55 Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes for 2023

Mobile devices generated 54.8% of global website traffic in the first quarter of 2021.

Since mobile has accounted for approximately half of web traffic worldwide since the beginning of 2017, it’s essential that your website is responsive. If you’re on WordPress, then creating a responsive site is as simple as installing the right WordPress theme. 

Responsive WordPress themes automatically change their layout and format based on the size and resolution of the screen in which they’re being viewed. This helps ensure your website visitors have a positive user experience, no matter if they're using a desktop, tablet, or mobile device. 

Now that you understand the advantage of using a responsive WordPress theme, let's check out your best options. 

Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes

Below are 70 of the best WordPress themes that are both free and fully responsive. Installing and activating any of them on your WordPress website will help you provide seamless experiences to desktop and mobile visitors — without costing you a dime. 

1. Astra

As one of the most popular WordPress themes in the official WordPress repository, Astra is known for its ease-of-use and high performance.

In addition to being lightweight and fast loading, Astra is fully responsive so your site is optimized for different device sizes. The theme includes controls that allow you to manage typography, headers, and more for both desktop and mobile screens.

Astra is also famous for its compatibility. It works with all major page builders and nearly every WordPress plugin.

2. Blocksy

Blocksy is a free minimalist theme that’s lighter and faster than most WordPress themes. In addition to offering features to speed up its load time, like code splitting, Blocky comes with seven starter sites that are tailored toward different niches. These starter sites — including ones for product review sites, apps, ecommerce stores, and blogs — have a clean and highly customizable design.

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3. Kadence

Kadence is another popular 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. In addition to speed, Kadence offers lots of customization options. You can set global color palettes, typography, and buttons to easily modify the design of your site. You can also use the theme's powerful header and footer builder to create truly unique sections on your site.

4. Sydney

A clean and modern business theme, Sydney is one of the most widely used free WordPress themes. This theme offers a great design with the flexibility to customize your site with a color scheme, custom logo, sticky navigation menu, and more. It's also fully responsive so your site will look beautiful on all devices.

5. Qi Theme

As a theme that has been designed with design and performance in mind, Qi Theme is 100% responsive and packed with layouts created specifically for mobile.

While many themes simply scale down a layout for hand-held devices, Qi Theme follows the best UX practices and offers layouts that are as engaging and dynamic on smartphones as they are on larger screens.

This fast and reliable theme comes with 150 demos covering all possible niches, with over 100 available for free. What’s best, it comes with Qi Addons for Elementor, the largest collection of flexible, fully customizable widgets for the popular page builder. 

6. Rosa Lite

Rosa Lite is the free version of the best-selling restaurant WordPress theme by Pixelgrade. It combines design and performance so that any small business can create a website that stands out. Rosa Lite offers a unique grid layout with parallax scrolling, a built-in menu system, and color palette system so you can customize your website’s design with just a few clicks.

It’s also designed to work seamlessly with the Gridable plugin. Gridable allows you to create an adaptable and fully responsive grid with up to 12 columns and as many rows as you want. You can learn more about the process in Rosa Lite’s documentation.

7. The Optimizer

The Optimizer is a fully responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme with a multipurpose design.

You can manage all of 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 will ensure that your content gets better rankings in search results.

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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, blog, products and services, clients, and parallax section.

Built on Bootstrap, Shapely is not only fully responsive — it also has a 12-column grid layout that’s ideal for displaying lots of posts, projects, and products on the page.

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 and clean design that's 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.

11. Vertex

Vertex is one of the best free minimalist WordPress themes designed 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. Whether your visitors view your site on a mobile device, laptop, tablet, or desktop, your site will look outstanding.

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 it. 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. Written with only the most essential code, Hello offers impressive load times and performance. Unlike other themes on this list, Hello is responsive by default but does allow you to customize your site by device. 

Simple, easy, and intuitive, Hello Elementor is ideal for new website owners looking to get their site up and running in a short time. Since Hello also enables developers to easily access and edit the theme’s codebase to make any changes they want, it’s also for more advanced users looking to design their site from the ground up.

14. Neve

Neve comes with a professional design and everything you need to create a modern shop to sell your products. Responsive and and incredibly lightweight (with a default WordPress install weighing less than 28KB), this theme will not only make your site look great on all modern devices — it will also perform great on all devices.

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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.

16. SimpleShift

SimpleShift is a super flexible, multipurpose WordPress theme that offers 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. 

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.

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18. NewsMag

NewsMag is ideal for any kind of news, magazine, media, or personal blog site. The theme is created with Bootstrap so it's responsive and mobile-friendly. 

You have the option to create a custom homepage for your site with the help of available widgets and sliders. There are four different kinds of blog page designs, and you get Font Awesome icons to style your site.

19. Activello

Activello is a beautiful, free Wordpress theme that is 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. This is a highly engaging and responsive theme that's great for blogs and viral news sites.

It offers an advanced theme options panel, where you can set up your site with ease, as well as 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 of the 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 if using infinite scroll or pagination. That means your site will look and perform great on any device.

21. Suki

Suki is a high-quality, free WordPress theme with a responsive design and over 1,000 customization options.

This one-page theme comes with important sections, including a team showcase, slider, projects grid, and testimonials section. It also offers seven pre-designed demos for different business niches and purposes, including a clothing shop, professional speaker, accounting business, wedding photographer, and cleaning service.

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22. Phlox

Phlox is an award-winning theme for WordPress. In addition to offering over 160 complete website demos, Phlox provides a mobile-first design, responsive touch slider, and modern typography so that users have a great experience browsing your website no matter what device they're on.

You can change the look and feel of your site using the live theme customizer. Unlike other free themes, Phlox adds a variety of customization options and widgets.

