It is quite often a good idea to keep things as simple as possible. In web design it is no different, simplicity helps important content to stand out, and visitors tend to find it easier to navigate minimalistic websites. Minimalistic and simple WordPress themes are designed so that they only contain the most essential elements. Often this is done by leaving out unnecessary images and by keeping styling of web page elements at a minimum. Readers’ attention will automatically be more focused on the important content as they are not distracted by element of your web design. Using WordPress and a simple website template is probably one of the best and quickest ways to get a new website set up. A recent trend in web design is minimalistic flat style. Flat web design does not make use of gradients and 3D effects and take minimalism to the extreme. In a recent post I collected a bunch of cool flat WordPress themes you should also check out.
One more thing that makes a simple WordPress theme great for most websites, is the faster loading time typically achieved by keeping web pages simple. This is simply because they are not loaded with heavy graphics and huge CSS style-sheets. I am featuring a collection of really cool simple WordPress themes in this article that I think will be great for starting WordPress websites.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.
Article Index
- Simple Business WordPress themes
- Simple Magazine WordPress Themes
- Simple Dark WordPress Themes
- Simple Grey WordPress Themes
- Free Minimalistic and Simple WordPress Themes
Simple Business WordPress themes
SimplePress Simple WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
SimplePress is a slick new page-based theme great for anyone looking to give their website a clean and professional look. This design was made to look something similar to other business-oriented themes, but with a simpler and crisper aesthetic. The theme features a un-bloated homepage with a beautiful javascript slider and clear hierarchy, as well as fully functional Blog and Gallery sections.
Epical – Business & Portfolio WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Epical is a minimalistic and bold WordPress theme for your business or portfolio. It’s clean, creative, responsive and packed with all kinds of awesomeness: unlimited colors, 10 custom page templates, 6 custom widgets, 100+ shortcodes, 6 post formats, advanced admin panel and so much more!
Flexible WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Flexible is a sleek and minimal portfolio theme packed full of some awesome features. The theme puts your work first, keeping the design elements to a minimum while still maintaining a definitive modern style. With its filterable, ajax-powered multi-media gallery, Flexible is perhaps our most feature-rich gallery theme yet.
Rumblings – Responsive MultiPurpose WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Rumblings is a powerful responsive business/corporate/portfolio & blog premium WordPress theme jam-packed with features. The theme is very powerful yet easy to use and customize, whether you’re a WordPress pro or a beginner with no coding skills.
Cleangold – Minimal WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
CleanGold is a HTML5+CSS3 fully responsive WordPress theme with a minimal and clean design. Highly optimized with mobile first technique, this theme can be used for personal portfolios, art and creative studios, but can be customized for any business.
U-design WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
U-Design is a very powerful theme which suits both, users with no programming background as well as advanced developers. It will help you build your site in no time to your liking with minimal effort. It empowers you to set any color to elements such as backgrounds, links, text, menu links, etc. You can completely change the look and feel of your site in seconds. You can also choose from over 500 fonts, including Google Font Directory and Cufón fonts.
Trim - MORE INFO / DEMO
Trim is a simple and well balanced theme suited to a variety of different websites.
Extensio – Elegant and Minimal Business WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO
Extensio is a clean, modern and Powerful Professional Premium WordPress Theme suitable for any kind of corporate / business website. It comes with an impressive jQuery homepage slider with unlimited possibilities and options. Extensio also comes with 18 page layouts showcasing all the design flexibility your theme has to offer, including Columns, Tabs, Toggle Box, Button Styles, multiple Div layouts and much more.
Unispehere Minim Corporate and Portfolio - MORE INFO / DEMO
UniSphere Minim is a WordPress theme designed with corporate businesses in mind. It has a custom CMS integrated into the WordPress administration area that allows you to build a fully functional professional website in minutes. The theme is also well suited for online portfolios and blogs.
Choices – Responsive Business and Portfolio - MORE INFO / DEMO
Choices is a responsive WordPress Theme suited for business websites and users who want to showcase their work on a neat portfolio site. The Theme is built on top of the fabulous Avia Framework and offers support for the WPML MULTI LANGUAGE plugin, just in case you need it. It comes with a plethora of options so you can modify layout, styling, colors and fonts directly from within the backend. Build your own skin or use one of 14 predefined skins right out from your WordPress Admin Panel. Font, background and color options as well as the dynamic template builder will help you create the Website you need in no time. In addition to the global options you can set unique styling options for each entry as seen in the theme demo.
