SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important factors of having a successful website nowadays, especially if your website benefits from search traffic. Getting a search engine optimized website built from scratch requires a big budget, which most entrepreneurs, bloggers and online shops don’t have. Luckily WordPress has grown into being the most used content management system (CMS) in the world, in fact more than 30% of all websites run on it. The high demand for quality WordPress themes have increased tremendously, so have the amount of free & premium themes published every day.
Everyone can create and release a WordPress theme, which makes it impossible to differentiate the good from the bad, luckily we have done that for you. We have in fact spent more than 38 hours on testing various free WordPress themes. Below is a list of the best ones we’ve found – we have tested a total of 318 free WordPress themes.
Editors Pick – Best overall theme
Divi PREMIUM THEME
This is the only paid WordPress theme we will be mentioning. Divi is a very unique WordPress theme, it’s both a page builder & theme. It currently has more than 800.000 active users, which really says something about its complexity and quality. It comes fully translated to 25+ languages & 500+ customization options. Divi is one of our favourite premium themes due to its features and possibilities.
Astra
Astra is a very popular free theme, it’s a fact in one of the WordPress themes with the fastest growing user base. The design is great and works extremely good for e-commerce WordPress websites. The code is lightweight, SEO optimized and the design is fully responsive.
Best Free Search Engine Optimized Business Themes
Gutenshop
Gutenshop is a next generation Gutenberg webshop theme. You can build any design you can imagine using only the WordPress 5.0 editor: Gutenberg. The entire theme is based around it, so it’s of course 100% compatible with it and uses every inch of the new editor to give you the flexibility to create your dream shop. The theme uses no external code libraries & page builders, which makes the theme blazing fast. Gutenshop is fully SEO optimized and responsive.
Neve
Neve is a multipurpose WordPress theme built with the user in mind. It is one of the fastest themes out there and comes with support for SEO and mobile. If you want to customize your pages with drag-and-drop, it lets you do that via Elementor or Beaver Builder. Check out its collection of free starter sites for business, WooCommerce, blogging, portfolio, travel, agency, and a lot more.
Bloggist
Bloggist is a minimal and search engine optimized (SEO) responsive blog theme. It’s easy to set up & looks exactly like the screenshot when you install it. The code & design is great, so is the page speed – we recommend this theme for people who are looking for a clean blog design, especially beginners since it’s very easy to set up.
Hestia
Hestia Lite is a very popular WordPress theme created by ThemeIsle. The design is a great fit for most business and online shopping websites. The theme is fully responsive and has a great loading time. It’s of course full search engine optimized and supports most page builders so you can create most designs.
Gutenix
Pay your attention to the brand new Gutenix free WordPress theme. It was made to expand the possibilities of such popular page builders as Gutenberg, Elementor, and Brizy. This possibility allows you to work on various projects. Gutenix’s theme is Retina and WPML ready, which makes it perfect for gaining the audience from all over the world. What is more, reaching the top ranking in any search engine is no more a problem, as the Gutenix theme is completely SEO-optimized.
Best Free SEO Optimized WordPress Blog Themes
Writers Blogily
Writers Blogily is a free responsive, search engine optimized WordPress theme made for blogs and news websites. It’s fully responsive and comes with lots of widget areas where you can place advertisements. Writers Blogily is a great choice for most affiliate blogs and websites.
Nisarg
Nisarg is what a lot of people would call “Old but gold”. It’s a very old, popular free WordPress theme made by Falguni. In fact, it’s his only theme, he still keeps it up to date and SEO optimized. The code is great, it’s lightweight and easy to read – the theme is fully responsive and comes with a great amount of customization.
Minimalistblogger
Minimalistblogger is pretty self explanatory. It’s a blog theme with a very beautiful & minimalistic design. It comes with 9 widget areas where you can put advertisements or other stuff. It’s fast, responsive and fully search engine optimized. A great thing about this theme is that it’s beautiful out of the box and easy to set up.
Best Free Search Engine Optimized WordPress Newspaper & Magazine Themes
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a free theme created for websites that rely on great SEO. Speed tests show that it has a 350 milliseconds load time, which is very impressive. It comes with more than 60 settings, SEO plugins and full on-page SEO. The theme has 4 widget areas which makes it easy to insert advertisements such as AdSense.
