Best Themes for Making Websites in Wordpress

Most Popular Wordpress Themes

Wordpress is the content management system of choice for millions of websites around the globe.

The reason is that while it is easy to design just any kind of website with Wordpress, the themes and plugins help give it an attractive look and extend functionalities according to your need.

Themes have a crucial role in terms of design, performance and SEO of your website.

Selecting the right theme will help you provide a superior user experience through a fast loading and responsive website as well as rank higher.

Speed is an important consideration in terms of SERP rankings and therefore people look for themes that are fast and responsive.

How do you select the right theme for your Wordpress blog or website?

To select the right theme for your Wordpress site, you will need to consider several factors including speed, responsiveness and SEO as well as customizability, updates and support. Several themes also offer a large range of free and premium well designed website templates. It depends on your needs as well as the quality of the Wordpress theme.

Speed: Speed is one of the most critical considerations for bloggers when selecting a theme for their Wordpress blog. You want a lightweight and fast loading theme for a fast loading blog. Slow loading, poorly coded or heavy themes can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. So, check out which themes are known to be lightweight and fast.

SEO friendliness: You want a theme that provides good results in terms of SEO, speed, and performance are critical factors in terms of SEO and therefore, well designed, fast and mobile responsive themes can help you rank faster and higher.

Customizability: You want to provide your users the best experience. However, you also want to design a website that looks attractive and engages users.

Even if you prefer a simple and minimal design for your website/blog you will still want a theme that can be customized to make changes to typography, colors and other options. Some of the best themes in the Wordpress repository provide a large number of customizations to help you create best websites.

Prebuilt templates: In case you want to avoid the hassle of designing a website from scratch, then you can just import one of the existing prebuilt templates provided by the theme developer and design your own website based on it.

Support and Update: The best themes are regularly updated and are safer to use. The developers provide regular updates, documentation and support if you face any difficulty using or customizing the theme.

Carefully make your selection to give your blog the best appearance and help it perform better. Here is a list of the best themes that can help you create awesome websites.

Best Wordpress Themes

Astra:

Astra by BrainStorm Force is on the top of our list of best Wordpress theme. It is undeniably an excellent multipurpose theme that can be used to design multiple types of websites. The theme offers great customization options and is superfast. However, there are more factors that Astra is so popular among Wordpress users.

The theme has received a 4.9 star rating out of five from more than 5,500 Wordpress reviews. Users appreciate Astra for its speed, responsiveness and customizability.

It is one of the most user friendly themes in the Wordpress theme repository.

Astra is available in both free and pro versions and you can get a lot even from the free version. The theme suits the needs of both new users and web designers. It offers more than 250 prebuilt theme templates that you can install on your website with just one click.

If you need higher customizability, you can opt for Astra Pro that offers multiple extra features including higher customization options for header, footer, sidebars, menus and website layout.

Astra is also compatible with popular page builders like Elementor and Spectra. Spectra Gutenberg Blocks are a great addition to the existing set of Gutenberg blocks available with Wordpress.

However, if you are planning to launch an ecommerce website, Astra pro is not just lightweight but its inbuilt woocommerce modules can help you design the most awesome looking ecommerce site.

It is fast and responsive and despite the number of features and optimizations, Astra manages to keep your website loading superfast. This theme has more than 1 million active installations which shows how popular this theme is.

You can also expect awesome support from the Astra team. If you are planning to launch online courses or a tutorial website, Astra can be the best theme for you which integrates well with LifterLMS and LearnDash. Other cool features include related posts and a sticky sidebar option.

• User friendly, responsive and SEO friendly
• Highly customizable
• Superfast theme
• Prebuilt templates
• Advanced hooks with the pro version
• More header and footer customization options with the pro version.
• Flexible and integrates well with leading page builders
• Inbuilt woocommerce modules for ecommerce sites

Generatepress:

Generatepress is a super lightweight and highly customizable Wordpress theme that is favored by a large number of bloggers and website owners. This theme is well known for its excellent speed, customizability, responsiveness and SEO friendliness.

The Generatepress theme is fast and can help you design awesome websites in no time with its excellent customization features. People who need more can opt for the premium version which offers a lot of extra features like infinite scroll, more style controls, off canvas panel and so on.

Whether you are designing a Wordpress blog or an ecommerce website, Generatepress is suitable for all types of websites. You can use the GenerateBlocks plugin with Generatepress to design any type of website.

The Gutenberg blocks based GenerateBlocks plugin adds several useful blocks that work fantastic and keep your site fast.

The theme is rated five out of five stars in the Wordpress theme repository.

Generatepress is also compatible with all the major page builders including Elementor and Beaver Builder.

The premium users get free access to the GenerateBlocks pattern library that includes more than 150 prebuilt templates. These ready to use templates can be great for designing your own website.

However, even if you are using the free version, there are many customizations available and creating a website with a minimal design is absolutely easy with Generatepress. The annual subscription of Generatepres is available for only $59 and a lifetime subscription for only $249.

