16 Most Popular Free WordPress Themes 2018

WordPress has evolved from a mere blogging platform into a full-blown content management system. From creating a simple business website to a complex e-commerce website, you can build anything on WordPress.

So if you’re planning to build your next website on WordPress, and looking for a theme to start with, we have collected some of the most famous themes for WordPress 2018. As you know, recently, we have listed best WordPress themes by doing performing various speed, SEO and coding tests. Likewise, we have done the same tests on some popular WordPress themes. After that, we have ranked them according to their results, so that you don’t have to do this tedious task.

So here is the list of most popular free WordPress themes for 2018.

1. GeneratePress

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Generate Press
Load Speed	1.1 seconds
SEO Score	4.2 points
Overall Rating	4.6 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

GeneratePress is undoubtedly among the most popular free WordPress themes 2018 among new WordPress users and seasoned developers alike. The themes work very well with page builders like Elementor etc. It’s incredibly lightweight, fast, sticks to coding standards and supports Schema microdata. The availability of 9 widget areas and 5 different layouts for sidebars lets you create complex websites on this framework.

As per performance, this theme doesn’t load any JS if the page does not require it. The page of theme content is under 50kb which is considered as highly optimized, means better SEO practices. With the help of Page Builder, hook, and filter, you can literally create different styles.

2. Readit

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Modern themes
Load Speed	1.4 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.5 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

One of the most popular free WordPress themes for 2018. Readit can be used efficiently for creating news, editorial or magazine websites. The header’s navigation bar uses android style hamburger menu. It shows a beautiful and bold fullscreen menu on clicking by blurring the background. The blog post layout is plain, full-width and simple, but the moment you enable the magazine layout in pages, it fires up a widget-based homepage design. Every single blog post you read in theme gives a peace of mind because of its central style. An extensive background parallax feature image with bold header and meta tags makes it eye-catching. This large slider will remove all the render blocking CSS and javascript files, which is good. In the sideways, you get to choose the previous or next posts slider which decreases the bounce rate.

You can place widgets according to your wish and make your web magazine look exactly you want it to. It indeed rendered a comfortable reading experience for everyone. Readit comes with a paid version as well as a number of child themes suitable to different genres.

3. Zerif Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Themeisle
Load Speed	2.5 seconds
SEO Score	4.8 points
Overall Rating	4.8 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

Looking to create a business website quickly? Zerif Lite is the perfect solution. Built on Bootstrap, the theme comes with parallax support that enables you to create visually appealing websites. The flat design has a modern touch. Other features of the theme include support to RTL, multiple languages, WooCommerce, and SEO optimization.

The navigation bar is integrated with font awesome to display icon and also include a sizeable drop-down style. Zerif lite uses a lot of eye-catching transitions in homepage and latest posts with a slider. The background is filled with an image, and you can change it later. Additionally, it has an editable team, testimonial, contact us, and about us page with the progressive rounded skill bars. Undoubtedly, one of the most popular theme for 2018.

4. OnePress

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Famethemes
Load Speed	1.3 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	4.0 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

OnePress is a one-page theme based on Bootstrap 4, which makes it fast and SEO-friendly. It’s an excellent choice for agencies, freelancers and all kinds of businesses. OnePress also supports the parallax effect and WooCommerce. With the responsible feature, this theme can automatically adjust and adapts itself according to any device screen size.

The theme comes with content blocks architecture, which enables you to manage the web content efficiently. Change the aspect of any design using built-in customizer. You can add five terminal gallery and smooth video representations to create a best impactful landing page ever.

While scrolling the homepage, you can clearly see the slide to top effect, which is used by premium WordPress themes as well. It is highly recommended for software companies and digital marketing agencies.

5. Customizr

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Press Customizr
Load Speed	2.2 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.8 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

Customizr has helped more 100k WordPress users and developers to create powerful websites. It’s fast and comes with a minimal design. Offers a greats experience on smartphones. The team has put in a lot of work in creating extensive documentation so that even new users can create the best out of it.

It increases more engagement within the readers by autoloading more content while scrolling downward. The theme uses plenty of java scripts and CSS to create unique animated styles while hovering. That’s why we have considered it as best most popular WordPress theme for 2018.