Griddist
Griddist is a unique responsive and light weight theme, it’s a great theme if loading time and search engine optimization means a lot to you. The theme is fully SEO optimized & crawable for search engines. The design is a masonry blog grid style, even though you have lots of articles it still looks beautiful.
Allegiant
Allegiant is a free WordPress theme mainly created for business websites, but it also works great as a magazine or newspaper theme. The theme has Gutenberg blocks, slideshow, portfolio, team members and other great stuff if you want to take your website to the next level. It’s fully SEO optimized, loads fast and works with all popular plugins.
Newspaperly
NewsPaperly is a free & great looking newspaper and magazine WordPress theme. It’s lightweight, SEO optimized and responsive so looks incredible on all devices. It has a lot of widget areas where you can put your advertisement or information. It has a decent amount of customization and is recommended for most magazine or newspaper websites.
Best Free SEO Optimized WordPress Webshop & E-Commerce Themes
OceanWP
OceanWP is a feature rich WordPress business and shop theme. It is one of the best rated WordPress themes on WordPress.org. It’s lightweight and has great written code, it is of course fully SEO optimized. The theme is free and fully responsive.
Best Free Search Engine Optimized WordPress Photography Themes
PhotoBloster
PhotoBlogster has a unique, mostly image based design. The theme is created for websites that require extremely good SEO, which means it’s fully search engine optimized. It has a great amount of customization for a free theme and is of course fully responsive. PhotoBlogster is a great pick for all image based blogs.
One Pageily
One Pageily is a free SEO optimized WordPress theme made for business & landing pages. The theme is simple and comes with a lot of features and widget area. It’s load time is quick and the design looks great. The best part about this theme is that it looks beautiful out of the box.
Safe SEO Friendly & SEO Optimized WordPress Themes
There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress themes which advertise with being SEO friendly, page speed optimized, responsive and much more. The brutal truth is that very few of them are, anyone can say their themes are SEO optimized & SEO friendly, but only people who’s specialized in it will know if it is true or not. Our finest job as theme creators and WordPress knowledge sharers is to go through the themes, line by line of code and check if they are or not. Any theme you’ve seen on the list above, have been gone through carefully.
Where To Download Free Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes
We have tested themes from WordPress.org, Creative Market and many other theme directories, in fact we have tested more than 300 themes to create the different theme recommendation lists we have on our website. You can go to their individual sites to view more than 10.000 themes, but it’s hard to get a decent overview of which is actually good and which isn’t.
Responsive, Customizable & Beginner Friendly SEO Optimized WordPress Themes
It’s 2020, let’s be honest, if your website isn’t responsive you won’t rank well on Google or have a good shot at getting your business started – we are fully aware of that, it’s one of the most important SEO factors these days, Google is mobile-first now, which means they rank your website, depends on how good it works on mobile. Another important factor we have been looking at is how beginner friendly vs customizable they are, most themes that have lots of features are not beginner friendly, in fact most of them are almost impossible to set up for someone who’s not a developer. Every theme recommended in this list is very customizable, beginner friendly and of course fully responsive.
Very nice article, very well written. Thank you
Thank you!
I hope you found the theme you were looking for! 🙂
Hi,
Great article. what is the name of the wordpress plugin you use for theme reviews?
Thanks
Hi Yildirim, we use our own Superb Blocks plugin, you can download it for free here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/superb-blocks/
We use the “Rating block”, we have modified it a little so it matches our design better 🙂
thank you so much:)
Hi guys 🙂 Thank you for such a great article. Trying to find a good theme for Gutenberg. Does any theme include custom Gutenberg blocks?
Hi Tina!
Both Astra and and Divi come with built-in Gutenberg blocks, I would recommend using one of them 🙂
I use Divi theme with Divi Builder plugin for my project and I have access to many custom Gutenberg modules, you will surely like it 🙂
Choosing a theme is quite an essential part while building up a blog or website. And you have done a great job in selecting some of the few SEO friendly wordpress theme free. Even I used Photoblogster for my blog. I loved it.