ProMotion Responsive WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
ProMotion is a responsive WordPress theme with a minimalistic and simple design. It is aimed for business and service or product promotion.
Modest - MORE INFO / DEMO
Modest is an elegant design that doesn’t sacrifice elegant or style. All extraneous details were stripped down to make the theme lightweight.
BUILDER – Responsive Multipurpose Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Powerful WP Theme designed in a clean and minimalistic style. This theme is very flexible, easy for customizing and well documented, approaches for personal and professional use. BUILDER has been coded in HTML5 & CSS3 and jQuery. It has a solid flexible responsive layout that scales from 320px to 1260px width all Bootstrap features.
Gala, a tasty Mac Inspired Agency WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Gala is smart and sophisticated theme designed for any business/agency that wants to show of their services, testimonials, portfolio and more. With the ability to have unlimited layouts by utilising widgets, you’ll have no problem creating a site that is unique to your company. You can choose from 3 different skins which include a light, dark and a minimal or blank skin. The blank skin is a great starting point if you wish to heavily modify your theme.
REWORK Responsive Modern WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
REWORK is a responsive HTML5 / CSS3 theme for business, software or blog sites. This is a flexible, multipurpose, modern and sleek WordPress theme, suited for any situation. With a responsive design, it will look stunning on any device – from a widescreen monitor to a mobile phone.
Classica: Minimalistic WordPress Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Classica is a beautifully minimalistic portfolio theme, free from gimmick and trend, making your talent the focal point of your portfolio – the way it should be. Present your work in a professional manner with a timeless design. Classica is perfect for artists from any discipline, web, graphic, motion, print, art and anyone who needs a showcase.
Shapeshifter 2: Responsive Flexible One Page - MORE INFO / DEMO
ShapeShifter 2 for WordPress is responsive. That means that it will flex to fit massive screens, iPhone screens and everything in between. Touch gestures even work on the slider. ShapeShifter 2 is the third of my “Super Skeleton” themes, which feature an incredibly powerful responsive framework, capable of doing layout gymnastics without the need for you to think hard about it. Add your content the way you normally would to a kick-ass WordPress theme, the theme will do the rest for you.
Angular – Responsive Portfolio - MORE INFO / DEMO
Angular is a responsive WordPress Theme, suited for users who want to showcase their work on a neat portfolio site. The Theme is built on top of the fabulous Avia Framework and comes with support for the bbPress Forum plugin, just in case you need it.
Super Spark -Responsive Minimal WP Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Super Spark is a super awesome WordPress theme. It’s designed especially for creative business industry and also it can give a corporative feeling. With admin panel in this theme, you can discover many features and various options that you can play with the theme. Also Page Builder will give the most flexibility to handle your content.
Purity: Clean, Minimal and Bold WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Purity is a Clean and Minimal WordPress Theme with a ‘BOLD’ feel that can be easily used as a personal portfolio or a business website. With an extensive documentation and a demo content you won’t have any problems setting your page up.
GOODCHOICE – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Powerful WP Theme designed in a clean and minimalistic style. This theme is very flexible, easy for customizing and well documented, approaches for personal and professional use. GOODCHOICE has been coded in HTML5 & CSS3 and jQuery. It has a solid flexible responsive layout that scales from 320px to 1260px width all Bootstrap features. Follow me to be notified for future updates!
Robust – Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Robust is a responsive multi-purpose WordPress theme for businesses, creative agencies and app developers.
Folioway – Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Folioway is a perfect pixel WordPress theme, not only its clean and elegant, it also comes with tons of features like amazing slider and unlimited colors. It is incredibly powerful, flexible and easy to use. It is just the best WordPress theme for your or your company’s work presentation.
Moxie – Responsive Theme for WordPress – MORE INFO / DEMO
Welcome to Moxie, a blend of style, creativity and power. Pushing the limits of WordPress to help you build amazing websites. Take control of your content and build the website you need with the content you want. It’s time to start making your WordPress theme work for you instead of the other way around. Get ready to use the next generation of themes and begin creating your beautiful new website.
