There is an incredible amount of themes out there, and the majority of them look good enough, honestly. But what sets some apart from others, is how well a theme fits with criteria that certain users would like. We shared a handful of themes and plugins for writers last month, and since you like it so much we decided to give you more.
As a writer, instead of a flashy theme that highlights visuals, you probably want a theme with strong typography that highlights your written content (and fits the vibe of your topic matter). Or if you’re a writer that also incorporates pictures into your content, you’d probably want something that could highlight both your visual and written content.
Whatever your needs, there are more than enough great options for both highlighted in this post and if you truly want to pursue a career in writing, then you are going to need a website. Period. The small cost of a premium theme is a small investment in your future that will surely be worth it. Premium themes offer features and support you just won’t get with a free one, and below are some of our top picks.
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1. Paperio
Paperio is a fully responsive, minimal and simple but creative and clean WordPress blog theme best suitable for personal, business and freelancer bloggers for different niches like fashion, food, travel, photography and many more. It is not overwhelmed with unnecessary features and codes to make it bloated and hence it is perfect for blogging niche.
There are 7 different creative blog layouts available to mimic different listing styles with featured and popular blocks to showcase various posts on the homepage. Pre-made demos can be imported with quick and easy import process with further filtering options to either import whole demo or specific items like pages, posts, widgets, settings and others. Various header and footer styles make it more convenient for users to have their mega menu, social icons, search bar, newsletter, latest posts, Instagram custom widget and recent tweets. Responsive and nice looking featured area sliders, in-built social sharing and powerful post types with audio, video, gallery, slider, quote are a plus to add attract readers.
And the most and useful thing is Paperio can be customized using WordPress default customizer with approximately 400 options like fonts, colors, layouts, color skin, background image, header, footer, sidebar, layout and many more to achieve the look from any of our ready demo plus other options to make it as per your need.
2. Underwood (Free)
Underwood is a versatile and bold WordPress theme that’s suitable for personal and lifestyle bloggers. It’s a modern, well-structured theme with plenty of white space that draws attention to your images and typography. The homepage includes a dynamic and easy-to-use slideshow that’s perfect for highlighting your best content or promotions. Still on the homepage, you get 3 layouts, including grid-style layouts, that you can choose to display with or without the sidebar. Additionally, this template comes with 9 custom post formats – including audio, video, and gallery posts.
The theme’s back-end is intuitive, with plenty of customizable options to match your unique style. Easily replace the default logo with your own, add your site title and tagline, choose from among the hundreds of Google Web Fonts and customize colors using the beginner-friendly color picker. It integrates with all major plugins, including JetPack, W3 Total Cache, and WooCommerce. Since Underwood is built on the sleek and responsive Bootstrap framework, your site will look spectacular and load fast on any device and screen size. And as for social media, the template includes neat buttons so your fans can easily connect with you and share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, and other social networks. You even get an About Me widget and an Instagram feed that looks awesome when placed in the sidebar or just above the footer.
3. Fabriq
The Fabriq theme is excellent for news, magazine and review sites. This simple look is the perfect solution for various industry website. From travel blog, to fashion and everything in between, Fabriq brings beauty and unique designs combined with performance and fast loading.
Over 25 unique demos and tons of features make Fabriq a must have theme for blogging. This multitude of options allow you to create a unique looking homepage in a couple of minutes with included Visual Composer most powerful page builder. Fabriq is bundled with many header and footer templates, 4 main blog grids like Metro, Masonry, Grid and Classic.
The theme integrates clean coding, great design and fast page loading speed. Fabriq is also WooCommerce compatible, TypeKit ready and supports responsive and mobile friendly. It uses the best clean SEO practices and is a social friendly theme. Customers can easily personalize their page’s aesthetic presentation, given that there is a limitless range of available accent color choices. No advanced knowledge is required for the installation or customization process, as Writing is very user-friendly.
4. Writers Blogily (Free)
Writers Blogily is an elegant free blog theme for WordPress with clean, minimal concept. It suitable for wide-range of blog niches such as personal blog, fashion, photography, travel etc. Writers Blogily is fully responsive and has been optimized to perfectly displaying your content on any devices and screen sizes.
