Free WordPress Themes for Designers 2018

Designers are everywhere. Every single website you browse on the internet is shaped by a designer. So, if you are a designer and want to upload your work for the public, you must need an attractive website for that. That is why, in this post, I have collected some of the best free WordPress themes for designers to get a headstart. These themes include prominent visual appearance, optimization and a lot of features. You do not have to spend any sum of money buying a premium theme to showcase your designer site.

The quality of these free WordPress themes is extremely well balanced between page load speed and illustrations. In order to check the authenticity, I have manually gone through our test. So you don’t have to search forever to own the best theme for your individual or business activity.

Here is the list of the most creative free WordPress themes for designers 2018.

1. Qusq Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Quema labs
Load Speed	1.8 seconds
SEO Score	3.5 points
Overall Rating	4.4 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Qusq lite is a free WordPress theme for art directors, multimedia artists, and animators. This theme is very creative with a lot of 3D touch on menu and pagination style. Every page you launch gives you fade in and fade out effect, it looks so dope. Due to the transition effect in CSS, the theme changes the different background color automatically in the header. The menu is tapered and so the pagination button which really enhances its UI by a lot. All the layers are in two flexbox grid style which is very trendy. With this theme, you get smooth scroll option throughout the page with the shadow effect on all the post.

I really liked the footer as it is very extended and gives your social media details with inbuild icon support. Also, every link shows transition underline which addresses the link visibility. The images used in the post can be aligned left or right that overlap each other and hover to zoom effect. This theme is built for developers as it using advanced Node.js, Gulp, and Bower. So overall, this theme is surely for creators to upload their design in a very unique way.

2. Olivo Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Quema Labs
Load Speed	3.0 seconds
SEO Score	3.5 points
Overall Rating	4.1 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Olive lite is a great two columns theme for web designer and photo editor to demonstrate logos, icons, and posters in a fashionable way. This WordPress theme is using advance Modernizr CSS with a stylesheet to improve visibility for visitors. Also, if you upload feature image to your post, it shows the color palette of your feature image using “Color Thief” JS.  While hovering effect comes from “Hover Intent” to enhance the UI.

When you check the demo, you can see that this theme is using Preloader to load all the content at once. I also like the minimal and image only layout of this theme with “load more” functionality. Not to mention that you can add a background image anytime to get rid of the default white background. Additionally, you will get features like the sticky posts, threaded comments, and contact form support with this theme.

3. Krea

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Quema labs
Load Speed	1.8 seconds
SEO Score	3.5 points
Overall Rating	4.4 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

If you are looking for a simple and free one page Wordpress theme for Advertising & promotions manager, Interior or even graphic designer, Krea is a great theme. This theme is built for a smartphone as well as the desktop user. Why I am saying that because this theme has “click to slide” or “touch to slide” banner images in the screen.

When you test the demo, you can see how premium this theme looks. While loading a page, a blue progress bar appears on the top. It creates a beautiful user interface. This theme has an inbuild portfolio to show the work and a blog to post your latest creativity to your audience. Every link has a beautiful strikethrough CSS animation which I liked a lot. So if you are a graphic, interior or even an advertisement company, go pick this theme.

4. Slanted

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Alxmedia
Load Speed	2.9 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.5 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

A perfect theme for designer cum blogger, Slanted is a free alternative. If you want to create a personality based blog, perhaps you can go with this theme. It has post formats like video, audio, image and gallery slider, you can choose any of them. It focuses on writing with the focus is on the centered picture. The footer area can be customized with widgets up to four columns. However, for mobile devices, I would recommend you to go with three columns layers.

This theme works for almost all popular browser Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE. You can enable or disable the high-resolution social media button according to your preference. I really like the premium like feature on this theme which allows you to create custom sidebars for home, single, archive, category, search and 404 error page. So if you want to blog about your designs, install this theme for free and its SEO friendly too.

5. Restarter

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Mypreview
Load Speed	2.6 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.8 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

A theme for WordPress creative mobile application showcase with a flexible design for mobile and desktop. Furthermore, it has a rich snippet view which is great for Google search engine to understand your pages easily. You can show different parameters of your mobile app or your projects such as Monthly users, Ratings and many other.

To be honest, the landing page style and Layered parallax make it look very professional. It has a complete package for a design agency such as Team info, Pricing Table, Testimonials, Contact us, Download buttons form etc. You can also add a video introduction to your projects. This theme is definitely is a great choice for your business with amazingly tech-savvy and incredibly visually polished design.

