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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Less is more.
These themes are stripped down to the bare essentials. You’ll find very few additional elements and decorations in the collection of templates below. And that comes with a few benefits…
Minimalist themes tend to outperform more cluttered themes because they keep the visitor’s attention on what matters. That means you get better performance from your site regardless of what that means – more readers, subscribers, sales, etc.
In addition to that, themes with minimal aesthetics are very modern. With a simple theme, your site will look instantly current and will likely look amazing years down the road too.
Keep reading to find my top picks for minimal WordPress themes.
Take a look at our simple WordPress themes collection for more themes.
Minimalist WordPress themes
I’ve only listed themes that are updated frequently and still work with the latest version of WordPress. Every theme listed below is also completely responsive (mobile-friendly), so they look great on all devices.
Here are my top picks for best minimalist WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Typology by meks (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Typology is absolutely gorgeous and it solves a problem many bloggers struggle with: finding images for every post.
Most blogging themes display a Featured Image along with every post and oftentimes, these images are huge. This forces you to hunt down relevant high-quality images simply because the theme looks bad without them. Yuck. The Typology theme makes such strong use of typography, color, and composition, you don’t need any images to make your content beautiful.
As you can tell from the screenshot, this is a truly minimalist theme. There is very little in it besides the text. Most notably, the template makes excellent use of drop-caps that look like watermarks to add a premium flourish to each post. The homepage is built with a few different “sections” where you can customize what content displays, there are a handful of post layouts to choose from, and you can change the primary color to whatever color you’d like. While Typology has quite a few more features, it looks so great out-of-box, do you really want to change it that much? If you want a minimalist theme for writing, go check it out.
2. Kleanity by GoodLayers (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Kleanity is a sharp theme with a serious premium vibe. Masterful use of typography and composition make for layouts that are both unique and familiar. This theme feels more like a carefully designed magazine than a website.
You can use this theme for a business, portfolio, or even a band/musician website. If you have any kind of creative work to promote, Kleanity can help. It has templates for grids of products and images, sliders, articles, product features, and more.
Kleanity has an outstanding 4.90/5 rating on Themeforest from 48 ratings (at this time). As a relatively new theme, it has an extremely modern look that will stand the test of time for many years into the future. If that doesn’t get your attention then go try it out now. The GoodLayers team have put out a trial site you can test out – you can find it by clicking this link:
3. Clean by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
You can’t go wrong with Clean; a cool and super minimal theme for blogs and magazines. There are hardly any elements beyond the headlines and Featured Images in this paired down theme.
Professional bloggers will appreciate the landing page templates that come with Clean. It has an excellent design in terms of performance built upon a solid foundation of clean code. This minimal theme loads quickly and is SEO-ready, so you’ll pull in more traffic and engagement than other themes.
If your site has more of a news orientation, you’ll appreciate the “Journal” demo site which shows off another style you can achieve by customizing clean. Artists and graphic designers will want to check out the “Portfolio” demo to see how Clean stacks up as a minimalist theme for creatives.
4. Better by KrownThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Better is a minimal theme for businesses and corporate sites. It’s simple and flexible design makes it a great fit for a wide variety of businesses.
Use Better for a personal portfolio, creative agency, architecture firm, or non-profit. All customizations can be completed via the Live Customizer that lets you preview changes as you make them. As a mobile-friendly theme, customers will have no trouble using your site regardless of how they visit it.
The Better theme comes bundled with both Visual Composer and Slider Revolution which add tremendous customizability. Create custom page templates and include animated sliders with any content you want. Think of Better as a blank site for building your beautiful new website.
5. Core by ThemeGoods (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Core is a unique and minimal photography theme. Visitors will love browsing your shots with this simple and beautiful WP theme. And videographers don’t worry – it works equally well for video too!
The horizontal scrolling carousel slider is really cool, but there are tons of other gallery types if that’s not your style. Altogether, Core has 6 gallery templates to choose from with both light and dark themes. Photography sites, in particular, tend to look great with the less common dark alternative. Of course, Core has loads of features outside the slider on the homepage.
Core comes with hundreds of fonts to choose from, fullscreen slideshows, password protected image galleries, and social sharing support. This carefully designed theme has earned great reviews on Themeforest over its whopping 6 year lifetime. As a theme that’s been available for so long, it’s been updated dozens of times and is highly refined and reliable.
6. Aurum by Laborator (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Aurum is a minimalist eCommerce theme. If you’re looking to open an online shop for clothing, sporting goods, or even digital products, you’ve got to give Aurum a look.
eCommerce sites are often overwhelming to navigate. Traditionally, they’ve had lots of clutter and content stuffed into a relatively small space. The growing number of simple eCommerce themes are certainly a reaction to this. Aurum takes the minimal style and perfects it creating a store that looks and works great.
As a responsive theme, Aurum looks amazing on mobile devices. This is important considering the rapid adoption of mobile browsing (especially in eCommerce). Aurum is made to work with WooCommerce, the #1 most popular eCommerce solution in the world. It is built on Bootstrap, so developers will find it friendly to work with and customize. Along with many other customization settings, this clean theme comes with the Visual Composer plugin which allows you to create totally custom page templates from scratch.
7. Lifestyle by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
Lifestyle is a minimal blog and eCommerce theme by MyThemeShop. This theme keeps it simple with plenty of white space and sparse use of color throughout its templates.
The Lifestyle theme works great for traditional blog and magazine sites, so it will be a great choice for content creators that also want to sell products. With the WooCommerce integration, you can sell your own products whether they’re physical or purely digital. In fact, you can even sell other people’s products by creating an affiliate store.
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use and elegant WordPress theme for a blog, magazine, or eCommerce store, give Lifestyle a shot. It comes with plenty of customization tools including 3 header layouts, 3 post layouts, loading animations, social icons, and much more.
Which minimal theme is right for you?
For writers, you can’t ignore Typology. It’s simply beautiful and so simple to setup and run on WordPress. Secondly, Lifestyle and Clean are both excellent for blogs and news sites.
If you want a minimalist-style eCommerce site, Aurum is probably your best choice, but Lifestyle does have great eCommerce options too. For photographers, you’ll want to try out Core. It’s a classic theme for photographers and has a fantastic, clean design.
Lastly, Better and Kleanity serve every other niche. If one of the other themes isn’t an obvious choice for you, check out these themes and really look through their demos. They have much more to offer than you can see in the screenshots here alone.
