10+ Most Popular and Best Free WordPress Themes in 2026

If you’d like to get yourself a fresh and beautiful theme for your WordPress website, then this roundup is for you! You don’t need to research anything and type queries into your search engine for hours. I got you covered. These are the most popular and best free WordPress themes on the market. And I really do mean it! 🤩

Here’s how this list came to be:

First, I went to the official theme directory at WordPress.org and looked through the top 20-30 themes from the “popular” tab. I removed all themes that had less than a handful reviews and also ones that were super-new. The remaining themes I installed all on a test site, added some demo content and tested the site’s performance with PageSpeed Insights. Everything with “less than stellar” results got scratched from the list.

What I ended up with – and what you can see in the following list – are only the very best free WordPress themes on the market.

👉 Shortcut: see our top 3 theme recommendations here.

10+ best free WordPress themes for 2026

Neve

Before we dive into the main list, let me just quickly highlight a theme of our own – Neve – our flagship theme. It’s been downloaded 5,943,187 times so far, and has the average rating of 94%.

It’s a great WordPress theme if you want to get your site online quickly, and use an out-the-box design that you can import with a couple of clicks.

The design is modern, optimized for mobile devices, the theme loads fast, and doesn’t take a lot of your web server’s resources. It also offers 20+ free starter sites (for business sites, blogs, portfolios, ecommerce, etc.), and even more of them if you decide to upgrade from lite to the premium theme.

We also did our best to make the user panel as friendly as possible – highlighting the most commonly accessed features such as header customizations, fonts, colors, logos, etc.

While other themes on this list offer starter sites as well (in the form of various page templates), Neve invites you to pick one right after installing the theme. This makes it a great solution to build a design that matches your brand quickly.

Astra

Astra is one of the most popular and also one of the fastest-growing WordPress themes of today.

What sets it apart is that it’s a performance-oriented minimal theme that only gives you very basic features out the box, albeit in a very functional wrapper. And then, you can pick which modules you need and activate/deactivate them accordingly.

You can very easily access the most common features through the Astra panel, and you get to choose from more than 300 website templates.

Another advantage of Astra’s is that it’s compatible with the most popular page builders on the market (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy), and, of course, the Gutenberg editor. There are also starter sites available for each of the builders.

All this means that you can build a website with Astra quickly, and then customize it to fit your needs 100%. However, just know that the out-the-box design of the theme isn’t much until you import a starter site on top of it.

OceanWP

OceanWP is in many ways similar to Astra – the way the theme delivers its features is similar, and the focus on minimalism is also similar.

You use this theme by selecting which features you need and then fine-tune the individual aspects of your site. The degree of possible customization is also similar to that of Astra’s.

Above that, OceanWP is very good when it comes to ecommerce-related features and settings. You can look into this if you’re planning to launch an ecommerce store as it has a WooCommerce integration.

The theme is also compatible with page builder plugins. However, again, the out-the-box design doesn’t look like much.

Blocksy

Blocksy has been one of my personal favorites for a while now because of the amount of customization that it allows and also by how easy it makes all those customizations to do.

This is achieved due to Blocksy’s deep integration with the WordPress Customizer. It basically brought all its features into the Customizer and made them easily accessible through the native sections there. It kinda also made those options look great – the UI itself, I mean – which is not always something that could be said about the Customizer on its own.

As you’d expect, Blocksy also comes with a number of great starter site designs, which you can all import with a couple of clicks. What’s particularly great about those is that they are all very modern and nice-looking. Every starter design feels intentional and not like filler to reach X total designs or something.

This theme can be a great choice if you’re after something that you can just plug and play, and start using without much upfront work.

Hello Biz

You might know this theme as the newest member of the Elementor family. It’s basically an evolution of their previous theme – Hello.

It’s not a secret, but this theme is perhaps only an option if you intend to use Elementor itself on your site. It comes with good native integrations for the theme and it’s set up in a way to receive any Elementor design you might want to build on top with no hiccups.

Speaking of building on top of it; Hello Biz comes with a setup/design wizard that lets you pick from some ready-made designs and then tune them up to match your needs and your niche.

