Top 5 Best Free WordPress Themes

05/12/2023

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WordPress

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Starting to build a website with a free WordPress theme is a suitable option for most new users who are getting acquainted with WordPress. A high-quality free WordPress theme will help you save money but still provide good website optimization capabilities, making it user-friendly and search engine-friendly. In this article, Bii shares 5 high-quality free WordPress themes that are very suitable for building websites.

Free WordPress theme but fully meets SEO optimization criteria

What is a Best free WordPress theme?

As we know, Theme is an essential component of WordPress. It is the framework that structures the website. A good WordPress Theme needs to meet the following criteria:

Fast page loading speed: The theme is optimized with clean and compact code to provide the fastest experience for users, saving maximum resources for server hosting.
Responsive on devices: Nowadays, the requirement for the compatibility of the website interface on devices such as tablets and smartphones is mandatory. A good theme needs to be 100% compatible with display capabilities on such devices.
Beautiful and professional design: The number one reason to choose a good quality theme is an intuitive and user-friendly interface. The theme has many useful features that meet the usage needs of many users, which is synonymous with high-quality themes.
Regular updates: Regular theme updates show that the development team is very concerned and devotes a lot of time and effort to it. In addition, regular updates will make the theme more secure and compatible with the latest WordPress versions.
Good customer support: The ability to resolve customer issues is also an important factor in keeping users and evaluating the quality of the theme. You can’t use a product that has terrible customer support, can you?

Based on the above 5 criteria for evaluating the quality of WordPress themes, Bii will introduce 5 themes that fully meet those criteria. Those themes are:

Blocksy
Kadence
Astra
GeneratePress
Neve

Bii will thoroughly evaluate the quality of each Theme listed below.

See more: Build a comprehensive FSE website with Cwicly Toolkit

A good WordPress theme needs to have the ability to display compatibly on devices (Responsive).

5 Best Quality Free WordPress Themes

Blocksy

Blocksy is a new and free WordPress theme that was launched in 2019. It is a theme specifically designed to support Gutenberg and has gained high praise from the WordPress community for its flexibility and the ability to customize the Header. Its most notable feature is the Hook content which allows users to easily add any HTML, image, or text to multiple positions on the website.

Pros of Blocksy

Customizable and easy-to-edit website content and layout as desired
Clean and beautiful interface design
Optimized for fast page loading and SEO-friendly
Perfectly compatible with popular plugins such as Woocommerce, Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7…
Ability to Hook Content allows you to add desired content to the sidebar, header, main content, Footer, or anywhere on the Website.
Free version with full necessary features similar to many other paid themes.

Cons of Blocksy

The free version limits many important features such as working with dynamic content, advanced Woocommerce customization, and deep Hook content.

Overall, after about 6 months of using and experiencing both the free and paid versions of Blocksy, Bii evaluates it as an extremely high-quality theme (possibly the best in this review). With 740 5-star ratings and only 1 4-star rating (a 99.8% 5-star rating rate), it’s enough to make you feel how impressive and good the Blocksy theme is.

The theme loads quickly is optimized for SEO, and is user-friendly. The free version of Blocksy can be among the top free themes currently available on the WordPress platform.

Download Blocksy free

Buy Premium

Blocksy is a highly user-friendly and SEO-compliant theme that supports Gutenberg’s many versatile functions

Kadence

The Kadence theme is basically 80% similar to Blocksy. Many people rate Kadence as a copied product of Blocksy. After more than 2 months of experience, Bii has shared some pros and cons of it as follows:

Pros of Kadence

Kadence has a slightly better performance speed than Blocksy, loads pages faster, and has a cleaner code because Kadence has removed some features compared to Blocksy.
Kadence allows for similar customization capabilities as Blocksy, from designing headers and footers to using the Hook content feature which lets you add any HTML, text, or image layout element to any position on the website.

Cons of Kadence

The Kadence interface is not as clean and tidy as Blocksy, Bii feels it is a bit rough and ugly.
Many features are missing compared to Blocksy such as working with dynamic content, and a lack of deep support for the Woocommerce store.

In general, after about 6 months of using and experiencing both the free and paid versions of Blocksy, Bii assesses this as an extremely high-quality theme. The theme loads quickly is optimized for SEO and is user-friendly. The free version of Blocksy may be among the top best free themes currently available on the WordPress platform.

See more: 7 criteria for choosing the best WordPress Themes

Download Kadence free

Kadence is a theme for website speed performance which is even better than Blocksy

Astra

Astra is one of the most widely used themes on the WordPress platform. Currently, there have been nearly 2 million downloads of the theme from the WordPress theme repository. Astra is trusted and used by a large community of WordPress users, and it has received positive evaluations from many WordPress experts.

See more: what is SEO-optimized website 2023?

Pros of Astra

Compatible and working perfectly with most popular page builders such as Elementor, and Beaver Builder.
Capable of good display support for mobile and tablet devices.
Fully supports necessary features such as Woocommerce integration, and layout editing for blogs.
A User-friendly interface is suitable for most beginners with WordPress.
In terms of diverse and abundant features, Astra outperforms Kadence and Blocksy.

