Are you looking for a Cheap WordPress theme to set up and start your first blog or business that can help you make money online?
If yes, you have landed on the perfect page because here, we have selected the 21 best WordPress themes in 2022 that can help you gain good rankings and traffic as well.
Let’s dive into those amazing WordPress themes.
In this article, we have also covered a quick buying guide to help you choose the best theme for your desired purpose. So, make sure to read the article till the end.
Divi
Divi is one of the most popular themes of 2022, and there are many reasons why it is at the top of this best WordPress themes list.
The main reason is its performance. It takes less than a second to load an entire page. No matter how many heavy images the page has, and in which browser the user is accessing your site, it loads rapidly. You can also check out its performance on tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed insights. You’ll get great results.
The theme is neither too expensive like those overpriced themes on the market that focus on earning, not on providing great performance, nor too cheap. With a single purchase, you get many options to make the website look as attractive as you want and user interactive like those award-winning websites.
With a single investment, you get 40+ website elements, 800+ Pre-made designs to save your time and effort, different animations, and drag-and-drop customization facilities to build the website from scratch.
Whether you want to earn from Google AdSense, affiliate commissions, or your eCommerce sales, this theme can give you an excellent conversion result. It won’t disappoint you with its performance.
Astra
At no. 2, here comes one of the most downloaded themes of all time, Astra. With a load time of less than a second, this time scores grade A in Gtmetrix and 95 plus score out of 100 in PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom-like tools, which is a great point to consider while comparing it with any other theme on the market.
Astra offers excellent customer support. So, don’t worry if something goes wrong with it. Astra staff will help you get rid of the problem. For any reason, if you don’t like the theme after the purchase, Astra’s 14 days money-back guarantee holds you back. You can get a 100% refund if you apply within 14 days after the purchase.
Even its free version offers many good-looking templates that can completely change the look of an ugly website into a premium website.
The paid version comes up with many options, which can be pretty time-consuming for a beginner to learn, but trust me, it is completely worth it. And, once you get used to this theme, you can build any website from scratch within minutes.
If you are a beginner and looking for a free WordPress theme with great customization options to build the website from the start, trust me, you won’t get a better theme than this.
Newspaper
Newspaper is another popular theme among bloggers and digital marketers. It is also one of the selling themes since its release.
This theme works just like its name. It shows lots of content in a small space, like an online newspaper that helps users go through all the necessary details in a very short time. Moreover, this theme is a perfect example of a magazine theme.
It is well-optimized and provides excellent performance even on heavy websites. It takes less than 2 seconds to load a demo website which is not bad.
It integrates with any of the theme builders to give you an uninterrupted drag-and-drop customization service.
Also, it is loaded with too many useful features that can help you grow your business and blog. The most important thing is that it comes with a responsive design and Google amp support. So, you don’t have to worry about how your website would be looking on different devices.
With the investment of just 59$, you get six months of customer support and access to all the features like 120+ demo sites, 1500+ attractive templates, tagDiv visual composer, etc.
Ultra Theme
Based on the themify framework, Ultra is the most flexible theme on the web. It is loaded with handy features such as pre-made demo sites that can be used to make a complete website with just a single click, 12 bonus builder addons such as countdown, progress bar, counter, typewriter, pricing table, etc. to enhance the site’s beauty, 17 Header styles, 5 single post layouts, section scrolling, mega menu, and much more exciting stuff.
In shorts, it comes with plenty of customization options and that too in an affordable price segment. It is perfect for a beginner and an expert looking for another to try something new and different.
It costs somewhere around 49$, including all 12 builder addons, 69$ with photoshop files and builder addons, and 89$ with all the features and 5 PTB addons. You can also go with the lifetime license that costs around 249$ and get lifetime services.
Shoppe: WooCommerce Theme
Another widely used WordPress theme by Themify. It is only 12 years old company that completely dominates the theme industry with its excellent service.
This theme is the best fit for those who are starting their online journey from an eCommerce website. The unique design and features can also help you increase your sales, taking your business to the next level.