Zito – Minimal & Responsive / WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO
Zito is a minimal, clean and responsive Portfolio/Blog WordPress Theme suited for the creative artists or agencies. Zito uses a timeless design to present your work. It comes with several options for customize colors, layout, styling, and much more. There are also plenty of shortcodes to set up the different pages. These options will help you to build the Website you want.
Propulsion Responsive Business Ecommerce - MORE INFO / DEMO
Propulsion is a responsive WordPress Theme, suited for users who want to create a business, portfolio or eCommerce site. The Theme is built on top of the fabulous woocommerce shop plugin as well as the bbPress Forum plugin. It comes with a plethora of options so you can modify layout, styling, colors and fonts directly from within the backend. 3 Slideshows, 21 predefined skins (which are easy to modify from your backend), font and color options as well as dynamic template builder will help you create the Website you need in no time.
Lounge – Clean Elegant WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
LOUNGE is a high quality professional WordPress theme for modern business or interactive creative use. Choose between 4 fluid AJAX animations, create unlimited Parallax pages, add unlimited sliders & slides to each page using two types of built-in sliders, take advantage of awesome Revolution Slider. Build you web site using our highly intuitive and friendly to use framework.
El Toro – Minimal and Responsive Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
El Toro is a responsive theme. It uses a framework that permits the site to be accessed on all mobile devices, including iPad and Android powered tablets. Mobile-phone layout is also included. You can now view your site even on display resolutions as 320×480 wide.
Aware – Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Aware is an interactive, responsive portfolio theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, photographers and videographers alike. Its user interactive interface delightfully enhances your most loved portfolio pieces. Now, you can take your portfolio with you, in your pocket.
Garnish: Cleancut WordPress Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Garnish is a clean-cut, straight to the point, simple to use portfolio theme. The uncluttered, one-page, ajax-powered portfolio is perfect for placing your most important work directly in front of your potential clients. Support for post formats means you can jazz up your blog with your own self-hosted video, audio, images, galleries, asides, links, quotes and of course good old standard posts.
Inovado – Retina Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Inovado is an ultra responsive, retina-ready WordPress Theme that everybody wants. It’s an incredible premium theme with powerful customization settings that helps you transform Inovado into your unique business tool. Inovado is very intuitive to use and completely ready to operate out of the box.
Centum – Responsive WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Centum is a premium responsive WordPress theme created for corporate and portfolio websites. It features a very clean and minimal design that is perfect for showcasing your work. It’s easy to customize with awesome features like Revolution Slider, unbranded OptionsTree panel for settings and new amazing WordPress Customizer.
HyperMind: Clear and Subtle WP Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Hypermind is an incredibly easy to use WordPress portfolio theme. Quick to setup and easy to customize, thanks to the powerful admin panel, the detailed manual, and the carefully structured code, HyperMind is the perfect theme for showcasing your most important work directly in front of your visitors.
B:LIV – Responsive Minimal WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
B:LIV (pronounced Believe) is a minimalist fully responsive WordPress theme inspired by Swiss design principles. Bold, clean typography along with fine touches of design elements will make your content stand out.Keeping with the minimalist, bold design approach the front and portfolio pages have a strong emphasis on images and large titles. Everything is kept as simple as possible, relying on spacing to give structure to the layouts.
Clean Creative – Clean Minimal WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
The Clean Creative is a Powerful Premium WordPress Theme designed in a clean and minimalistic style. This theme provides all the main functionality you will need to present your products, work and yourself in an elegant and professional style. Clean Creative easy for customizing and well documented. The theme is best suited for any portfolio, business and photography.
Edge – Professional Corporate and Portfolio WP - MORE INFO / DEMO
Edge is a WordPress theme designed with corporate businesses in mind. The theme is also well suited for online portfolios and blogs.
COMMANDER – Responsive Multipurpose Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Powerful WP Theme designed in a clean and minimalistic style. This theme is very flexible, easy for customizing and well documented, approaches for personal and professional use. COMMANDER has been coded in HTML5 & CSS3 and jQuery. It has a solid flexible responsive layout that scales from 320px to 1260px width all Bootstrap features.