The homepage features a post slider and grid, and you can customize the design somewhat by uploading your logo, defining a favicon, choosing your menu, and adding widgets. Writers Blogily is a great option for sharing your thoughts and experiences with your readers.
5. Rich Master
The Rich Master theme is the perfect fit for personal as well as professional business blogs. Its design is contemporary and pushes your content into the limelight. It is a fast performing and lean theme. It is fast to setup. There are no confusing option panels or visual composers littering the code and making your site slow. This theme has been done in the right way!
The Rich Master combines the power of the ZURBs Foundation front-end framework with the WordPress development experience of RichWP to deliver unparalleled speed and responsiveness. Big hero images draw attention to your posts and the finely calibrated typography makes reading your content a pleasure.
Simplicity is king: Just upload and activate the Rich Master Theme, create your menus, and your site is ready to go. Finetune it by changing the lead colors like the top bar background and the buttons and upload your own logo. Everything has built the WordPress way, so you already know how to use it. The Rich Master theme is as simple as it gets while providing maximum flexibility.
6. StoryBlog
This is a fresh, grid-style theme that perfectly showcases your story titles and images on the homepage. StoryBlog offers 7 different homepage layout options, comes with a beautifully designed author page, and unlimited color options so you can easily change the color scheme of your site at will. If you’re looking to show off your photography/drawing skills in addition to your writing abilities, this could be the right choice for you.
7. Ink
This is another grid-style theme, but there it is very content-driven and doesn’t even have a header. Ink comes with a wide range of customization options, including colors and typography, giving you pretty much full creative control from within the WordPress live customizer. Again if you want to showcase images or other visual artwork along with your texts, Ink is a great choice.
8. Author Personal Blog (Free)
This is a theme that is designed for authors to share their thoughts and their books. If you mainly focus on writing, you need a way to promote yourself and this could be just the theme for you. The Author Personal Blog free theme includes a lovely homepage, a landing page to promote and sell your books (via WooCommerce) and design beautiful content with full Gutenberg support. It’s also SEO optimized and speed optimized for reader experience.
9. Florence
Florence is a slick theme that sports a slim sidebar, along with a thin sticky menu at the top of the page. The featured images are placed beautifully above the posts, making this another good choice for people who also want to include pictures. It also comes with extensive customization options so you can tailor it to suit your needs, and plenty of social media widgets to add your Facebook page, Instagram feeds and more.
10. Veen
Start your own blog in minutes using this awesome theme that has all the features you need to share your thoughts and ideas. The Veen theme includes plenty of easy to use options to help you get your blog off the ground in no time at all. Use the custom page templates to setup your homepage, category pages, contact page and any other page you might need. Plus the theme includes translation plugin support, so you can translate your site into any language you might need. This way you can add whatever content you want to your blog without any problems.
11. Merapi
Merapi is another theme that showcases your latest writing along with their accompanying picture on the homepage of your website. It has a clean, minimal header and navigation at the top, and offers many customization options to give you creative control of how your site ends up looking.
12. Hemlock
Hemlock is a beautiful minimalist theme for creatives, bloggers and writers. The default homepage features a logo (could be replaced with a face and a name) and a slider of your most recent posts. Hemlock offers multiple homepage layouts, sleek custom sharing buttons, custom post formats, custom widgets and many customization options.
13. Heap
Heap is a clean theme with a grid-style homepage. It offers different layout options, high customizability from a live customizer(you can even change layout sizes), and multiple custom post formats.
14. Blank.
Blank is a simple, blog style theme with a very appealing layout that puts all focus on content. In addition to the design quality, it also offers extensive customization options, 2 different layouts, video support and sleek social buttons.
15. Blog World (Free)
A theme with minimalist design, the homepage features a beautiful grid of your latest posts. Blog World offers various ways to showcase your posts for your personal blog, travel magazine and food magazine or any other site. The theme uses a mobile-first design(great if you have a large mobile audience) and works great with a variety of plugins.
