How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that has been around since 2003. The platform supports over 60 million websites on the internet, making it the most popular blogging and website management tool online. With this popularity comes countless WordPress extensions, plugins, and themes.

Even though the software includes a default theme, WordPress allows its users to switch easily between templates. Customizing the look and feel of these themes without knowledge of code is ideal for beginners and users can choose from thousands of free and premium themes.

Many of the free themes can be found on the official WordPress website, while premium templates can be purchased from individual developers and online marketplaces. WordPress also allows its users to create and develop their own templates. best wordpress themes gallery wittythemes

You may have read that these free templates are risky to download and install since they are not supported as well as the premium ones, or because they are designed by non-professionals. And honestly, there is some truth to that, which means that you must look for a quality layout that offers great support. As you might already know, premium WordPress themes come with an around-the-clock support team and offer solid code.

Using Free WordPress Themes and Templates

Some of the platform’s free templates are really worth looking into. Some even offer better functionality than premium themes and look incredibly professional. They are ideal for bloggers, hobbyists, art portfolios, photography, and more. Fully functional business websites can also be created using free WordPress templates. Some of the features that you can find on even free WordPress themes include responsive design, flexibility, easy customization, social sharing features, multiple page styles, automatic upgrades, retina-readiness, and multilingual support.

WordPress users can extend features and overall functionality of their blog or website with the help of numerous plugins. The platform has over 45,000 options available. Each one offers custom features for users who wish to build a website as they please. One can customize their website using widgets, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, navigation bars, and content display features.

Premium WordPress Themes and Templates

Because WordPress is open source, it allows anyone to create themes and templates for use on the platform. Many individuals and companies have created entire businesses dedicated solely to creating themes. This is a win-win situation for all parties because it allows you to access professional designs at an affordable price, while the template builders can earn a larger profit than they would if they specialized in custom website design. Creators are incentivized to make themes that look and function well because that results in more sales.

Many opt for premium templates so that their site will have more individuality than those built on free themes. They start at just a few dollars and can add some oomph to an otherwise standard website. Listed below are just some of the many options available to you. They are exclusive to Witty Themes and represent the work of some of the top web design professionals in the industry.

Focally Theme

Focally is a responsive, one-page, multi-purpose, kick-ass WordPress theme. It is built with Bootstrap and is 100% customizable, it is ideal for anyone looking to share their portfolio, advertise a business, or simply start a blog.

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Gloss Theme

For some, nothing is more important than a good presentation. Gloss was designed to suit hairdressers, beauty salons, massage parlors, and day spas looking to advertise their services on a beautiful website. This flexible template is extremely easy to use and comes loaded with tons of great features.

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Kaiser Theme

Kaiser, the German word for emperor, is an appropriate name for this regal theme. It features an astonishing, full-screen slider on the homepage and uses smooth transitions, price tables, grid-based portfolio layout, and a simple yet functional blog.

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Boundless Theme

Boundless is a professional, multi-purpose layout specifically tailored to businesses or portfolio websites. It is mobile ready and offer unique responsive design which will look stunning on any tablet or mobile device, conveying exactly what your customers want to see.

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Presenter Theme

Presenter is a responsive, one-page, multi-purpose theme built with Skeleton. It is 100% customizable and uses a drag-and-drop interface, making it ideal for users with little website building experience, but with high desire to learn.

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Idelux Theme

Built with an awesome Twitter-integrated, bootstrapped, responsive, HTML5 site template, Idelux will be a great solution for your business, portfolio, blog, or any other site, with options for boxed and full-width layout.

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Inception Theme

Inception is a beautiful, multi-purpose, one-page theme with lots of features to help you create your desired website. If you want a parallax theme that can highlight your work or your business, then Inception is just for you.

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Lavish Theme

Lavish is a multi-purpose WordPress theme designed with businesses in mind and is a unique template with consistent typography. No one million colors or unlimited features, just simple-to-use features packed up and ready to use – i.e. a powerful page builder for every page.

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Productor Theme

Productor is a business landing page template built with a very cool, responsive template with cool design, a clean template, and a slew of features.

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Bullseye Theme

Bullseye is a responsive, one-page/multi-page landing page built for promoting and selling products, services, or events.

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Other Trending WordPress Templates in 2017

Aside from what we offer, we would be remiss if we did not also feature some of the most trendy themes of 2017 so far. Each of these designs is multi-purpose and easy to customize. They all have powerful features that make them tempting choices when building your website. Keep reading to discover the best WordPress themes for free and paying users of the platform.

