It’s easy to find a list of free WordPress themes on the internet, but finding an article that objectively ranks their features and functionality is a bit more difficult. In order to spare you some time searching for these articles, I have done a bit of research myself and have provided a summary of the best five articles about the best free WordPress themes on the Internet.
1.) 50+ Beautiful & Free Responsive WordPress Themes to Build Awesome Websites 2016 by Colorlib
This article starts out by explaining how users love WordPress themes because they’re easy to set up and can be readily used for blog, personal, corporate, and portfolio purposes. Of course, because of their increased popularity, high quality WordPress themes have become harder and harder to find. That’s why Colorlib has created their top 50 free WordPress themes and has included their reasoning for why these themes are on the list, for example because of their style, plug-ins, and other included features.
2.) 40+ Best Free WordPress Themes for 2016 by Adelina Tuca
Adelina Tuca explains how bootstrap has become the most popular framework for front-end web development, as it provides a free collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. Bootstrap lets you utilize HTML, CSS, and Javascript to develop a responsive website that can fit mobile / smartphone sizes.
In the past year, however, this framework has been expanded to include smart watches and TV screens, which means that WordPress themes now need to take these sizes into consideration. The list provided in this article includes the themes that include these changes, and provides a description of each of their unique styles and features.
3.) 96+ Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes 2016 by Fresh Design Web
FreshDesignWeb suggests searching for the best responsive WordPress themes available on the internet when looking to create your website. It states that you will most likely be inspired by a website for a corporation/business/blog in your line of competition.
It goes on to describe each theme in detail, explaining what the style says about you and your product or business, and what features and plug-ins are included with each theme. Some of the descriptions are shorter than others, but this is still an incredibly thorough list and is well worth your time to read.
4.) 47 Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes 2016 by Designs Crazed
Designs Crazed observes that WordPress is the most popluar CMS of this generation, with most frameworks enabling browsing on tablets, smartphones, laptops, and more. This article by Designs Crazed includes frameworks that support these platforms and also includes those that support browsing on androids and IOS.
The list also takes readability and well documented website code into consideration. Themes built specifically for magazines, portfolios, eCommerce, fashion, travel, corporate, and bbpress forums are all exemplified throughout this article.
5.) 53 Best Free WordPress Themes 2016 by Brenda Barron
In this article for AThemes, Brenda Barron points out that free themes can be risky because they aren’t always well supported, and they might be created by inexperienced developers.
Therefore, this article focuses on high quality designs that also offer tangible support. Like in the previous articles, Barron also provides an explanation for each theme’s unique style and features, and what that says about the owner of the site.
While these articles all contain links and descriptions to high-quality, free WordPress themes, there are other places that contain just lists without any description. Here are two more sites that contain lists only:
Personally, my favorite theme for an eCommerce business site is Storefront because of its visual simplicity and direct incorporation of the WooCommerce plug-in. Storefront was developed by WooThemes, which makes it specially designed for eCommerce purposes. It has a lean and extensible codebase, which also makes it easy for developers to customize and extend.
That ends my collection of articles on free WordPress themes. In total, my collection includes over 300 free WordPress themes, many that are described in detail in each of their respective articles!