Do you want to start a blog but haven’t the slightest clue on how to create your own design?
Do you already have a blog but feel its design is due for an overhaul?
In this post, we’ve rounded up over 30 WordPress themes ideal for personal blogs and writers. Some are simple with designs that are laser-focused on showcasing your blog. Others are intimidating multipurpose themes that offer dozens of premade templates to choose from and seemingly endless ways to customize them.
Without further ado, here are 30+ WordPress themes for bloggers and writers.
The best WordPress themes for bloggers in 2020
1. Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Theme Builder is a sophisticated page building WordPress theme that combines the page building aspects of Thrive Architect with powerful theme options and theme building capabilities. That is to say with Thrive Theme Builder, you can customize key theme elements like your 404, search and archive pages as well as your blog page layout.
Bloggers will love the ability to customize their sites from the ground up without having to use code, but the things that truly make Thrive Theme Builder special are its marketing capabilities.
This theme has calls to action and email opt-in forms for you to use right out of the box. Custom author boxes and blog posts are available as well.
Price: From $97, or $19/month (paid annually) as part of the Thrive Themes Membership
2. Astra
Astra is a multipurpose WordPress theme and the perfect companion for page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder and Brizy. The theme works with Gutenberg right out of the box, but many of its professional blogging templates are reserved for the aforementioned page builder plugins.
Astra is another theme that comes with advanced theme options. You can customize more or less everything without code. This includes blog page layouts, typography, header options and more.
It’s perfect for bloggers who want more control over the way their sites look and behave as well as those who have their hearts set on Elementor, Beaver Builder or Brizy.
Price: From $47
3. GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a multipurpose WordPress theme capable of building a wide variety of websites. It has dozens of its own site demos, but it also has dedicated demos for page builder plugins like Elementor and Beaver Builder.
GeneratePress also happens to be one of the most customizable themes on the market. It has dozens of color and typography options for you to pick from as well as multiple layouts for menus, sidebars, pages, blog posts and more.
Bloggers will especially love the theme’s blog demos and options, including controls for featured images, columns and masonry layouts, infinite scroll, and more. The dedicated support for popular page builder plugins also gives you access to creative ways to create blog posts.
Price: $49.95
4. Pro
Pro is Themeco’s powerful theme builder theme. While the developer’s premier product X uses the company’s own page builder plugin Cornerstone, Pro has been designed to combine page building with theme building.
The result is a sophisticated theme that’s complex underneath yet easy to use at surface level. You’ll never need to use code to customize your header or footer, change your blog page and overall site layouts, or customize your site’s styles.
There are hundreds of page templates and pre-designed sections at your disposal so you can create beautiful blog posts on the fly without getting caught up in the design process.
Price: From $9/month or $69/year
5. Breakthrough Pro
Breakthrough Pro is a customizable WordPress theme that uses the Genesis theme framework. Its homepage layout uses a design best suited for professional bloggers who want their homepages to act as an optimized landing page complete with calls to action.
Breakthrough Pro is optimized for Gutenberg, WordPress’ built-in editor. It also has powerful theme options and widget areas you can use to customize your site with ease.
Price: $129.95
6. Purple
Purple is a professional blog theme by MyThemeShop. Its homepage uses a hero section that features an email opt-in form above the fold, after which is the typical blog archive you find in blogging themes. This gives it a marketing-friendly feel even though it’s a blog-heavy theme.
Purple doesn’t have the page or theme building capabilities as the previous themes on this list. However, you do have two premade header layouts to choose from along with six premade homepage sections you can drag and drop.
Advanced styling and theme options are available, including such blog-centric features as five related post layouts, image effects, custom author boxes, lightboxes, spaces for ads and custom social sharing buttons.
Price: $59
7. OceanWP
OceanWP is a multipurpose WordPress theme designed to work alongside a page builder plugin. Fortunately, it works with eight page builders, including Elementor, Thrive Architect, Divi Builder, Beaver Builder and Brizy.
The theme has dozens of homepage demos to choose from, ranging from dedicated blogging demos to professional layouts. It also has advanced theme options, but some features are available only as extensions.
They include sticky sections, Instagram feeds, post sliders and content displayed in modal format.
Price: From $59
8. Revolution Pro
Revolution Pro is another theme designed for the Genesis framework. It doesn’t have the same level of customization as the previous themes, but it does utilize WordPress’ block editor if you don’t know how to code but want control over your site’s design.