6. BizPoint

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	SaltTechno
Load Speed	3.0 seconds
SEO Score	3.5 points
Overall Rating	4.1 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

BizPoint is a free SEO ready WordPress theme that can start your online Design business in just 5 minutes. It has import functionality that can import all the demo parts in your project and you can later customize it. So if you are a small designing business or agency, you can go with BizPoint.

Talking about its features, it has an Elementor page builder that is very helpful in creating different page templates without knowing any coding. It is very fast and optimized for the search engines which can drastically improve your business growth. Also, it has various customization such as typography (Google fonts), custom CSS, data highlighted in the home page. The only drawback on this theme that you have to give a credit link to the theme author in the footer.

7. Foliopress

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Theme Horse
Load Speed	1.8 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.8 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Foliopress is a seamless integration of your designing work, blog, and portfolio. It represents your personality to your audience in a minimal and refreshing way. This is why Foliopress is a great multi-purpose free WordPress theme created designers, photographers, artists, and creatives.

The backend of this theme has a lot of customization options. You can change the logo design, background color, Header style, Menu links, Favicon, default CSS and Webclip Icon as per your choice. It creates a great reading experience by allowing a list layer style instead of the grid. Of course, you can also choose a grid layer. Additionally, this theme is compatible with the latest WordPress release and popular plugins like WooCommerce, bbPress, Breadcrumb NavXT, WP-PageNavi and Contact Form 7. It works with PC, Mobile, and tablet by resizing automatically.

8. Heythere

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	950dsgn
Load Speed	2.2 seconds
SEO Score	0.5 points
Overall Rating	2.8 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

If you are looking for a free designer theme that has a lot of parallax effects, Heythere is one of the best themes. This theme suits web designers and industrial product designers. It has an incredible fullscreen front page that shows a premium design. You can upload your projects in Heythere and the theme presents in an artistic style. For each project, you can set a custom color for the homepage view.

Heythere comes with a additional customization such as social icons and Google custom fonts (Roboto Condensed to be specific). The combination of colors with a full page menu look very professional. Finally, after inspecting it, I can tell you that theme is great for personal use and not for commercial use.

9. Portfolio Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Organic themes
Load Speed	2.1 seconds
SEO Score	0.5 points
Overall Rating	2.0 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

A unqiue designed free WordPress theme that has all the ingredients a designer wants. It comes with dedicated custom pages to show logos, illustration, photography, and slideshow. This theme is most suitable for a personal portfolio website because of its one-page nature. You can also show your latest work through the blog posts.

The menu style is pushed towards the left corner which is a very unusual design. Also, with this type of design, your clients will able to see the maximum of your work. This theme has a clean white background which looks like a professional and minimal looking website. One more reason to choose this theme is fast loading speed as it has a few external files link.

9. BusinessX

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Acosmin
Load Speed	4.4 seconds
SEO Score	0.0 points
Overall Rating	2.5 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

BusinessX is a modern creative WordPress theme to represent and sell digital products online. This theme has a majority of useful elements like sticky header, transparent menu, preloader with different animations and many more. The homepage gives you a full-width carousel slider with a “call to action” button (essential to boost your sale). This theme is ready to boost your sale as it has a very attractive and strong online appearance. If also features custom typography and right to left translation support. Although the design is great, the Page Speed and SEO is very poor in this theme.

For a newbie, this theme is one of the most simple themes right now. It gives you simple to understand backend where you can customize it with an ease. Check the documentation for setup tutorials.

The theme comes with lifetime free updates and Businessx Extensions Plugin for free. The Businessx extensions plugin adds more homepage sections and new features to your existing style. So, If you can hire a developer, you can increase the SEO and Pagespeed of this theme using a Child Theme.

9. Hamilton

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Anders Norén
Load Speed	6.0+ seconds
SEO Score	0.0 points
Overall Rating	0.5 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

One of the most versatile free WordPress for photographers, illustrators, and designers with a clean white background. It features two boxed with poster-size featured images, all in a single layout. The title appears when you hover over the images. I really like the fullscreen hamburger style menu which also has a place to add your social media links. Below the header, you can type your message or tagline for your readers to represent your brand properly.

The theme comes with two appearances i.e Dark and Light theme, you can choose either of these. You can use this for the mobile site as well as the desktop because of its responsive nature with Jetpack infinite scroll support. I strongly believe that Hamilton is the theme for the private or personal site and due to its low score, you should not consider it as a great SEO site.