Plus, it takes less than a second to fully load a demo site which is quite noticeable as your audience will not need to wait for too long, which eventually helps you decrease your site’s bounce rate.
Most premium themes don’t offer many archive layout options, but in this case, you get 9 different unique options to choose from.
Unlike Ultra, this theme comes with only eight demo site options till now; however, they say there are more to come in future about which you’ll be updated soon. The actual price of the theme is around 60$, but you can get up to 30% off on a lifetime license.
Avada
Avada is one of those themes that the user either likes or just hates. Everyone has their own opinion about it. Some say it takes too much time to load; some say it loads rapidly. Some say it has too many bugs; however, some people still prefer it over any other theme in the world. It comes with an eye-catching list of features that requires time to understand and learn, even for an expert.
The theme comes with many demo options to quickly set up a new site in very little time. However, if you can’t find the design type you want in the demo options, the Fusion builder holds you back and helps you customize the prebuilt sites as the way to like.
Most of the themes are not good at playing real-time video background with the level of efficiency that a premium theme should have, but you will never face such problems with this theme. Avada is available on ThemeForest, and you can buy it for 60 bucks.
MegaOne – One-Page Parallax
MegaOne is 2020 and 2021’s trendy theme made by HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap 4 frameworks, and JQuery animations. It offers around 60+ beautiful and unique demo websites, including one-page templates that can be imported with just one click.
It is compatible with any web hosting such as Hostinger, Siteground, Hostgator, GoDaddy, etc., and also with different browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc., and offers responsive layouts on all types of resolutions.
It supports all types of font styles. Whether it is Raleway, Roboto, Poppins, or Montserrat, you can choose any font you like. Plus, 24/7 customer support helps you resolve your issue at any time.
With the vast collection of flexible layouts with impressive landing pages and 200+ elements to help you make your site clean and well-managed, it is an awesome template available in a highly affordable price segment.
Ocean WP
OceanWP is the best wordpress theme for writers and most bloggers’ first choice when it comes to theme selection to run a successful blog.
Usually, themes are dedicated to layouts, animations, and UI, and some of them are not optimized to perform with good efficiency with different plugins. However, this is not the case with OceanWP.
Install any plugin you want; it is compatible with all, whether it is the woo-commerce plugin to set up an eCommerce website or an SEO plugin like Yoast, All In One SEO, and Rank Math.
Scoring a 95+ score out of a hundred on PageSpeed Insights, this theme is thoroughly optimized and offers the best SEO practices from a newbie who has just started to an expert.
It loads rapidly in any browser and device, and it has also got a 5-star rating on wordpress.org, which is a great achievement.
The best part about this theme is that its free version also comes with 13 demo sites that you can import from its setup wizard. Right now, the free version is activated on more than 400,000 themes.
Kalium
Kalium is a multipurpose theme for professionals who hate coding and have zero knowledge of it. Just make any type of website by simple drag-and-drop from the various options.
Featuring WPbakery page builder, trendy sliders, ACF plugin pro, WooCommerce support, Responsive layouts, this theme can fulfill all your requirements with a one-time investment. It even offers you free lifetime updates, which is amazing as not much theme provides that.
The theme weighs around 5 MB, which is slightly more than the recommended size, and takes 3-4 seconds to load that can be reduced with JS minifications and clearing browser cache.
Be theme
BeTheme is one of the most successful themes on ThemeForest. It was created by the Muffin Group back in 2014, and it is consistently gaining popularity in the theme world.
The theme is well equipped with around 50+ widgets, 20 cool header layouts, 450+ pre-built websites, including sites for cafe, band, hotel, racing, food, shop, etc., that make a website-making task relatively quick and straightforward.
The theme is quite complicated to learn as it comes with too many new useful features that most themes usually don’t offer. It is available on ThemeForest for just 59$.
Say bye to those bulky themes that take much longer in loading and contain too many bugs in them. Try BeTheme once, and I guarantee it won’t disappoint you in any scenario.
Sydney pro
This powerful theme
comes from aTheme, a company whose founder was competing alone against the famous theme-making brands. The theme is lightweight enough that can be handled on any type of web hosting server without any complications.
