, you have everything at your fingertips to craft your site just the way you want. The easy-to-use customizer makes the process simple.
14. Neve
Neve has a professional design and everything you need to create a modern shop to sell your products. Responsive and incredibly lightweight (with a default WordPress install weighing less than 28KB), this theme will make your site look great and perform effortlessly.
15. Venture Lite
Venture Lite is a beautiful business WordPress theme with a fully responsive layout. Venture offers different homepage sections — including a Features, About, Team, News, and Contact section — that can have the parallax scrolling effect to keep readers engaged. It's ideal for creative agencies, small businesses, startups, and freelancers, and it's one page, which is great if you're looking to keep things straightforward.
16. SimpleShift
SimpleShift is a super flexible, multipurpose WordPress theme with a stunning design and numerous features. This single-page and responsive WordPress design is perfect for any business website. It includes the impressive parallax effect for a modern, professional website.
17. Zakra
Zakra is a high-quality, multipurpose WordPress theme that is great for many niche sites. In addition to being fully responsive, it's also fast-loading and SEO-friendly. Plus, Zakra boasts over 80 templates, so taking the first step toward your dream site is easy.
You can customize the design of your site easily using the built-in WordPress Customizer. Zakra also allows you to add images, call-to-action buttons, social media profile links, custom logos, and more.
18. NewsMag
NewsMag is ideal for any news, magazine, media, or personal blog site. The theme is created with Bootstrap, so it's responsive and mobile-friendly. SEO is especially crucial for news outlets, which is why the theme is also SEO-friendly.
You can create a custom homepage for your site with the help of available widgets and sliders. There are four kinds of blog page designs, and you get Font Awesome icons to style your site.
19. Activello
Activello is a beautiful, free responsive Wordpress theme created with the Bootstrap framework. It's a fully responsive design, which will make your site work seamlessly on all modern devices. The homepage looks stunning with the full-width slider that you can use to promote the best content on your site. Also, you can customize the design to suit your needs and capture users' attention.
20. SociallyViral
SociallyViral is one of the most popular WordPress themes created by MyThemeShop. It lands itself on our list of the best responsive WordPress themes because it's highly engaging, retina-ready, and SEO-optimized.
It offers an advanced theme options panel, where you can easily set up your site, unlimited color schemes, Google Fonts, advanced typography options, unlimited sidebars, unlimited background options, and more.
Although it is a relatively heavy theme, it hides most content behind a "Load More" button. Because load buttons require less content to appear upfront to the user, the web page is generated much more quickly than it would with infinite scroll or pagination. That means your site will look and perform great on any device.
21. Suki
Phlox is an award-winning theme for WordPress. In addition to offering over 200 complete website demos, Phlox provides a mobile-first design, responsive touch slider, and modern typography to give users a great experience browsing your website no matter their device.
You can change the look and feel of your site using the live theme customizer. Unlike other free themes, Phlox adds various customization options and widgets.
22. Phlox
Phlox is an award-winning theme for WordPress. In addition to offering over 200 complete website demos, Phlox provides a mobile-first design, responsive touch slider, and modern typography to give users a great experience browsing your website no matter their device.
You can also update your site using the live theme customizer, which is a major perk. Unlike other free themes, Phlox adds various customization options and widgets.
23. Clean Box
Clean Box is a beautiful, powerful WordPress theme. This grid-based design has a fully responsive layout that will adapt to any screen size. Plus, it's translation ready, an appealing addition if you have a global audience.
This highly flexible theme is designed with HTML5 and CSS3 code, making it light, fast, and SEO-friendly. You can also customize the design of your site by using the real-time WordPress Customizer.
24. Minimalist
Minimalist is a personal portfolio theme for WordPress. It comes with a clean design that will keep the focus on your content. The theme is fully responsive, so your site will look great on all devices.
This theme offers different post formats: standard posts, videos, images, quotes, links, and more. This variety extends the theme's usability and helps you publish many types of content on your blog.
25. CTLG
CTLG is another option for those seeking free responsive WordPress theme options. When you download the theme, you get several pre-designed templates. There are also style variations so you can pick which feels right for your site. You can also display blog posts, pages, and experiment with page templates.
26. Futurio
Futurio is one of the best multipurpose WordPress themes. Built on Bootstrap, this theme is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. It also comes with over 10 free demo sites and a one-click demo importer to get your site up and running rapidly.
Thanks to the over 100 customization options and custom widgets Futurio offers, it's easy to create a completely unique site.
27. Hueman
Hueman is one of the most widely-used and highly-rated free responsive WordPress themes. This responsive theme is ideal for magazines and blogs thanks to its ease of use and versatile design.
When you install Hueman, you'll notice that it enhances the WordPress Customizer, giving you more customization options. For example, you can only add a left sidebar to all pages or your Contact page. Or you can add a unique navigation bar to one specific page on your site and much more.
28. Moderna
Ideal for corporate business sites, Moderna is a high-quality, responsive WordPress theme built on the Bootstrap framework. Moderna also offers advanced and highly desirable features including a portfolio filter, AJAX contact form, and multi-column footer for your contact information, latest blog posts, and other important links.
