A personal blog is a great way to share your thoughts with the world. Whether you are keeping in touch with distant friends and family from afar, or ensuring you keep up with your writing, a personal blog is just what you need. WordPress gives you the most flexibility and freedom to make your blog your own while also being one of the easiest platforms to master.
These simple and free WordPress themes will be just what you need to take your personal blog to the next level. Many of them are responsive, which means they look great no matter whether you are viewing from a computer screen, smartphone, or tablet. A number of the themes I’ve included in this collection are also a flat design, making them modern and sensible.
1. Blogly Lite
Blogly Lite is a responsible personal WordPress blog theme. It boasts a beautiful flat design that includes basic customization options including a color picker and easy to upload logo. Blogly Lite makes use of post formats, so you can use your WordPress blog a bit like a Tumblr blog, with image posts, audio posts, video posts, quote posts, and more.
Blogly is also available in a pro version for $49 when you join ThemeFurnace.
2. Bushwick
Bushwick is a light, responsive WordPress theme that emphasizes the power of nice typography and clean lines. Put your content side by side with a bold, vertically-oriented image filling your sidebar. Set a default header image to be used across your entire site, or set the header to display your featured image on posts and pages.
3. Eighties
Eighties is a free personal WordPress theme that is clean, modern, and goes back to the basics. It puts the focus on the bold and beautiful header image, which can be set to show your featured image on posts. There is no place for AdSense here; instead, put the focus where it belongs: on your writing.
Eighties’ creator actively maintains the theme, and has released updates and plugins to make bbPress (WordPress forums) work beautifully with it, as well as support for the new WordPress portfolio feature (which you can enable in Jetpack). This is a great theme for a personal site where you show off your work and your writing.
4. Esperanza
Esperanza is a typography-focused, responsive WordPress theme for personal bloggers. Each post is headlined with a large featured image, and the theme options allow for a solid or image background and custom text colors. Let your writing stand out with comfortable line spacing and negative space.
5. Flounder
Flounder offers up a flat, responsive design for personal blogging that supports custom post formats with their own colors and icons. Users applaud the chic, modern color scheme although they dislike the lack of easy options for changing the colors. However, if you are looking for a simple WordPress theme that you can throw onto your site that looks awesome right out of the box, Flounder is just what you need.
6. Inkness
Inkness is a responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme that gives your images all the attention they deserve. With a huge slider image headlining the page, you can make a bold visual impact. Posts fall into a grid layout below. Customize the widgets in the header and footer to your liking. While perfect for image-centric personal blogs, Inkness is adaptable and could suit many different kinds of websites.
Inkness is also available in a premium version for $25.95.
7. Serene
Serene is a free theme by Elegant Themes that gives your content the space it deserves. Featured photos are big and bold, headlining each post. The design is simple and sensible, and allows for custom post formats. Everything is in its place in this relaxed, responsive theme, and you can customize the colors to your heart’s content.
8. Sparkling
Sparkling is a responsive WordPress blogging theme created with Bootstrap, a framework for creating great websites that adapt to any screen size. With a beautiful slider topping the theme and nice use of space in the design, the theme makes great use of flat design. A color picker and lots of other customization options makes this theme a great choice for anyone looking for a powerful design to support their great content. Sparkling features infinite scrolling, so nobody needs to break their groove by clicking to future pages of posts.
9. Story
Story is a colorful, flat blogging theme. Use the built-in color picker to customize the design to your liking, and then let your images take center stage. With a responsive layout and infinite scrolling, Story is a great way to tell your story to audiences with any size screen.
10. Writr
Writr is a minimalist theme for, well, writers. It is responsive and uses flat design, and supports multiple post formats like a Tumblog. Your menu sits comfortably on the left side to keep the content area distraction-free. Built-in customization options allow you to change the colors or apply your own background image to make the theme truly your own.
Those are our picks for the best free WordPress themes for personal blogs, but there are lots of themes out there and these ones only scratch the surface.
What are your favorite free WordPress themes for personal blogs? Share them in the comments below!