It also has multiple site demos to choose from, including a Lifestyle Blogger demo that features your blog archive and portfolio. The theme also comes with Genesis eNews Extended, which gives you the ability to add opt-in forms to your site.
Advanced theme options and styles are available as well.
Price: $129.95
9. Schema
Schema is another WordPress theme by MyThemeShop. This one uses a classic blog layout: a fullwidth header, your blog archive in the main content area and a sidebar.
This one’s a great option for bloggers who simply want to publish content and aren’t looking to create specific designs or utilize marketing to its fullest potential. Fortunately, the theme is also compatible with Elementor if you’d prefer to have more control over the design of certain pages.
As a MyThemeShop theme, Schema also has spaces for advertisements with ad management included. A review system, powerful theme options, related posts and custom widgets are available as well.
Price: $35
10. Personal
Personal is a simple yet powerful blog theme by MyThemeShop. It features a more modern style than Schema, starting with a well-designed slider above the fold. The rest of your blog archive is displayed in a masonry grid that can be quite stunning when the right featured images are used.
Personal’s default layout doesn’t use a sidebar, not even in blog posts. This gives the theme a clean, minimalist style that places your reader’s focus on your content.
An opt-in form is available for the footer, and advertisements and advanced styling options are available as well.
Price: $59
11. Ad-Sense
Ad-Sense is a multipurpose WordPress theme ideal for bloggers who monetize their sites with advertisements. It’s called “Ad-Sense” because it detects when a visitor is using an adblocker while browsing your site.
With this mechanic, you’re able to lock certain content when an adblocker is detected. There are multiple ways to showcase the alerts visitors will receive when they’re using adblockers.
Nevertheless, the theme has multiple ad placement options to choose from as well as pre-designed landing page templates. Similar to the previous themes, MyThemeShop offers advanced theme customization right out of the box and things like a review system and rich snippets.
Price: $35
12. Divi
Divi is the premier WordPress theme of longtime theme house Elegant Themes. It has a built-in page builder that’s become one of the most popular page builders available for WordPress.
This is a big reason why it’s such a fantastic theme for bloggers, especially professional ones. Divi has one of the most expansive libraries in terms of full landing page templates, and it has a wide selection of theme options that allow you to customize every aspect of the Divi theme with ease.
Plus, your purchase of Divi gives you access to Elegant Themes’ marketing plugins, which include an email opt-in plugin called Bloom and a social sharing plugin called Monarch.
Price: $89/year for Elegant Themes membership
13. Chronicle
Chronicle is a personal blogging theme by MyThemeShop. It uses a simple homepage that features your blog archive displayed in grid format. Blog posts themselves use large, hero-style featured images at the top of the page and a classic content-on-the-left, sidebar-on-the-right style beneath the fold.
Nevertheless, Chronicle offers a number of different ways for you to customize this simple design. Theme options allow you to customize colors, typography, and header and blog page layouts.
Price: $35
14. Scribbler
Scribbler is a simple personal blogging theme from MyThemeShop that has a clean and modern, card-based style yet a classic layout. That is to say it features your blog archive on one side of the homepage and a sidebar on the other.
Scribbler has two blog page layouts to choose from and enough theme options for you to truly make the design your own. It also has multiple related post layouts. Plus, as a MyThemeShop theme, it’s optimized for AdSense, reviews and Elementor.
Price: $35
15. Kale
Kale is a food blog theme by LyraThemes, though its elegant and somewhat feminine style is well-suited for personal, beauty and fashion blogs as well. The theme has multiple homepage layouts, allowing you to choose from modern hero section layouts to more classic designs.
The rest of the theme is customizable as well. Alongside color and typography options, you can choose from multiple blog page layouts, blog post layouts, menus and sidebars.
For food bloggers, the theme includes a built-in recipe card functionality, recipe index templates, support for ads and a built-in review system.
Price: Free, Pro version from $35
16. Fresh
Fresh is a food blog theme by MyThemeShop. It steps away from that classic blog layout some of MyThemeShop’s other blogging themes use and offers multiple homepage layouts that utilize landing page elements like calls to action, features, testimonials and more. Plus, you can drag and drop these sections across the homepage as you please.
There are also multiple ways for you to customize this theme. Numerous options are available for color, typography and other styles. Plus, there are multiple premade layouts you can choose for page designs, headers and footers.
For marketing, Fresh has built-in social sharing buttons, ad support and WooCommerce elements. Unfortunately, a recipe card functionality and recipe index templates are not built in, but the theme is compatible with the Cooked recipe card plugin.