6. Evolve Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Theme4Press
Load Speed	1.8 seconds
SEO Score	4.4 points
Overall Rating	4.8 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

Evolve Lite claims itself to be a theme created for web enthusiasts and advertently mentions itself as a premium theme. It’s created on Kirki framework and Twitter Bootstrap, which makes it extremely fast, responsive and flexible. Whether you want to create a simple blog or a complex e-commerce website, Evolve is there for you. As a matter of fact, it using bonus features like parallax & post slider.

If you check the demo, you can see that Evolve is using a “two grid” layout with three distinct styles which are trending these days. To control spam, it uses CAPTCHA in contact form which is again a premium feature. Also, it comes with a dedicated control panel to revamp your theme easily without knowing any coding knowledge. For more simplicity, the one-click import option allows copying settings smoothly.

7. Julia Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Modern themes
Load Speed	2.4 seconds
SEO Score	5.0 points
Overall Rating	4.6 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Another tremendous free blog theme with widget-based homepage layout for food lovers. It has a custom-made recipe indexing system to track your favorite food recipes. You get a full page slider at the top along with a spacious white layout. It offers clean typography and premium design. There are three different kinds of widgets – Boxed, Columns, and Grid, which can be used to create an immersive web-based magazine design.

If you are a visual artist or want to make a personal portfolio, Julia theme fits you. I think that the colour and font selection of Julia is very professional to main­tain a healthy rela­tion­ship with those who read your sto­ries. To create more visuals, the theme uses a drop cap with shadows in each blog post. Every image opens in the entire screen by using lightbox stylesheet and script. A progress bar on the header shows the number of lines left to read. So overall, Julia is a great theme but you have to give a credit link at the footer.

8. Virtue

Features	Details
Price	$35
Author	Mythemeshop
Load Speed	1.4 seconds
SEO Score	5.0 points
Overall Rating	5.0 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Virtue theme comes with integration to Schema microdata, which makes it a step ahead if SEO is your primary marketing strategy. It also with full support to Project Gutenberg, which allows you to create authoritative content from within the WordPress. Not only this, you can also build a strong portfolio in any page. The theme offers a robust options panel, which lets you completely customize the design of the website without editing the CSS.

Virtue works with different kinds of the slider which are responsive as well. The header shows up maximum links using Top, Primary and Secondary navigation bars. ItNot to mention that it a completely free theme which has excellent support feature too. This theme can be used for bloggers, professionals, e-commerce or small businesses. No doubt, it is one of the most popular WordPress themes for 2018.

9. Wellington

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Themezee
Load Speed	2.8 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.5 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

A pretty neat and straightforward blogging theme with a focus on typography and subtleness. A great option if you want to make your blog actually look like a simple blog. You can add a featured post slider to make the homepage more attractive. The theme lets you choose from two different post layouts. A lot of customization options are also available using WordPress default customizer.

For the localized audience, you can refer to Easy translation mode which changes it to multilingual. The theme is very light coded and using HTML5 and CSS3 to make it blazing fast. Not to mention that it works with all browsers and is absolutely free for everyone.

10. Writee

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Scissor Themes
Load Speed	2.5 seconds
SEO Score	1.5 points
Overall Rating	2.5 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

The Writee theme for WordPress comes with a minimal yet bold design. Whether you are a fashionista, traveler or a foodie, it’s a great option to host your personal blog. Being a responsive theme, Writee is mobile-friendly. It also supports Woo-commerce, in case you want to add an online store to your WordPress blog.

Additionally, with built-in related posts and social media sharing, it lets readers interact more. This theme also helpful to show up specific posts in the homepage boxed slider. It is a flexible WordPress theme that has a unique look coupled with a variety of modern features. Writee also comes with a pro version option, which lets you access its advanced features.

11. Iconic One

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Themonic
Load Speed	1.0 seconds
SEO Score	2.5 points
Overall Rating	3.9 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

Iconic One is like a premium theme available for free. It’s made for speed plus SEO. The theme guarantees a Google page speed score of 95+. It follows proper SEO protocols and is very much compatible with SEO plugins like Yoast. It has the latest coding standards that include HTML 5 and CSS3. You can use the live customizer to modify the theme exactly according to your taste, without touching a line of code.