You can guess its popularity from the fact that it has been downloaded by more than 200,000 people so far, and it has more than 600,000 active installations till now.
If you are an expert in website making and want to migrate to a different theme, then the Sydney Pro theme can be the best fit for you.
It also has a built-in sticky header option so that you don’t need to download any plugin and make the site heavy just to enable the stick header feature.
Providing you with 54 KB of page size, less than 0.5 seconds of load time, and with 100% of GTMetrix score, this theme becomes a beast when it comes to performance.
Uncode
Whether you want to create a website for your agency, portfolio, education purposes, NGO, blogs, or even if you’re going to start an eCommerce business, this powerful theme can handle all of them alone.
The theme Uncode is easy to install and use. Even a beginner using WordPress for the first time can make any type of website with it. Although it offers many valuable features and the best part is you don’t have to pay for them separately. It comes with some of the essential features that a theme must have, such as responsive design, prebuilt demos, beautiful buttons with awesome hover effects, smooth scrolling, all types of google font support, etc., so that you can entirely focus on your work.
It also features multiple awesome blog layouts that force the user to stay on your site, which eventually helps grow the website.
Uncode theme costs around 59$ on themeforest.net and comes with six months of support that can be extended to 12 months by paying some extra fee.
Flatsome
Here comes the safest and best-selling WooCommerce and business theme “Flatsome“, which I also use and prefer for all users. For those in website selling business who need to make many websites in very little time, this theme is highly recommended.
Featuring UX Builder that includes 36 free and useful elements helping you handle your site’s different sections, such as header, footer, sidebar, contact form, etc. Plus, every element is 100% mobile-friendly, which adds additional comfort and saves your time.
The theme comes with many eye-catching navigation menus, enhancing the site’s appearance.
If you ever face any issue while learning or building anything, you can check out their how-to videos and get the solution yourself.
Like other themes, Flatsome’s regular license also costs approx. 60$ that can only be used for one site. However, you can extend it according to your need and use it on multiple sites.
TheGem
It is built to assist website owners who do not consider themselves developers or coders but want to create a high-quality and interesting interface with a modern WordPress website. It is one of the best WordPress themes.
When you build a fresh website with TheGem, you can choose from over 40 demos. As soon as you select the demo, it will automatically import on your WordPress Website in one or two clicks.
TheGem is all about giving you creative control over your website. If you’re a beginner in website design and management, TheGem has a superfluity of qualities that can help you create a website that goes above your current set and abilities.
Pofo
Pofo theme was created by ThemeZaa company. Having a multipurpose theme with 29 best WordPress theme strategies and over 190 prebuilt templates, Such as creative agencies, corporate websites, portfolios, and WordPress blogs, all these you can easily make from the Pofo design. Pofo has excellent WooCommerce support, making it a perfect choice for an online store as well.
Pofo is a well-optimized search engine WordPress theme that loads very fast. The theme is translation-ready and supports WordPress child themes because it is built with HTML5, CSS3, and the Bootstrap 3 framework. You can create stunning content for your website’s front-end or back-end using the plugin. It delivers lots of content features and a library of templates to help you in making professional pages.
After you’ve imported a method, you can adjust the designs of the home page, footer, portfolio pages, header, blog pages, etc. Many users are using this amazing Pofo theme to create a unique website.
Oxygen
Oxygen is a website builder that works as a WordPress plugin, much like Elementor. It is a plugin, it replaces your complete WordPress theme.
You can create your site without including coding right from scratch, thanks to its supply of prebuilt components, fundamental building blocks, and standard WordPress shortcodes.
Similarly, precise styling changes enable you to efficiently or smoothly change items up with custom Oxygen’s built-in styling tool or CSS.
What’s better, you can resume using all of your different favorite WordPress plugins, including normal WordPress page builders.
Even if you’re an intermediate WordPress user who enjoys building your websites, Oxygen will most likely be helpful to you. It’s simple enough to create a unique site even if you don’t know how to code.