Cons of Astra

Many useful features are only available in the paid version of Astra, such as creating Mega Menus, in-depth editing for Woocommerce, hook content feature, product and blog post filters, and many other advanced customization options.
Due to the integration of many features, Astra’s speed is slower than Blocksy and Kadence
The SEO support capability is not as good as Blocksy, and the ability to work with SEO plugins such as RankMath or Yoast SEO is still limited

Currently, Astra has upgraded its version to support compatibility with Gutenberg, specifically by launching the Spectra toolkit that works perfectly with Astra, through similar blocks such as Kadence blocks, stackable… The free version of Astra can meet up to 90% of basic editing requirements. This is a very suitable theme for beginners who want to build a website on the WordPress platform.

Download Astra free.

Buy Premium

Astra is an extremely popular and well-optimized theme with nearly 2 million downloads

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme developed by Tom Usborne. Launched in 2014, it quickly became one of the most popular themes on the market. Later, the company also released a Pro version with many additional features.

GeneratePress is an extremely lightweight and clean theme. This is the theme that provides the best page loading speed among the current WordPress themes available. GeneratePress currently has over 500,000 downloads with nearly 1,400 5-star ratings accounting for over 98% of total ratings, making it one of the best-rated 5-star themes currently on the WordPress theme repository.

See more: easily accelerate WordPress websites to 100/100 with Accelerator.

Pros of GeneratePress

Speed is the number one advantage of GeneratePress. This theme is optimized to help you achieve maximum speed on the WordPress platform. GeneratePress is faster than all themes in this article; it’s number one in terms of page load speed.
GeneratePress is an excellent support team. The majority of your requests will be addressed within one day.
The code is extremely clean and optimized. By minimizing unnecessary code structures, GeneratePress simplifies the code and makes the theme work stably with most plugins, with very few conflicts.
It has high-security features and is one of the few themes that regularly update security features.

Nhược điểm GeneratePress

Due to minimizing most features to maximize page loading speed, GeneratePress lacks many necessary features compared to Blocksy (supports Woocommerce, works with dynamic content, advanced layout customization for posts, category pages, etc.)
The interface is fairly simple and somewhat user-friendly but lacks many features needed to create a beautiful user interface for websites.
Many professional features are only available in the paid version (editing Woocommerce, deep Hook system customization, global font and color editing, off-canvas, etc.).

Generally, this is a fairly simple and fastest-optimized theme possible. GeneratePress is very suitable for websites with simple structures that do not require too many complex features. Additionally, if you have good customization skills and a lot of time to learn and adjust, this is the best Theme you should use. Most WordPress experts will choose GeneratePress to work with instead of other themes.

Download GeneratePress free

Buy Premium

GeneratePress is the fastest speed-optimized theme with compact and lightweight code

Neve

Neve is a free WordPress theme developed by Themeisle, a company that specialized in producing high-quality WordPress themes and plugins. This theme is designed to meet the needs of professional web designers, bloggers, business owners, and individuals who want a beautiful, professional, and easily customizable website.

Pros of Neve

Fast page loading speed: This is one of Neve’s strong points, helping websites load quickly and improving the user experience.
Flexible and easy customization: Neve provides many options to customize your website interface, including page templates, color and font options, mobile interface, and other custom features.
Compatible with page builders: Neve works well with page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer, making it easy to create beautiful websites.
Support for WooCommerce integration: If you want to sell online, Neve supports integration with WooCommerce, one of the most popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress.
Multi-language support: Neve supports multiple languages so you can create a multi-language website.

Cons of Neve

Limited free features: The features of the free version of Neve are limited, you need to upgrade to the paid version to access all features.
Restrictions on customizing header and footer sections: This may cause difficulty for those with no coding experience or who do not want to use plugins.
Integrated features require installing plugins: Some features of Neve, such as integration with WooCommerce, require separate plugins to function. This can make it difficult to manage various plugins and increase website load volume.

Overall, this is a good theme that balances its elements well, providing a fast experience, SEO-friendly, and highly customizable interface, helping you create a website structure suitable for many customer groups. This is a very good theme.

Download Neve free

Neve is a theme that has a very good balance of speed-related factors, interface, and SEO optimization

Some frequently asked questions

Can a free theme meet the needs of a website?

Yes. The free themes mentioned in the post such as Blocksy, and Astra can fulfill up to 90% of the basic needs of a website. In case you have high demands and need additional advanced features, consider upgrading to a paid version.

What is the difference between a free and paid theme?

That is an advanced feature. For example, in the paid version of the Blocksy theme, there will be support for advanced editing capabilities for Woocommerce, and the Hook content feature will be available for all website layouts (while the free version only supports hooking content to some basic components such as header, footer).

Astra is a WordPress theme highly regarded by the WordPress community.

Through this article, Bii has introduced to you 5 high-quality free themes, all of which are based on Bii’s actual experience after working with WordPress for nearly 7 years, trying out around 100 themes. Hopefully, this knowledge will provide answers to your questions!