The 5 best WordPress Themes for Blogs

You’ve created your first blog or maybe you’ve just finished my tutorial in setting up a blog 🙂 … Now what? With thousands of themes out there, it is hard to make a decision. It is like telling a kid in a candy store, that he can only pick one piece of candy. Cruel, right? Researching the best WordPress theme for your blog takes a lot of time. I’ve gone ahead and researched hundreds of themes to save you the effort. Here are the 5 best WordPress themes for blogs.

How to select the best WordPress theme for your blog?

Before we get starting with the 5 best WordPress themes, you need to realize that every blog is different. Some people might be blogging about cats and others about personal finance. No shoe fits all.

When picking the best WordPress theme for your blog, I’d like to suggest to first think about the following items:

1. Make a list of features that you do want

To select the best WordPress theme for your blog and your specific needs, you need to analyze the features you want in a theme. Some features to consider are:

• Page builders;
• (Free) Premium plugins;
• Theme support;
• Responsiveness;
• Mobile optimization;
• Flexibility for customization.

When selecting the theme for Markletic, a couple of things were imperative to me. The first item being support, if shit hits the fan, I want things to be solved fast. Also, if I need help with the design, I want a team that will be supporting me.

Other options that were important for me is that the theme must be light-weight, fast, optimized for SEO and I need extreme flexibility. This is important for me to be successful at achieving exponential marketing growth through growth hacking.

Additionally, I don’t want to be doing any coding to design my pages. I required a page builder.

2. Make a list of deal-breakers

Similar to making a list of features to select the best WordPress theme for your blog, you should also make a list of deal breakers. A list of deal breakers is different for everyone. However, if you intend to have many visitors, a common dealbreaker is the level of support some theme creators provide.

For a professional blog, it is advised to use a theme with an awesome support team. If the ice breaks while you are standing on it, you’ll be very grateful when there is a lifeguard.

Another common dealbreaker if the way theme creators code their themes. You want to make sure that the theme is SEO optimized to drive as much traffic to your website as possible. After all, you don’t want that you spend a lot of time creating quality content and that your theme is hindering your SEO efforts.

I also recommend selecting a theme with a massive community behind it. A theme with no supportive community is a deal breaker for me personally.

3. Theme development

With any theme, you are limited to the features that theme creators provide. Some themes will have gorgeous layouts, but don’t allow for many customization options. This is fine if you are a developer, but if you have no development skills, this wouldn’t be ideal. You’d either have to hire a developer or learn how to do some coding yourself. This is why I always opt for themes which a lot of flexibility and customization options.

The rise of page builders

Many themes now come with page builders and allow for a drag and drop method to develop your blog.

There are also fantastic companies which have developed awesome WordPress plugins such as Elementor. Elementor is a page and theme builder with loads of cool features, options for responsiveness and optimized code. I use Elementor on Markletic to develop my pages.

People used to refrain from using page builders as the code was bloated and was terrible for SEO. However, modern page builders such as Elementor blow all those points of critic out of the water. The genius team behind Elementor saw that there was a massive pain in the market. Namely, writing code. Here is an excellent post of Ben Pipes about Elementor and SEO benefits. I recommend reading it.

The traditional way of coding websites or application takes a lot of time and allows for many potential errors.

Nowadays, companies, which are trusted by the world’s biggest brands, have developed platforms to visually create applications and websites. The generated code is extremely clean and optimized. I can know because I work for one of those companies that provide so-called “low-code” software for globally leading brands.

The future is visually developing applications and websites, whether you like it or not. The days of traditionally writing code line-by-line are fading away. The technology has improved so much, that the best and highest-paid developers in the world are using this software rather than writing code.

With this in mind, let’s dive right into it.

The 5 best WordPress themes for blogs

Theme Pro

Theme Pro is easily one of the best WordPress themes out there. Not only is their code optimized for SEO and page speed, but there also many impressive features. This theme is my go-to theme.

Theme Pro offers a header, (page) content and footer builder. The staff and external professional website developers are continually adding new content blocks and layouts to the design cloud. The design cloud is a repository of beautifully pre-designed templates.

One of the most significant advantages of Theme Pro is their support team. If you have any questions about the theme or need a bit of help with the development of your website, the support team is always willing to help. How do I know this? Because Markletic is running on Theme Pro and I’ve received a lot of help from their support team.

Benefits of Theme Pro

• Awesome support;
• Page builder included;
• Lightning-fast;
• Free Premium third-party plugins such as WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Essential Grid, Convert Plus, and Slider Revolution;
• SEO Optimized;
• Fully Responsive;
• Compatible with Elementor.

Costs: $79

Astra

Astra is also one of the best WordPress themes for blogs. The theme is a stylish theme, lightning-fast and it is fully compatible with Elementor.

A benefit of Astra is that it has a vast library of pre-built websites that you can import with the press of a button. As mentioned above, the theme is made for page builders. Combining Astra with Elementor is a match made in heaven. Everyone hates a slow website and fortunately, this will never be an issue with this theme as it is optimized for speed.

Astra provides a lot of flexibility, which to me is very important. The theme comes with several built-in header options and the ability to customize the archive pages.

Benefits of Astra

• Fully compatible with Elementor;
• Flexibility;
• Responsive;
• Lightning-fast;
• Extremely light-weight.

Costs: $59

GeneratePress

With over 1.6m active installation, GeneratePress is amongst the best WordPress themes for blogs. The theme is extremely light-weight and is compatible with your favorite tools such as Elementor.

GeneratePress is focused on performance, security and is one of the fastest themes out there. The theme is optimized for search engines. Besides, the theme is translated in over 20 languages.

The theme gives you control on how you display your featured images and it has an integrated page builder.

Benefits of GeneratePress

• Performance
• Security
• Light-weight
• Compatible with Elementor

Costs: $49.95

OceanWP

With over 800k active installations, OceanWP belongs to the best WordPress themes for blogs.

OceanWP has an excellent support team that is willing help you at any time. The theme was built with SEO in mind and therefore, the code has been massively optimized. OceanWP is fully responsive and will look great on all devices.

The theme has a market-leading WooCommerce integration which is great if you’re looking to sell products on your site. They have state-of-the-art WooCommerce features built into the theme, which means you don’t need additional plugins.

OceanWP is fully compatible with page builders such as Elementor and Beaverbuilder.

Advantages of OceanWP

• Built with SEO in mind
• Light-weight
• Compatible with Elementor
• Market-leading WooCommerce Integration

Costs: Free

Ultra

Ulta is among the best WordPress theme for blogs as it comes with 60+ pre-designed layouts. It includes a drag and drop builder, responsive layouts and more. The theme comes with pre-made demo websites for blogs in all industries such as agencies, restaurants, fitness, eCommerce, photography and much more.

The theme is hugely customizable with many layout options for headers, single post pages, and archive pages.

Benefits of Ultra

• Pre-designed demo sites;
• Flexibility;
• Compatible with Elementor;
• Drag and Drop Builder.

Costs: $49

That's it for now! Let me know which theme you decided to install!