Fullpane
It is a user-friendly WordPress theme with a fullscreen design. It is prepared for a portfolio showcase for individual blogs, photographers, agency websites, and videographers. Fullpane is a multipurpose theme with many different layout options, custom post types, and animation effects to create colorful and stunning websites.
Fullpane theme is consistent with all existing browsers and is 100% user-friendly, which suggests it will fit in any machine you prefer, whether it is a desktop, mobile, or tablet. This theme enables you to create a parallax scrolling site with a single page and an area with multiple pages. You can make full section galleries using either the Media Gallery or the Gallery custom post type.
Landing
The App Landing Page WordPress Theme is ideal for showcasing apps. The app is a more modern way to present your company. It’s simple to customize, well documented, and has a child theme. It also agrees with desktop, mobile, laptop, and major browsers.
It is one of the best WordPress themes for those who are interested in making an app, app showcase, landing page of an app, template of the app, etc. It is also very beneficial when you make the traveling app, medical app, landing page of a mobile and restaurant app. All these qualities you can find in this is the reason most people prefer this Landing theme.
Neve
Neve should be the best WordPress theme if you want a lightweight yet adaptable WordPress theme. It is one of the most widespread and most used themes in the WordPress guide, with over 150k downloads in 2021. It was created by Themeisle, the same company that created Hestia, another popular free theme.
Although Neve provides a plethora of customization options for each site component, it does not sacrifice performance. Holding the size and number of recommendations to a basic minimum makes the front back fairly light. The demo websites agree with page builders such as Elementor, Brizy, and Beaver.
Relive
Relive is the best WordPress theme blog theme that permits you to convey your travel experiences and stories. You will have credentials to “Visual Composer,” as shown by TeslaThemes, to make company pages using drag-and-drop elements.
The theme emphasizes related posts and social sharing icons to increase page views and social followers. The homepage demo uses a grid layout to highlight many featured stories, another great feature of its design.
We like this theme because of its versatile layout, allowing both novice and experienced bloggers to manage their content easily. It will enable you to publish articles that include multimedia elements such as photos, videos, and other media. Starting a blog or news portal does not require you to be a coder.
Sanse
Sanse is a straightforward and free WordPress theme that 1000 people have selected in the last 90 days. The interface of a theme is very easy to use, creating this theme best for the WordPress blog.
Sanse, like WordPress admin since version 4.6, uses native system fonts. There are no Google fonts or other font stacks to slow down the theme.
It places a strong emphasis on high performance and small, clean code. The theme is very small, and it is the lightest WordPress theme you will find. As a consequence, it loads quickly and is one of the quickest WordPress themes available on google.
What is a WordPress theme?
A WordPress theme is a group of files in which codes of different languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, etc., are written. These various files work together to provide your website with an attractive appearance and make it user-friendly. In simple terms, the look of a website entirely depends on a theme or a WordPress theme.
What To Look while buying your first WordPress theme:
If you are starting a blog or website for the first time and looking for a theme, these factors can help you boost your website’s success. So, it would be best if you select a theme after considering all these listed factors.
Size & Load Time:
All WordPress themes have a different size depending on their specifications, like what features and customization options it provides. Some themes have sizes in KB, whereas some have in MB. The lower the size of a theme, the faster it loads.
Many low-quality themes in the market don’t perform well even after having the smallest size, and the reason is that they are not thoroughly optimized.
Now, how can you check whether the theme you want is well optimized and loads faster? Here’s a quick tip.
The best part of theme-providing websites is that they provide a preview option which gives a quick overview of how your website will be looking after using that particular theme. So, you can check out your theme without even spending a penny.
First, search for the theme and click on the preview option.
Once you enter the preview page, copy the URL and paste it into any of these website speed testing tools, Gtmetrix [recommended], Pingdom, Pagespeed Insights.
Now, wait for the results. If you have used Gtmetrix, it should be showing some grade, and if the grade is A or B, the theme is outstanding. However, the other two tools show points out of 100, and if your theme scores at least 75 points, you can go with it.
Customization (Free Vs. Paid):
Theme customization is another vital thing one needs to check out while purchasing the first WordPress theme. You can customize your website’s Title, Tagline, Font Style, Widgets, Colors, etc., easily with a single click.