To customize this one-page theme, you can add sliders, videos, and animation effects and use its built-in color picker to select the perfect color scheme.
29. Auberge
Auberge is a fully responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme ideal for restaurants, cafes, and recipe blogs. It is an excellent option thanks to its premium features including header slideshow, translation-ready code, and schema markup, which will help Google and other search engines provide enhanced search results to users.
30. Vivre
Vivre is another choice if you want a minimalist, clean theme that looks gorgeous on all screens. Its main feature is the heavy san-serif font throughout the site. This theme is ideal if you’re building a responsive site for a blog, magazine, or content website.
31. I-EXCEL
I-EXCEL is a feature-packed WordPress theme with a beautiful, responsive design. It has multiple page templates, including a masonry-style blog layout and an impressive portfolio page. It also offers a custom slider, the option to use third-party sliders, unlimited color options, and over a dozen demo sites.
Each demo site can be installed in one click and automatically adapt to iPhones, iPads, and other small hand-held devices.
32. Vega
Vega is a free multipurpose theme ideal for a personal blog or small business website. It offers a responsive design with bold colors and hover animation effects to keep visitors engaged.
Vega also has three pre-built color schemes, a full-screen image banner, and parallax backgrounds. This theme is also ideal if you have an ecommerce site as it integrates with WooCommerce.
33. Awaken
Awaken is a sleek WordPress theme that will make your site look great even on the tiniest screens. The theme is created with Bootstrap, making it that much more flexible. Among the theme's many features, you will get a featured slider, video widget, multiple ad widgets, and social media profiles to keep your visitors engaged.
34. JupiterX Lite
JupiterX Lite is a Bootstrap-based theme that is one of the best responsive WordPress themes for ecommerce stores. It offers hundreds of pre-designed demo sites, or the option to build a site entirely from scratch.
Using the built-in WordPress Customizer and third-party Elementor page builder, you can edit previously untouchable parts of your store, including your product lists, single product pages, shopping carts, and checkout pages.
35. Biography
If you want to create a website to showcase your experience and skills and build a personal brand, Biography is a great option. This responsive theme comes with all the sections you need to keep readers informed and engaged, including a services, skills, portfolio, and timeline section, as well as a contact form. It is also WooCommerce-ready.
36. Masu
If you're building a blog, look no further than Masu for a free, responsive theme. Masu is neutral, visually appealing, and displays your content in organized boxes. This is also an excellent option because it features an about section in the footer, and we love how the newsletter signup box is central.
37. True North
True North is a stunning free portfolio WordPress theme showcasing your work in style. This theme is simple yet powerful and comes with a fully responsive design.
True North offers a theme options panel where you can upload your logo, change backgrounds, and more. It also comes with a portfolio post type so that you can present your work to attract new clients. Plus, it works well with Gutenberg and Elementor, so whichever you'd rather use to build your site, you can.
38. Meeta
Meeta comes with a simple, attractive design and is packed with features. This theme is created on the WPZoom framework, which makes the design highly customizable. It has a fully responsive design and various custom widgets to bring different functionalities to your site.
39. Vantage
Vantage is an extremely popular free WordPress theme with over a million downloads. Designed by SiteOrigin, this fully responsive WordPress theme is built for the SiteOrigin Page Builder. This drag-and-drop interface offers complete control over your website's look and feel. Plus, this theme is retina-ready.
40. Receptar
Receptar is designed to help you create an easy-to-read and content-rich site with high-quality images and stunning typography.
This responsive theme supports the Beaver Builder page builder, Jetpack plugin, and schema.org markup for rich snippets. It also includes translation-ready code, a front-page slideshow, customizable colors, and other cool features.
41. Remote
Next up is Remote, a straightforward, easy-to-read theme that puts emphasis on your website's copy. It offers block patterns that contribute to an unforgettable user experience on-site, including a large list of recent posts.
42. Accelerate
Accelerate is a free multipurpose WordPress theme that will work for any business niche or type of blog. In addition to supporting all post formats, the layout is simple and responsive. That means you can use this theme to display various content.In addition to being optimized for speed and performance, Accelerate is highly customizable. You can use multiple color options, advanced typography, and custom widgets to create a truly unique site.
43. Evolve
Evolve is a multipurpose theme that can help make your WordPress site look professional.
Based on the Bootstrap and Kirki framework (a widely-used customizer framework),Evolve is a responsive and highly customizable theme. It has multiple header layouts, blog layouts, widget areas, slider options, and social media links. These combined features make it an ideal choice for creating a business website or a personal blog.
44. Esteem
Next up on our list of best responsive mobile WordPress themes is Esteem. It works just as well for personal blogs as it does for a business site or portfolio to showcase your work. This responsive theme is also highly customizable. You can create a custom header and background, choose your color palette, and upload a custom logo.
45. Ample
Ample is a stunning responsive WordPress theme that's best for portfolio and one page sites. You can create impressive sliders, adjust the layout, style it with unlimited colors, and select a custom background to make your site look unique. Most notable about Ample is how it loads in under a second.