Price: $59
17. Beauty
Beauty is a personal blog theme by MyThemeShop with a heavy focus on the fashion and beauty niches. Like some of MyThemeShop’s other themes, it steps away from that classic blog layout and gives you eight modern homepage layouts to choose from, making this theme a great option for professional bloggers.
It also has all of the style options MyThemeShop’s other themes have along with support for ads, Elementor, social sharing buttons, custom author boxes and more.
Price: $77 (currently on offer for free)
18. Hemingway
Hemingway is a simple blog theme that uses a hero-style header and a classic blog layout across the rest of the page. It has a modern style despite its simplicity, and its minimalist approach puts your content at the forefront of the design.
Hemingway is strictly a free theme available in the official WordPress theme repository, so it doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles a lot of the other themes on this list have.
Even so, it allows you to customize your colors and header image.
Price: Free
19. Writer
Writer is a multipurpose WordPress theme by MyThemeShop. It has three homepage layouts, two of which are perfect for bloggers. One uses a classic blog layout while the other uses a more modern homepage. The latter does include a section for your blog archive, however.
This theme is similar to the other MyThemeShop themes featured on this list. There are multiple layouts for headers and your blog page, and you can even rearrange the homepage sections as you want them.
Style options are available as well, as is ad support, making this theme a suitable choice for marketers.
Price: $35
20. Authority Pro
Authority Pro is a professional blogging theme built for the Genesis framework. It uses a marketing-like landing page that features your blog archive but doesn’t focus on it. This allows you to develop your blog around a fully-fledged marketing plan rather than simply publishing post after post.
This plugin is optimized for Gutenberg, so you can customize the homepage demo with WordPress’ built-in block editor. You can also customize your site’s colors, fonts and settings. Plus, multiple layouts exist based on where you want your sidebar and whether or not you want a sidebar.
Price: $129.95
21. Reader
Reader is a modern approach toward the classic blog layout a lot of MyThemeShop’s other themes tend to use. It uses a clean, minimalist style ideal for personal, travel, fashion and beauty bloggers.
While its style is different, Reader is comprised of all the lovely inner workings of MyThemeShop’s other blogging themes. You can choose between a few different header, blog page and related post layouts, and there are numerous style options to choose from.
The same optimization for ads, social sharing, image functionalities and Elementor are there as well. A couple of unique features include sections that allow you to advertise the next post in your archive and thank your visitors for reading.
Price: $59
22. Jevelin
Jevelin is a multipurpose WordPress theme with a large collection of over 40 homepage demos. Some are based on niche, but many are blog-centric or at least feature a section for your blog archive.
Nevertheless, there’s an expansive list of blog page layouts for you to choose from as well as a few different post layouts. One of these is designed for AMP posts, giving you the opportunity to optimize your blog for Google AMP without foregoing too much of the style you originally had.
There are also an impressive number of layouts for headers, pages and titles. Built-in elements are available as well, so you can customize your homepage to your liking. Aside from that, Jevelin has an advanced theme options panel that makes customizing styles as easy as can be.
Price: $59
23. Monochrome Pro
Monochrome Pro is a multipurpose WordPress theme based on the Genesis framework. It uses a stunning, minimalist design and offers a handful of homepage demos for different niches.
Each design uses a fully-fledged landing page with a section dedicated to your blog. This makes this theme a great option for professional bloggers who want to do more than simply publish blog posts.
Plus, as a Genesis-based theme, you can expect as many customizations as similar themes on this list.
Price: $129.95
24. Writing
Writing is a personal blog theme with multiple homepage demos, all of which showcase your blog archive in a different way. This is a wonderful option for bloggers who just want to write and don’t need all of the bells and whistles of a fully-fledged marketing theme.
It’s a simple, minimalist theme, yet there are numerous aspects for you to customize. Colors and fonts are chief among them, but you’ll find multiple layouts for different elements to choose from as well.
Price: $49
25. Maker Pro
Maker Pro is a personal blog theme that uses a clean, modern style that relies on bold imagery and contrasting fonts. Its homepage is headed by a hero-style call to action. The rest of the homepage features additional elements typical of landing pages.
The blog itself uses no sidebar, which gives the theme a minimalist style that places emphasis on your content. Outside of all of this, the theme offers plenty of theme options for you to customize your styles even further.
Price: $99.95
26. Foodica
Foodica is a food blog theme by WPZOOM, though it’s elegant enough to be used by personal, fashion and beauty bloggers as well. It has three homepage demos (one of which requires Beaver Builder Pro).