Almost all themes allow you to completely change the look of your entire website, no matter whether it is the navigation menu or the footer options. But, these options are usually available only for paid versions. For instance, if you use an OceanWP or GeneratePress theme, you can change the positioning of your navigation bar, but not its color and style. Also, you can’t customize the free version of these paid themes that sometimes compel you to pay for it and then enjoy.
So, the moral of the story is that if you want 100% control over your theme’s customization options and want your website to look the way you like, first, you’ll need to purchase it because, without that, you won’t get enough options to play.
Look For Responsive Theme:
A responsive theme offers you better content visibility, a more user-friendly interface, even on smaller devices such as smartphones, as it automatically adjusts its layout according to the device’s screen resolution.
Today, almost 60-70% of people use their smartphone to access a website, and that’s why the responsiveness of a theme must be your priority.
It is true that nowadays, all WordPress theme companies design their themes with responsiveness but still cross-check for it, just to be on the safe side.
Here’s a quick guide for beginners who don’t know how to check a theme’s responsiveness.
How to check For Theme Responsiveness:
There are many methods or tricks by which you test whether a theme is responsive or not. One of the well-known and quickest methods is to put the theme or website URL on famous responsiveness checking tools such as mobiletest.me and responsinator.com.
Check carefully how the theme looks on different devices, whether the text is readable or not, and whether the content is well managed. In simple words, consider yourself a user and check if something is missing from your theme’s interface in different resolutions. And if you think everything is well managed and readable, you got your theme.
Site owners widely use both these tools and are highly recommended by the experts as well. So, you can rely on them.
Another way to check whether a theme is responsive or not is by accessing the inspect tool from your browser.
You can access the inspect option in two ways. One is by simply pressing Ctrl+Shift+I on windows or CMD + Options + I on MAC OS. Another is by right-clicking anywhere on the theme page and selecting the inspect option. After entering the inspect option, you’ll notice that your screen is divided into two parts, the left side for your theme and the right side is covering the coding section.
Search for the toddler device toolbar option on the top of the coding section or press Ctrl + Shift + M. Finally, increase and decrease the theme section with your mouse and check whether it is working fine or not.
Price:
A WordPress theme price starts from 10 dollars and can go up to 300 dollars for a lifetime license. You can select any theme according to your budget, but make sure to go through all the factors we have mentioned above and don’t forget to check its customer support period.
Typically, if you buy a theme for one year, it provides customer support for 1-2 years, and for a lifetime theme subscription, they give you lifetime support. So, consider your budget and check out the theme reviews, too, because not all these are as good as they claim to be.
FAQs
Is it worth paying for a WordPress theme?
This question arises in many people’s minds: should they invest in a WordPress theme to start their first blog or eCommerce business? Let’s discuss it briefly so that you can decide on your own.
As mentioned above, free WordPress themes come with minimal options when it comes to customizing a website. And, with these limited options, a free theme makes a website look quite unprofessional.
Moreover, you don’t get any customer support in free themes, so you’ll be pretty much on your own if the theme creates a problem, because of which you’ll need to focus on the issues that don’t even matter.
And the final point, when your business will start growing, you’ll need to access more options to make your website much more user interactive, which can’t be done with a free theme until you know how to play with the code.
If we talk about paid themes, it is a one-time investment, and you are all set to focus on your business, not on silly bugs that typical themes have. In addition, you’ll get customer support, so you can discuss your problems directly with their staff and solve all theme-related queries.
If you are a beginner who is just stepping into this field to learn new things like how to make a website, how to host it, or just setting up a blog only because of your writing hobby, a free theme is sufficient.
However, if you are serious about your online journey and want to take your business to the next level, investing in a good theme sounds like a smart idea. Hence, the final call is yours.
Which WordPress theme is best for beginners?
Many themes are available in the market that perform exceptionally well and have an excellent track record, but it also depends on the type of work you plan to use.
For those looking to start a blog, Astra, Oceanwp, Soledad can be some good options. On the other hand, for an eCommerce website, Flatsome, Porto, WoodMart, XStore are some great options.