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23. Clean Box

Clean Box is a beautiful, powerful WordPress theme. This grid-based design comes with a fully responsive layout that will adapt to any screen size.

This is a highly flexible theme 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 usability of the theme and helps you publish many types of content on your blog.

25. Piclectic

A stunning free WordPress theme for bloggers, Piclectic will enable you to create an attractive and successful blog in no time. Unlike other themes on the list, Piclectic has a fluid design. That means it simply resizes elements instead of rearranging or eliminating them on a page based on breakpoints (like responsive themes do).

In addition to a fluid design, Piclectic comes with a powerful theme options panel, unlimited colors, and tons of other amazing features.

26. Futurio

Futurio is one of the best multi-purpose WordPress themes. Built on Bootstrap, this theme is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. It also comes with 16 free demo sites and a one-click demo importer so you can get your site up and running in less time.

You can also fully customize your site thanks to the over 100 customization options and custom widgets Futurio offers. 

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27. Hueman

Hueman is one of the most widely-used and highly-rated free responsive WordPress themes. Thanks to its ease of use and versatile design, this responsive theme is ideal for magazines and blogs. 

Once installed, Hueman enhances the WordPress Customizer so you have more customization options. For example, you can add a left sidebar to all pages or to your Contact page only. 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. This Bootstrap-based theme offers advanced features like 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 is specifically created for restaurants, cafes, and recipe blogs. It comes with premium features like a header slideshow, translation-ready code, and schema markup, which will help Google and other search engines provide enhanced search results to users.

30. Deep

Deep has been a well-established WordPress theme for nearly a decade, providing both free and premium multipurpose themes. Deep’s core focus has always been on speed, functionality, and user-friendliness. Alongside being powerful and lightweight, Deep offers a collection of more than 120 demos and brings a unique and eye-catching design to your website. 

In addition, Deep users can access 160 predefined website templates to use ranging from blogs to newsletters and even covering niche themes. Deep is fully compatible with WooCommerce and Elementor, Deep can be easily personalized using Elementor drag-and-drop feature without any coding knowledge. Deep is teemed with lots of features including the Woobuilder, a unique newly-released tool for customizing your WooCommerce dashboard, and is translation and RTL-ready.

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31. I-EXCEL

I-EXCEL is a feature-packed WordPress theme with a beautiful, responsive design. It comes with multiple page templates, including a masonry-style blog layout and impressive portfolio page. It also offers a custom slider (as well as the option to use third-party sliders), unlimited color options, and over a dozen demo sites. 

Each of these demo sites can be installed in one click and automatically adapt to iPhones, iPads, and other small hand-held devices.

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32. Vega

Vega is a free multipurpose theme that's ideal for a personal blog or small business website. It offers a responsive design with bold colors and hover animation effects to keep your visitors engaged.

With Vega, you also get:

• 3 pre-built color schemes
• full-screen image banner
• parallax backgrounds

33. Awaken

Awaken is a sleek WordPress theme that will make your site look great even on the smallest 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's ideal for ecommerce stores. It offers hundreds of pre-designed demo sites, or the option to build a site completely 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 cart, 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. 

36. Quick

Built on the Bootstrap framework and offering over 50 customizable components, two bundled plugins, and four pre-designed layouts, Quick is ideal for building responsive, mobile-first projects for businesses, startups, and agencies.

This theme allows you to apply a sleek hover effect to images and other elements to grab your visitors' attention. It also provides a built-in calendar so you can promote events and accept bookings on your site.

37. True North

True North is a stunning free portfolio WordPress theme that will showcase 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. 

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 comes with a fully responsive design and various custom widgets to bring different functionalities to your site.

39. Vantage

With over a million downloads, Vantage is an extremely popular free WordPress theme. Designed by SiteOrigin, this fully responsive WordPress theme is built for the SiteOrigin Page Builder. This drag-and-drop interface offers you complete control over the look and feel of your website. 

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. HarmonUX Core

Ideal for blogs, HarmonUX Core is a magazine-style WordPress theme that provides a responsive and SEO-friendly design. This theme is  fully customizable and offers a content slider, custom widgets, social profiles, and opt-in forms, among other features.

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 a wide variety of 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 comes with multiple header layouts, blog layouts, widget areas, slider options, and social media links. All these features combined make it an ideal choice whether you're creating a business website or a personal blog.

44. Esteem

Esteem 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, upload a custom logo, and more. 

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 and style it with unlimited colors, and select a custom background to make your site look unique.

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 footer.s 

It is also responsive, fast, and compatible with all browsers. Designed to look almost like an app on smartphones, 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 easy-to-read, especially on mobile devices.

47. Brawny

Brawny is a powerful theme with a highly customizable and responsive design. It comes with five layouts, bold typography, a sticky menu, scroll-to-top button, and other features that will make your site attractive and easy-to-navigate.

This can be a great design option for business and corporate sites as well as professional blogs. You can use this theme to create an online shop as well because it supports the Jigoshop ecommerce plugin.

48. Dispatch

Dispatch is a fully responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme for photography, portfolio, corporate, personal, and business websites.

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 automatically adapt to any screen size, including tablets and mobile devices. However, unlike other themes, Interface allows you to disable this responsive feature if you choose.

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.  

If you create a lot of content on your site and want to keep your users engaged, no matter what device they're on, this is a great option.

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51. Rowling

Rowling is a clean and simple theme for content-rich sites. It comes with a 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 for 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 — 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 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 use this theme to create an online shop as well 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 truly 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 comes with different page templates and post formats, gorgeous typography elements, tons of widget positions, and more.

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 to your website visitors as they move from desktop to mobile to tablet. 

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.