The X Theme

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The 5th version of the fully responsive X Theme is finally available. It comes with a new options panel, expanded demos, extensions, and price. It also includes several unique designed all wrapped up into one WordPress template. There are four designs, referred to as stacks, available in the theme. It has its own extensions and also third party extensions in order to integrate an abundance of features into your website.

Using the updated options panel, previewing the changes you made to your site happens live without needing to refresh the page or use a new tab. The X Theme allows you to make edits to the stack selection, content layout, custom fonts, etc.

Divi

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Divi has been a popular WordPress theme since its release by ElegantThemes. It has a wide range of features and a modern design. It is highly customizable, keeps getting updated, and is easy to use for beginners. Some of its features include the drag and drop page builder tool, a powerful theme options control panel, handy icons, large sliders, a responsive design, full-width layouts, and full-length one-page layouts.

Anyone creating an online business will find the WooCommerce-compatible, premade layouts for an online shop very handy.

Hestia

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Hestia is a free theme that can be downloaded and installed on your WordPress website easily. It has been designed for easy user interactions and quick setups. Hestia is multipurpose, meaning that personal and business websites can use this template. The layout is fully responsive, which will make your website look great on any of the viewer’s mobile device.

It is highly recommended for small companies and startups, because of its sleek slider area where you can explain the mission statement and put promotions in the limelight, add short explanations about your employees, and a few testimonials for a more personal touch. The best features of Hestia include the drag and drop editor, WooCommerce integration, translation tools, custom background settings, mega menus, one-click install, and much more.

Flash

Flash is a free, multipurpose, and flexible theme to consider if you are using WordPress. It is fully responsive and has a built-in drag and drop page builder. The theme has amazing features to offer its users, such as a Toolkit plugin, pre-made About page, widget areas, 11 custom widgets, and more.

Your logo can easily be uploaded onto the website, and the Services widget displays your services or products using images and icons. Making your own buttons is made easy thanks to the call to action widget, which does not require any knowledge of shortcodes. Other features of the Flash template are a full portfolio, an animated number counter, a slider for banner images, an area for your team member biographies and pictures, color options, a full blog, social sharing buttons, and WooCommerce support.

Moesia

moseia

The free Moesia WordPress template is ideal for different kinds of businesses. It offers 11 predefined blocks for your homepage in order to enhance the look and feel of your site. Every one of these blocks can work with parallax backgrounds. This is a feature that will surely catch any visitor's eye, especially since you can choose specific background colors for these blocks. Additional handy features include two blog layouts, several effects and animations, Google Fonts, custom widgets, responsive layout, translation-ready features, a custom header, and social media integration.

ShopIsle

ShopIsle is totally free but can be upgraded in case you need additional features. A handy feature for viewers who are visiting your site on different mobile devices is the fully responsive design. This is also beneficial for your website with search engines which tend to prefer responsive sites. Some features include WooCommerce integration, the ability to integrate a payment processor, localization files, a contact form, and full-screen header parallax effects.

Your brand will be presented to visitors in a unique manner thanks to the About Us page that supports text and images. In order to showcase promotions and events, you can place text and buttons on top of a hi-res image that you uploaded. You may add a shopping cart and product bundles as widgets on your site.

ColorMag

This WP look is incredibly popular among new bloggers. It is an excellent option to use for making a sleek magazine website. You can easily make money through this theme using its spots for listing your own advertisements. Your readers will be able to follow you on all your social media pages, thanks to numerous social media buttons. The ColorMag homepage has many widgets on it, making it easier to manage and move around elements on your site. Other handy features include custom headers and colors, the integration of a wide array of plugins such as WooCommerce, and more.

Llorix One Lite

Llorix One Lite has several premium features to offer its users. Website visitors will be able to access it via any of their mobile devices thanks to its fully responsive design. They will be able to see all your content in one go since the theme has a one-page layout. You may customize the homepage for your own brand using its different modules. Handy features of this theme are parallax scrolling, buttons and a call to action text, and a customizable ribbon for introducing your company.

Llorix One Lite offers a full blog to give free content to clients and boost your search engine rankings. Your online store will easily integrate with WooCommerce and you will easily stay in touch with customers through the contact form. Two convenient modules are the one-page module with columns and icons, plus the one that puts your employees in the spotlight. Of course, this theme comes with social media buttons, widgets, and even with an embedded map.