There are several advantages of using Generatepress to build your website including:

• Super lightweight and superfast
• Clean and minimal design
• SEO friendly
• Easy Woocommerce integration
• Premium version includes more layout features and advanced hook system
• Supports leading page builders
• Infinite Scroll
• Sticky navigation
• More than 150 prebuilt templates

Blocksy

Blocksy is the most popular block theme in the Wordpress theme repository that has grown highly popular for its speed and design features.

It is a very light and superfast theme that beats several other leading wordpress themes in terms of performance.

Blocksy theme is highly customizable and offers several attractive templates to design your website.

Blocksy is not just blazing fast but it is also highly customizable and extendable. You can create just any type of website using Blocky including education website, ecommerce website, blog or portfolio website.

This theme is also compatible with all the major page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer and Brizy.

Another great feature of Blocksy is that it packs more in its free version than any other theme.

You can add your social media accounts and related posts easily with Blocksy theme.

Blocksy also includes a highly customizable header section where you can include widgets of your choice.

If you want an even faster and better experience then you can try the pro version of the theme.

The pro version includes local Google fonts, Adobe Typekit fonts, advanced header and footer build as well as custom fonts and advanced hooks systems. You can localize Google fonts with the pro version and avoid any GDPR related hassles.

Blocksy theme can be a highly suitable option if you are looking for a fast and highly customizable theme that can be customized to build any type of website and which integrates well with all the leading website builders.

Main features of Blocksy and Blocksy Pro:

• Gutenberg Blocks based theme
• Blazing fast and highly customizable
• Responsive and SEO friendly
• Large number of prebuilt started sites
• White Label (you can replace original branding)
• Speed features including image lazy loading and disable emoji scripts
• Advanced hooks systems and advanced header and footer layout with the pro version

Neve:

Neve is also one of the most popular and widely used themes in the Wordpress theme repository. It has more than 300,000 active installations and is rated 4.5 out of five on Wordpress theme repository.

Neve is also a very fast and highly customizable theme. It can be used to build just any kind of website including blog, portfolio website, educational website, ecommerce sites and other types of websites.

Neve is a well coded, highly responsive and fully optimized theme. It is a minimalist theme with highly extendable design.

The theme also offers more than 100 starter sites that can be used to design your own website.

Neve works well with almost all the leading page builders including Elementor, Beaver builder, Visual Composer, and Divi Builder. Neve has been brought to you by ThemeIsle which has also created another popular theme Hestia and the OtterBlocks Plugin.

The theme offers solid customization options including a highly customizable header and adjustable layout. Neve’s pro version costs $69. However, ThemeIsle provides support through livechat only to its agency customers and the agency plan costs $299 per year.

Ocean WP

OceanWP is also one of the most popular options among all the Wordpress themes.

With more than 700,000 active installations and a 4.9 out of five stars rating, it is undeniably one of the most popular wordpress themes.

What makes it so popular is its speed and functionality. The theme is highly extendable and very fast loading.

It also includes several exclusive woocommerce features that can help you grow your conversion rate. The theme can be customized to suit the needs of various devices including desktop, mobile and tablet screens.

The theme works well with almost all the popular site builders including Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, Visual Composer, Divi, SiteOrigin, etc.

You get access to several more useful features with the pro version including premium woocommerce add on that can be used to create highly customer friendly ecommerce websites.

If you want to build an online shop, you can opt for Ocean Ecommerce Pro bundle and for the other types of websites, if you need extra options you can purchase the pro version of Ocean WP. The Ocean WP pro bundle starts from only $31 per month.

Hestia

Hestia is another popular theme by ThemeIsle that has more than 100,000 active installations and is rated 5 out of five on the Wordpress theme repository.

The theme has a multipurpose modern one page design and seamlessly integrates with almost all the popular page builders.

Hestia is modern, fast, sleek and highly extendable with several crucial customization options.

Like the other theme by ThemeIsle, Hestia also offers access to prebuilt templates.

It integrates seamlessly with almost all leading page builders including Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin and Divi Builder.

Hestia pro comes with several additional features including woocommerce integration. The theme provides an out of the box design for ecommerce store. It also offers a fully customizable homepage.

If you want to build a blogging website, you get more options including author and subscription as well as various layouts and masonry grids.

Overall, Hestia is a high performance theme that is user friendly and customizable and can be used to design almost any type of website without any issue.

The Hestia Pro personal plan starts from $69 for individual websites.

Conclusion

Whether you are going to create a blog or ecommerce website or just a portfolio website, you will need to consider responsiveness, speed, SEO friendliness and extendability among the several other factors that are crucial to selecting the right Wordpress theme.

The above list includes the fastest themes in the Wordpress repository which are also SEO friendly, highly responsive and best in terms of functionality as well as page builder and plugin integration.

Themes like Astra and Blocksy pack a lot of punch in their free versions. From customizing the header fully to footer and copyright, these themes offer a lot in their free version that you can use to launch a well designed and fast website.

However, the pro versions of these themes including Astra, Generatepress, Blocksy and the others are designed to provide even more.

The biggest benefit of using these themes is that even with no knowledge of coding, you will find it very easy to design awesome websites.

With more than 1,000,000 active installations, Astra is the most trusted name in the world of Wordpress themes.

However, there are more themes that compete with Astra in terms of functionality, features and speed and you have some great options to choose from if you need best in class performance.