Thanks to its responsive design, Ample adapts automatically to different screen sizes, including iPhones, iPads, and other small hand-held devices.
46. Customizr
Customizr is a top-rated theme in the WordPress directory. As you might imagine, Customizr is a highly customizable theme that allows you to feature content in grids, sliders, and custom headers and footers.
It is also responsive, fast, and compatible with all browsers. Designed to look almost like a smartphone app, Customizr is also built to load your posts and images just before becoming visible when a user scrolls down the page. This makes your site fast and easily read, especially on mobile devices.
47. Heiwa
Next is Heiwa, a clean, minimalist theme with eloquent typography and an excellent option for agencies, portfolio sites, and beyond. Regardless of screen size, Heiwa is a seamless option for those who don't like busy websites.
48. Dispatch
Dispatch is a fully responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme for photography, portfolio, corporate, personal, and business websites. It's also an excellent option because it is SEO-optimized.
Created with HTML5 and CSS3, this theme is high-performing and customizable. You get plentiful color options, image sliders, more than 300 font icons, pagination, custom widgets, sidebar options, and more.
49. Interface
Interface is one of the best flat WordPress themes. It comes packed with features, like four layouts for every post or page, five templates for pages, eight widget areas, six custom widgets, a featured slider to highlight your content, and more.
This theme is designed to adapt automatically to any screen size, including tablets and mobile devices. However, unlike other themes, Interface allows you to disable this responsive feature.
50. ColorMag
ColorMag is a feature-rich, magazine-style theme that's among the best sellers in the WordPress directory. Optimized for speed and search engines and offering advanced typography, color options, and custom widgets, this responsive theme is perfect for any news or personal blogging site.
This is a great option if you create a lot of content on your site and want to keep your users engaged, no matter what device they're on.
51. Rowling
Rowling is a clean and simple theme for content-rich sites. It features great design and features to make your site stand out from the crowd, including highly readable typography, two menu locations, social menu support, custom accent colors, and more.
The layout is also designed to adapt to devices of all sizes. That means your posts will look just as great on a 27" iMac as on a smartphone or tablet.
52. MH Magazine Lite
MH Magazine Lite is one of the most popular free responsive WordPress themes for digital magazines, news sites, and blogs. It's not only fully responsive — but it's also one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes, so you don't have to worry about website performance on any device.
53. Wallstreet
Wallstreet is a highly-rated free WordPress theme for business and corporate sites. It offers three beautifully designed page templates for the homepage, the blog, and a full-width page. Since it was developed using the Bootstrap framework, Wallstreet is fully responsive.
You can also use this theme to create an online shop because it is fully compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.
54. Smartline Lite
Smartline Lite is a professional-looking design for news and magazine sites. Like other themes in this list, Smartline Lite provides a fully responsive design with bold colors so your site pops on any device.
The best part about Smartline Lite is its highly flexible front-page template. You can use built-in widgets with this template to create a genuinely unique homepage with ease.
55. Appointment
Appointment is a great WordPress theme for creating blogs and websites in any business niche. Developed with Bootstrap, it is fully responsive and retina-ready with a range of built-in widgets and customization options to help you build a successful site.
It has different page templates and post formats, gorgeous typography elements, many widget positions, and more.
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56. Blossom Spa
Blossom Spa is a feminine-looking WordPress theme specially designed for the spa and beauty industries. The theme is highly responsive, so your designs will look and perform flawlessly across all devices, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Blossom Spa comes with 3 blog page layouts that help you showcase your website content in three distinct formats. You can also add external links on your website through sidebars that come in 4 different layouts.
The theme offers a handful of 22+ widgets that allow you to customize your website with added advertisements, Call to Action, Email Newsletter, and so much more. Additionally, Blossom Spa is compatible with a wide list of plugins, including WooCommerce, which you can use for pre-booking services within your website.
57. Blossom Coach
Blossom Coach is a highly responsive theme specially designed, keeping coaches, mentors, speakers, and therapists in mind. The theme is built to highlight you and your services through strategic layouts and power-packed features.
The theme comes with 3 unique blog layout options to showcase your blog articles. For more options, you could also use page builders such as Elementor or Gutenberg to build your website from scratch using their drag-and-drop functionality.
Blossom Coach offers additional features, such as a pre-designed CTA section, testimonial section, and about-you page, that help convert visitors into customers. Furthermore, you can integrate third-party plugins into the theme to extend your website’s functionality.
58. Travel Monster
Travel Monster is a niche-specific design tailored for travel websites. The theme offers dedicated layouts, service sections, and functionalities that showcase tours and travel packages.
Travel Monster integrates with industry-leading travel plugins like WP Travel Engine, which helps you manage and display tour itineraries and allows your guests to book tour packages with ease.
Additionally, Travel Monster is core web-optimized and has a blazing-fast load speed. Plus, its easy integration with website builders like Gutenberg and Elementor makes it easy to build your website.
Create Your Responsive WordPress Website
Responsive web design is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a critical investment in your user experience, conversion rate, and business's future. The responsive WordPress themes above will provide a seamless user experience as visitors move from desktop to mobile to tablet.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