The rest of the theme, though modern and quite stylish, is pretty simple from there. You can customize the styles with an advanced theme options panel, and recipe card functionality is built in.
There’s also a recipe index template, making this theme a fantastic option for those who want to build their own food blog empire.
Price: $69
27. Contentberg
Contentberg is a blog theme optimized for WordPress’ blocked-based editor Gutenberg. It uses a clean, minimalist style that truly follows the “content is king” approach to blogging.
Multiple homepage demos are available depending on how much content you want to showcase on the front page. There are multiple blog post layouts to choose from, each one featuring a stunning style that will make your words come alive.
Along with all of this, you can customize your site with the Gutenberg editor, widgets, theme options and more.
Price: $69
28. Breek
Breek is a blog theme with a design somewhat similar to Tumblr. It has multiple homepage demos to choose from, some of which use grid layouts that present your blog archive as cards.
Overall, the theme uses a modern, magazine-like style with clean typography, but you can customize multiple aspects of it. This includes choosing between multiple header and blog page layouts as well as customizing that typography, colors and more in a theme options panel.
Price: $35
29. Typology
Typology is a blog theme that takes the simplicity of minimalism and brings it to an extreme. There are no sidebars, and featured images are excluded by default. The theme uses one color outside of black and gray fonts and accents, which only adds to its minimalist style.
Nevertheless, there are multiple homepage and blog page layouts for you to choose from. Fortunately, each one never strays away from that original minimalist approach. The ones that use featured images are perfect for photographers and bloggers who use striking images in their posts.
Other than that, you can customize the theme’s styles and choose which layout(s) you’d like to use.
Price: $59
30. Blog Prime
Blog Prime is a modern, fun and stylish personal blog theme with an elegant magazine-like homepage. Unlike most other themes on this list, it’s a fairly what-you-see-is-what-you-get theme. There aren’t many layouts to choose from and customization is limited.
You can, however, customize colors, fonts, footer widgets and social media elements. The theme also has a few places for you to insert ads, making this a great personal blog theme for bloggers who want to generate revenue by driving a lot traffic to a frequently-updated blog.
Price: $49
31. Lovecraft
Lovecraft is a simple blog theme that uses a classic blog layout beneath a hero image and centered header. This classic blog layout uses a sidebar by default, but the theme does have a fullwidth template you can use.
It’s a free theme, so it doesn’t have the same amount of customization many of the other themes on this list have, aside from the option to change the design’s accent color.
However, the theme switches between web-based serif and sans-serif fonts elegantly, and there are modern yet stunning styles throughout the design. This includes parallax-scrolling effects for some images.
Price: Free
32. Jumla
Jumla is a blog theme with two homepage demos: one for personal blogs and one for fashion/beauty blogs. Both demos use more or less the same styles and elements but arranged in different ways. The only major difference is in the fullwidth layout the first demo uses versus the boxed layout of the fashion-focused demo.
Overall, the theme uses a modern style perfect for engaging lifestyle, beauty and fashion stories or tutorials. This is great as the theme isn’t very customizable, at least not in the way many of the other themes on this list are.
There’s a fullwidth layout for blog posts, and you can customize colors and typography. However, that’s more or less as far as this theme goes in terms of customization, making it most suitable for bloggers who don’t feel inclined to customize their sites.
Price: $49
33. Saraswati Blog
Saraswati Blog is a charming personal blogging theme that offers multiple homepage demos for you to choose from, each one showcasing your blog in a different way. Many use a classic blog layout, but some include a collection of featured posts at the top of the page.
The theme itself is fairly simple from a technical standpoint. You can customize colors and fonts, and there are a few different page layouts to choose from. However, the theme options panel doesn’t stray too far from there.
Overall, it’s a fantastic option for casual bloggers.
Price: $39
Final thoughts
Deciding on a WordPress theme is tricky, especially when you’re a blogger or writer who lacks the technical knowledge behind design and code. Start by deciding which type of base layout you’d like to use for your homepage: a fully-fledged landing page or a classic layout that only features your blog archive.
This choice will narrow your options down significantly. For example, if you want to use a classic blog layout, you can remove multipurpose WordPress themes from the list.
If you want more control over the design of your site and have plans to develop a sophisticated marketing strategy as your blog grows, narrow your list down to one of the themes that either have a built-in page builder or are optimized for one.
Once you get all of the technical details out of the way, you can narrow your options down to one choice with a single creative decision: choosing a design that represents you and your brand.