Find Me

FindMe can help you create your dream directory site. This top template design offers an advanced search and lets users locate listings with ease. Choose your listing layouts from a variety of options and feature your most popular or latest listings in a carousel list, masonry list, or a simple box design.

The template guarantees that all of your listings will look impeccable and includes essential features like a regional filter, easy booking, Google Maps, paid listings, and free plugins like Visual Composer and Slider Revolution.

Superhero

Superhero is a tres chic website template for those looking for the most cutting edge multipurpose design. The drag-and-drop visual composer allows you to make the design your own with over 140 elements and 790 theme options.

True to its name, Superhero offer high performance, designed for zippy loading times. The award-winning design can save you time and money with pre-built demo sites and some ridiculously efficient add-ons, like lazy image loading, which only downloads images when they are needed.

Garage

Give your blog, magazine, or news website some pizzazz with the Garage template. The bold and responsive design includes 14 amazing page styles to choose from, all of which can be edited using the Visual Composer page builder, which can be used to drag and drop elements wherever you wish and requires no coding knowledge.

Rounding out the Garage template are unlimited custom sidebar options, mega menu, Google fonts, XML demo content, and clean code.

GetNews

Change the way people consume current events with the GetNews blog and magazine theme. This unique template puts the focus on the news that matters most with over 30 home page designs, post grid, light and dark skins, unlimited color customization options, and over 750 Google font choices.

Designed for single or multiple languages, GetNews truly caters to an international audience. No detail was not considered, as demonstrated by the two date format options, instant search, poll widget, and fully responsive design.

Epoint

In most businesses, professionalism is key. That is why the Epoint business template is a vital addition to any organization, agency, consulting or finance firm looking to impress. The flexible design includes dozens of pre-made home page styles, gorgeous portfolio and blog layouts, and full customizability through Theme Options and Visual composer.

Six awesome premium plugins round out the package and include Slider Revolution for creating a stunning slide with special animation effects, WooCommerce for adding an online store to your site, and Contact Form 7, which allows you to create your own forms.

Passion Blogger

If you’re a blogger, the default template you’ve been using just won’t can’t cut it anymore. Show the world how passionate you are with Passion Blogger. The template allows you to choose from hundreds of different layout variations and further tweak them in real time using WordPress Customizer to make it your own.

Passion Blogger includes everything you need to not only create a beautiful and highly readable blog, but also to ensure that your users spread the word with full social integration, support for mailing list creation, and analytics tools.

Exito

How many times have you heard a template described as comfortable? Exito classifies itself as that very things. That’s because this creative template makes it easy for young agencies, studios, and freelancers to design a website with great ease.

It accomplishes this with a number of great features including Visual Composer with ultimate add-ons, Revolutions Slider, Easy Color Manager, Sticky Menu, WooCommerce, and dozens of other things designed to make your experience as smooth as possible.

Bonfire

Bonfire is a beautiful, creative, and multipurpose template that brings users an optimized experience via a combination of clean design and high-end coding. Designed with you and your visitors in mind, Bonfire is an inspiration.

Its core features include the Super ArrowPress Admin Panel, which enables you to make all changes in a user-friendly and intuitive workspace, the Powerful Page Builder, which is the most popular visual composer on the market, and WooCommerce, if you want to add a shop to your website.

Gravity

You may not really think much of a Coming Soon page, but they are becoming increasingly important for building enthusiasm and an initial email marketing base. If your Under Construction page still displays an image of an orange traffic cone, consider upgrading to Gravity.

Touted as the most customizable Coming Soon template, it includes the Visual Composer drag-and-drop page builder, a design tool for making changes in real time, and theme options for making straightforward changes. You can even choose from a wide range of included backgrounds that will make your site truly pop.

Life

With an astounding 18,000 users, Life is one of the most popular portfolio templates. With over ten unique designs, a high level of customizability, flexible images and videos, and tons of gallery and layout options, it’s not hard to see why.

Included with the template is everything you need to make any changes with ease, like a drag-and-drop page builder, live customizer, and an advanced theme options panel. With a focus on aesthetics, the design is guaranteed to appeal to even the most critical of visitors.

ReCreation

Storytellers rejoice, you’ve just stumbled upon the ultimate theme for anyone who understands the necessity of words, photos, and design to work in unison to set a mood!

ReCreation is a clean, modern, and fully responsive blog template. It includes numerous different layouts, quick access to theme defaults, one-click demos, and full WP customizer integration, perfect for helping you share your experiences with the online world.