Aries Responsive Business WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Aries is a full featured WordPress theme great for businesses. Includes a drag and drop page builder, 5 sliders, shortcodes a pricing table and a whole lot more.
WhiteBlack – Premium Business WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
WhiteBlack WordPress theme was designed for customers with an exceptional taste, for those who can see the original beauty of modesty and purity. Clean design is meant to become a perfect canvas for any website, contributing to your content performance and providing space for brand style presentation.
Nomos Clean Multi-Purpose Business Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Nomos is the Clean Multi-Purpose Responsive WordPress theme built for corporate, business, software company or portfolio website. It comes with many cool features ex. Revolution Slider included, Live Chat Plugin included, 4 Header Options, 10 Skins + Custom Skins, 2D & 3D Slider, Skin manager, Content Builder Module, customisable elements’s color, font and background image. There are also 100+ advanced shortcodes with Shortcode Generator support. You can also use 300 + Installable Google Web Fonts.
Simple Magazine WordPress Themes
Gonzo – Clean Responsive Wp Magazine - MORE INFO / DEMO
Gonzo is built with semantic HTML5/CSS3 and is completely responsive. Not only is it responsive but it also keeps that magazine feel right down to mobile screen sizes. Practically every typographic element has been endlessly tweaked for different screen sizes to make sure it looks great no matter what the device.
Metro Magazine Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Metro Magazine is a clean and powerful metro inspired responsive magazine WordPress 3.5 ready theme designed specifically for magazine, news and blog sites. The theme is highly flexible, fully responsive and packed with awesome features.
Splash - MORE INFO / DEMO
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Splash is a blogger’s best friend. With Splash, you can review and rate products or services, all using the built-in review feature. It’s built to stand out with a sleek design, and it adapts to any situation you use it for. The fluid grid means that device type or browser size is never an issue.
Volcano – Responsive WordPress Magazine / Blog - MORE INFO / DEMO
Volcano is a cool customizable, flexiblle, responsive WordPress theme with a minimalistic design for your Blog, Magazine or News website. Volcano can be configured to focus on your work, your blogging, or both.
Theme is powered by the SMOF Options Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – it is well suited for both beginners with no coding knowledge
and developers.
Volcano comes with 17 custom widgets, 18+ widgetized areas, 5 post formats (image, audio, video, gallery, standard), 7 Home page layouts, 7 Blog layouts and tons of theme options.
Bolid – Responsive News, Magazine and Blog Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Bolid is new responsive theme for magzines with modular and flexible homepage. Bolid is built for heavy-content websites, but it is suitable for all bloggers! This theme comes with many cool features as sliders and carousels widgets, modular featured sections and flexible layout and possibility to manage color schemes, responsivity settings.
Studiofolio: A Versatile Portfolio and Blog Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
A new versatile responsive portfolio and blog theme.It is fully responsive and retina ready, adapting to almost all browsers width and screen resolutions.
Deadline – Responsive Premium WordPress News / Magazine Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Deadline is a premium responsive WordPress theme created for news and magazine websites. Its clean and professional design allows your images, video and writing to stand out.
8020 WordPress Magazine Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
80/20 is a simple, bold, news theme for WordPress. The design and layout is simple and subtle enough to be a fine fit whether you have a personal blog, a digital magazine, or a community news site.
Simple Dark WordPress Themes
Modernize – Flexibility of WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO
Modernize is extremely well designed dark website template for WordPress and will make most business website rock. But it is not just looking good, it is fully responsive and comes with a very powerful page layout builder. Without any coding you can easily put together a new layout for a any page. Only thing I was missing when testing this theme was the possibility to add widgets as a layout element.
Agency – Fullscreen Dark WordPress Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
The Agency is the Next Generation photography WordPress theme. Unique clutter-free fullscreen experience with various control options. Present your works in professional manner with smooth flash-like flow. Future-proof approach and infinite scalability. Extensive customization options with unbranded options panel. Powerful Typography Plugin included. The definitive portfolio solution for creative professionals available now.
Music Pro – Music Oriented WordPress Theme - MORE INFO | DEMO
Music Pro WordPress theme is in favor of music industries. It is incredibly customizable, easy to manage dark style theme
RockWell – Portfolio & Blog WordPress Theme - MORE INFO | DEMO
Introducing Rockwell – one of the great and includes unique features in WordPress Theme. It allows you to choose and explore many attractive and creative theme options that will surely suit your style.