What is the difference between a WordPress theme and a template?
This is one of the most confusing questions about WordPress. A WordPress theme is something that completely changes the look of an entire website. On the other hand, a template can only change the look of a single page. You can use multiple templates on a single website but can’t use more than one theme at a time.
If you want to change the appearance of the whole website, you’ll need to change the theme; however, if you want to change the appearance of a single page, simply upload a template.
In detail, When you download a theme, you get it in the zip format. This zip file contains all the main files that can be accessed easily by extracting. A template is one of those files inside that theme folder.
How to change the WordPress theme?
Changing a WordPress theme is a straightforward task. Simply login into your WordPress account and search for the appearance option in the left sidebar menu.
Now, click on it and then click on the themes option. Click on the “Add New” button in the theme section on the top left corner. Search for your theme and click on the install button. It should take 1-2 minutes to install. Finally, just activate it, and you’ll notice the theme has completely changed. You can delete the previous theme to make your website slightly lightweight.
Manual Upload: If the above method doesn’t work for any reason, you can still change the theme by uploading the theme manually. But first of all, download the theme you want to upload. It should be downloaded in zip format.
Instead of searching for the theme, click on the upload theme option. Now, choose the zip file by browsing it and click on the “Install Now” button. Again, it should take 1-2 minutes to complete the installation process.
How to tell what WordPress theme a site is using?
Earlier, I became very frustrated whenever I came across a theme but couldn’t figure out the name of it, even after searching it for hours on different theme selling websites. But luckily, I found some handy tricks that help me easily find the name of any theme I see on websites.
The quickest method to detect any theme on the web is by using a chrome extension, and most of you might have heard about it, Whatruns. This is an amazing tool to detect any theme in a single click, and even experts recommend it as it saves your time and gives the results within seconds.
Another famous way for detecting a WordPress theme is by accessing the online theme detecting websites like wpthemedetector.com or Scanwp.net. The best part is that you don’t have to pay a single penny to use them. Just copy and paste the URL of the website where you saw the theme and wait for the results. These tools also show the theme version, author name, popularity, price, ranking, and much more details.
So, next time whenever you see an attractive theme on the web, don’t forget you know these amazing tricks to get its name.
What are the best children wordpress themes?
Whenever we look for a children wordpress theme, we need to consider many aspects it should have to make a website much more kid friendly such as colors, simple design, not so complicated interface, easily accessible, and, more importantly, plenty of characters, icons, and images.
And, when it comes to the best children themes considering all those aspects, you’ll not find a better option than these listed themes. Which are, Littledino, Kidzoo Lite, Tabula, Pappory, Happy Kids, Playroom, Zixton, Parezy, Tediss, Lighthouse, and Uneno.
All these themes are specially made for children’s websites, so if it’s a website for children’s games, nursery, child doctors, kindergarten, or any other child-related program, just go with any of these themes.
Which is the best web hosting for beginners?
Many hosting service providers offer cheap and reliable hosting such as Hostinger, Bluehost, DreamHost, SiteGround, Flywheel, Namecheap, and A2 Hosting.
If you are a beginner, it doesn’t make sense to invest in those premium and expensive web hostings that are capable of handling a massive amount of traffic. There are much more expenses you need to consider while setting up a website, such as domain, content, marketing, etc. So, it is recommended to invest a little in hosting and then migrate to premium hosting when the business grows.
Where to find a cheap domain to set up a website?
No matter what type of website you are planning to start, you can’t set it up without a domain.
You can buy any domain name you like and available on those famous hosting providers mentioned above. These companies provide affordable domain names as well. No matter if you want a .com, .net, .org, .in, or even a .xyz domain name, they provide all of them.
Conclusion
So, these are the 21 best wordpress themes in 2021 that you can buy without any doubt. Choosing a theme from the group of the world’s best themes can be quite complicated. That’s why you should consider your budget and the type of work first before buying any wordpress theme. Also, you can go through the guide if you are still confused about choosing the best one for you. Now, the final call is yours.