16. Blockmagazine
Block Magazine is a theme that has really nailed the digital magazine look. It offers different custom menus and post formats, a built-in rating system and extensive customization options.
17. eStory (Free)
eStory is a clean blogging theme that would be great for visual storytellers. It offers a clean design, different post formats, and support for the Gutenberg page builder. Create your posts and pages with default Gutenberg blocks as well as eStory’s blocks for social icons, search, CTA, icon boxes, author box, gallery and ads.
18. Readme
Readme is a minimalist theme with a portfolio option that is perfect for writers. Offering a clean layout very focused on written content, it differs from a lot of the grid-style photography/artwork portfolio themes. Other than that it offers distraction free reading, 5 different blog layouts, shortcodes custom widgets and extensive customization options.
19. Litho
Litho is technically a multipurpose theme, but it has lots of stunning demos perfect for writers. One example is the Blog Metro demo. This has a clean masonry layout that showcases a grid of your most recent posts on the top of the homepage. It offers a clean design and strong typography, different layouts and templates, and extensive customization options. Litho custom Elementor elements, more than 300 page templates, unique navigation styles, WooCommerce integration and more.
20. Eleven Blog (Free)
Eleven Blog is a clean, content-focused theme for writers and bloggers. It offers a centered logo, stylish homepage layout with a featured post, WordPress post formats and galleries, and a responsive design. And since it’s free and on WordPress.org, you can install the theme right from your WordPress dashboard!
21. Buzzblog
Buzzblog is a minimalist theme for bloggers and writers. It offers 40 different layouts and unlimited styles, extensive customization options, and a custom 404 page – plus it’s Gutenberg compatible. But that’s not all – there are plenty of writer specific features you’re sure to love. These include sticky navigation, font icons, RTL support, excerpt length control, custom fonts, mega menus, custom subscribe page, SEO and speed optimization, MailChimp support and more.
22. Literatum
Literatum is a flexible theme for writers. It offers interview support, read time estimates, an animated sidebar (that is hidden by default) and more. The theme includes other notable features for multiple authors, video covers, custom typography, AJAX navigation and custom author avatars.
23. Brixton
Brixton is a clean and minimal responsive blog WordPress Theme with classic layout, designed and developed by Premiumcoding. The blog is the core of any good WordPress powered website. It all begins with storytelling. Brixton brings a unique and modern style and will present your content in a bold way. The theme presents content as the most significant and most important aspect of your website. What you write should be the most notable part of your blog and should bring visitor’s attention right away.
Brixton makes it easy to add you social links with the built-in administration panel. Simply add your accounts via the theme admin panel. And while you’re there you can make changes to your layout (sidebar or fullwidth), responsiveness option, custom logo, post meta options, Instagram block, three main posts under the menu, favicon, typography, color scheme and much more.
The theme was also built with multiple post formats. Brixton includes standard, quote, link, gallery, audio and video post formats. This way you can choose multiple mediums to communicate with your visitors.
24. Chic
Chic is an elegant and stylish blogging theme with great features to enhance your content. Use built-in options for custom colors, fonts, multiple headers, various post formats and custom colored category tags. Plus the theme is integrated with WooCommerce, so you can sell your own ebooks and more.
25. Mesa (Free)
Mesa is a clean theme perfect for blogging. It comes with custom widgets, post formats, color settings, and live customizer settings for your site options. Mesa also features built-in social links and is compatible with the JetPack plugin if you want to add infinite scroll.
26. Kouki (Free)
Kouki is a well-designed minimal theme for writers, bloggers or photographers. You can change colors, fonts and add social icons through the theme options.
Wrapping Up
In the end, there are tons of great themes for writers out there. But what really matters, is whether or not a theme is right for you. To find that out, you have look around find one you like, then test the waters a little bit with live demos, and you’ll quickly be able to find the one that suits you best. Any themes or resources you’d recommend? Let us know! And if you need any help getting started, checkout our tips for creating your first blog post.
Keep reading the article at WPExplorer. The article was originally written by Kyla on 2022-08-30 15:42:18.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.