Captain – A Brave & Invigorating WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Captain is a powerful WordPress theme made for brave bloggers who share various types of information such as images, videos, audio, quotes, galleries, and more!
Slate Responsive WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Slate adapts to your style as well as the device it’s viewed on. Featuring a responsive design, you can scale Slate all the way down to iPhone size and still have a beautiful, full-featured site in the palm of your hand.
Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio - MORE INFO / DEMO
Core is the Minimalist Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type and Image Uploader etc.
Simple Grey WordPress Themes
Origami – Minimal Responsive WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Origami is a minimalist premium WP theme created by Satori Studio. Inspired by the paper-folding art from the Land of the Rising Sun, our aim was to develop a clean and aesthetically pleasing, yet stable, powerful, and highly customizable theme to use for personal websites/blogs or creative/portfolio websites. Origami is a responsive theme, which means it adapts to the screen resolution of the viewing device: your website will be equally usable and good-looking on large monitors, laptops, tablet devices, and smartphones.
Beard – Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Beard is a content-first blogging theme for WordPress. Responsive & beautiful with careful typography, Beard is here to showcase your writing.
Rawa – Clean / Responsive / Minimal / WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO
Rawa is a clean, minimal and responsive HTML5 / CSS3 template. It looks fantastic on mobile devices such as iPhones/Smartphones or Tablet-Pc’s. This is the perfect way to show your works/posts.
Nova WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Nova is a sharp, simplistic design that makes for an intuitive user experience. Nova’s biggest strength is its homepage, which allows you to organize your content into two areas. The Featured Slider is perhaps the most versatile slider built, and comes with multiple slider variations that breath new life into the design.
Bookcase – WordPress Portfolio Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Bookcase is a unique interactive portfolio theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, photographers and videographers alike. Its user interactive interface delightfully enhances your most loved portfolio pieces.
Coraline Ajax and Responsive WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Coraline is the perfect theme for the creative agency, freelancer or general business. It has a lot of modules are ready for homepage, it’s simple-to-use, customize and install.
Minim – Portfolio / Small Business WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO
Minim is a very clean and professional portfolio and small business theme. The focus is on the portfolio content which allows you to easily showcase your work online in an elegant fashion. You can upload portfolio items via custom post types, create unlimited portfolio categories and of course choose between the 6 different portfolio item styles (default, slider, video, gallery, full images and plain). The portfolio template comes with a drop-down where users can choose what category to browse and pagination support. Since the portfolio template isn’t paginated you can get full SEO benefits from showcasing the static category pages.
Sensei – Personal and Professional WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Sensei is a premium WP theme created by Satori Studio. Our aim was to develop a clean and aesthetically pleasing, yet stable, powerful, and highly customizable theme to use for both personal and professional websites.
Free Minimalistic and Simple WordPress Themes
WordPress Bootstrap – MORE INFO
All the beauty of Twitter’s Bootstrap – Built on v.2.1.1. This theme is built with LESS and has homepage carousel and etc.
Bootstrap for WordPress – MORE INFO
A new WordPress theme that is built using Bootstrap. This theme can be used as a starting point.
Imbalance – MORE INFO / DEMO
Imbalance is an excellent choice for any online magazine, blog or portfolio websites. This free wordpress theme designed with a contemporary modern vibe in a minimalistic style.
BootstrapWP - MORE INFO (leave out the demo if you cant find it)
BootstrapWP is a Bootstrap theme for WordPress. Use Bootstrap with WordPress for a solid base for custom theme development.
Modern – MORE INFO / DEMO
Here is a free themethat you’re sure to love (as long as you’re into super-clean, killer looking Swiss design style themes!
StrapPress – MORE INFO
This WordPress theme is built using Bootstrap. This is the first basic version, but more features will be added.
Hybrid - MORE INFO / DEMO
Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized parent theme, featuring several custom page templates and multiple widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want.
Bootstrap for WordPress – MORE INFO
This is a WordPress Theme based on Twitter Bootstrap. Navigate the top bar to explore the features and the theme itself, which is showcased by this website in primis.
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