The theme looks very simple, but if you want a fast and responsive theme to serve simple content, it is a great option. You can use this theme for link building to make your blog profile strong.

12. Begonia Lite

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Pixelgrade
Load Speed	2.0 seconds
SEO Score	1.5 points
Overall Rating	2.5 stars
→ Demo ↓ Download

Begonia Lite is a corporate and blogging theme with unique modern design pattern and cosmic layout. This theme leaves a professional impression on readers with its highlighting visual approach. On the top of that its mobile-ready responsive can fit any device of your choice. It is an ideal choice to increase readability since it is using bold font combinations.

When you look at the demo, you see that it has a different post preview with a lot of white spacing at the right. At the bottom of the container, it is using a large footer to represent essential links and sitemap which is a crucial SEO demand. This theme is not very popular but its trending right now because of its original appearance. Finally, all I can say that Begonia is one of the best free WordPress themes for 2018.

13. Atlast Agency

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Akisthemes
Load Speed	5.3 seconds
SEO Score	0.5 points
Overall Rating	1 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Breaking its entrance with a fresh design, Atlast Agency is one of the most promising themes for creative business and digital marketing agency. With a full-width layout, it is covering below the header section with a bootstrap carousel slider. Also, a broad and bold heading is including the slider with description and an action button. Honestly, it really makes a significant impact on the readers to pass your message.

This theme gives us a smooth design experience coupled with ultra-professional typography, makes a branded impression to the viewers. It followed by a four grid simple footer with HTML support. The theme is also using a contact form which can be used anywhere. It is not good for blogging after all but definitely an excellent choice for a Digital Marketing agency.

14. Fluida

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Modern themes
Load Speed	8.3 seconds
SEO Score	3.5 points
Overall Rating	3.8 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

Fluida is created on a sturdy yet lightweight framework. It’s built on Icon fonts, HTML5, and CSS3, which makes it extremely fast to load. The theme uses Google readable Schema.org microdata and microformats, which gives your website an edge concerning SEO optimization. On the top of that, you get a flat design which is a demand of current time.

There are more than 100 options in the customizer that allows controlling almost every aspect of the theme. On further inspection, I found that you can configure both layouts and widths of any box, thumbs up for that.

If you are a grid lover, you can add more grid up to four which are responsible too. It also creates different cursor hover actions and actionable transitions to catch visitors attention. One of the best WordPress theme for business and small agencies. It has 10,000+ current download means it is quite popular right now. This theme loads bit slow, but you can remove additional scripts if you are a developer.

15. Merchant

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Famethemes
Load Speed	3.3 seconds
SEO Score	4.0 points
Overall Rating	3.8 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

A theme created to display WooCommerce products stylishly. Merchant is a child theme of StoreFront which is the most popular free WordPress theme in 2018 among to create shopping website. If you are looking for a free theme to build an e-commerce store, go for it. It offers you a wide range of color and layout options to customize your shop according to your requirements.

It presents your products in minimal style ( like node.js style ) combined with customer’s ratings. You can indeed display the latest, top selling, a sessional collection of products in the homepage to generate more sales. You can also create product description boxes to promote specific products anytime. Likewise, you can filter and sort product according to your choice which is an equally important feature as SEO.

16. Page Builder Framework

Features	Details
Price	Free
Author	Famethemes
Load Speed	4.5 seconds
SEO Score	3.0 points
Overall Rating	3.4 star
→ Demo ↓ Download

As the name says, the theme has been created specifically for page builders. Whether you are using Visual Composer, Divi, Beaver Builder or Elementor, the Page Builder Framework theme supports all of them out of the box. It has been created from the ground up and comes with a minimalistic approach, which makes it an excellent option if you want to create a compelling website and to look to start with a blank canvas. This framework itself take a page weight of just 30kb which is insanely low.

This theme should be the best choice to showcase your Android or iOS app, small agency, corporate, digital marketing agency. Basically, this framework can adopt different page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, Divi, Thrive Architect, and more. This framework is only recommended for developers.