In the end, a great minimal theme if you like to build your pages with the Elementor page builder.

Kadence

Kadence is a WordPress theme that comes in free and pro versions. It’s pretty easy to use if you’re new to WordPress, with a bunch of starter templates you can import and customize.

It’s actually a great solution no matter if you’re building a site for yourself or need to work on a client’s site. You can build elements such as headers and footers through a visual builder, and most customization happens in the WordPress Customizer.

It works with the block editor, too, plus builders like Elementor. There’s also a free Kadence Blocks plugin that adds extra functionality without needing a separate page builder.

Kadence is flexible-enough for online stores, course sites, membership platforms, or regular blogs. Basically a solid choice if you want something that loads quickly and gives you decent customization options without getting too complicated.

Extendable

Extendable is a bit different from the other themes that came on this list before it. Mainly, it’s a block theme – meaning that its main design features come integrated with the block editor and the full side editor.

The theme offers some really nice and abundant style selection options – you can pick from tens of pairings of fonts, sizes, colors, and backgrounds – and makes them easily switchable from the block editor. It also looks great on all devices.

Extendable can be a good choice if you’re looking for a modern theme that will play along nicely with WordPress’ native block editor.

Ollie

Ollie has been the talk of the town for a good while now. They have been innovating the block theme space quite a lot, introducing very interesting solutions into what the “block building experience” could/should be.

The theme comes with lots of patterns (all nicely categorized), global style settings, and an overall great package of customizations. But what Ollie’s really known for are the style presets it offers. And this isn’t just about font choice or typography settings – it’s whole, nicely put together color palettes and presets that give you the creative control to make your website truly distinctive.

Overall, it’s a very nice package for users who want to take the block editor to the next level.

Zakra

You can enjoy Zakra for a number of reasons. First, it does offer more than 100 pre-made designs that you can use on your site. Those are quite nicely done, and you can choose if you want to import a design for the block editor, Elementor or Brizy.

Zakra is also SEO-friendly, it allows you to customize everything you see on the page, and puts all the key settings front and center in the theme’s panel. You get quick access shortcuts to the most popular customization areas – such as your site identity, header and footer settings, global styles, and more.

The developer also promises Zakra to be “the only theme you’ll ever need,” so I guess you can go ahead and test that.

GeneratePress

This is another WordPress theme that’s similar in principle to Astra and OceanWP. Once again, you get an extended customization interface with a lot of dials and knobs. You can tune up your typography, color scheme, layout options, post formats and other fine details.

GeneratePress promises stability, lightweight structure, and most importantly, focus on speed. As with many themes these days, there are also loads of starter designs to choose from.

The settings panel gives you easy access to all the most important features and settings – such as your site identity, color options, typography system, and layout options.

However, this theme is a bit more geared toward delivering its most useful features in the premium version. The theme options available in the free version are a little under par compared to what’s in Astra or OceanWP.

Twenty Twenty-Four

You probably didn’t expect this one … after all, it is one of the default WordPress themes. However, this one brings a lot to the picture, and to this day remains the best default theme of them all!

It’s the first truly useful block theme that gained serious popularity. It’s very well optimized right out the box, and comes with unobtrusive enough design features that make it possible to actually use this theme on a production website.

If you haven’t used a block theme before, Twenty Twenty-Four can be a great entry to this world.

How to pick your ideal free WordPress theme?

Hint: you can probably narrow it down to just three

Okay, so we’ve covered some awesome examples of the best free WordPress themes that the market has to offer, and each of them delivers some cool features, designs, and customization options.

So, how to pick the best one for your site?

For me, this comes down to three scenarios based on your needs and the type of user you are:

Scenario C ✍️ If you’re a beginning blogger or a small businesses that’s just starting out and you want to quickly launch a site that will look good right out of the gate, then go with Blocksy You’ll have an aesthetic, highly-functional website without having to do much work, but you’ll also be able to customize the heck out of it when you eventually have some time to do so – either through the starter designs available or by tinkering with things in the Customizer.

Got your favorite one among these best free WordPress themes? Or maybe you’ve used one or more of these themes and want to share your thoughts? Write in the comments below.

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