Free WordPress Themes for Portfolios
There are literally tens, if not hundreds of free WordPress themes for portfolios. Besides these themes, many WordPress developers sell premium themes suitable for portfolios. Under these circumstances, the real problem of anyone wanting to create a portfolio is identifying the proper theme from the multitude of options.
Installing and testing a theme takes at least 25–30 minutes, but I doubt that someone can test all of a theme’s features in this time. It takes around an hour to build and customize a web page. Is it too much to say that building an attractive portfolio might take a few days?
It heavily depends on user skills, but it’s obvious that choosing a theme for a portfolio and building that site takes plenty of time. We know that time flies, so we want to help you by featuring ten free WordPress themes for portfolios.
Features of a Good Portfolio
Before taking a look at the themes, let’s make a recap of the two most important features of a great theme for portfolios. This list isn’t exclusive, and we strongly encourage you to add your contribution.
· Customization Options
A portfolio should be different from other websites. It should grab the attention of the viewers from the very first second. A trivial design won’t generate enough clients to pay the bills. You need countless customization options to make your site standing apart—that is undeniable.
Regardless of whether you are an artist, designer, developer, or DJ, your portfolio must be in line with your style. If you are an unconventional graphic designer, then your portfolio should also be unconventional. Only a theme with many customization options lets you stylize your portfolio as per your needs.
· Speed, Speed, Speed
Of course, no one wants a slowly loading site, but a portfolio should load blazingly fast. Unless you are famous, people won’t wait for ages for your site to load. Use a performant plugin to optimize the images—you most likely will use many images on your site.
It’s super-fast (feel free to test it and let us know your results). Also, no matter the layout you create, it will look great both on mobile devices and desktops.
Rife includes the Revolution Slider, which will grab the users’ attention with its cool sliding effects. It’s all you need to feature your best works.
If you haven’t heard about Elementor, then you must be living under a rock. Elementor is a powerful and user-friendly page builder. Many WordPress users are deeply satisfied with this page builder, and there is a strong community around it.
Luckily for us, the team behind Elementor released a theme called Hello Elementor. It pairs perfectly with Elementor, so you have unlimited power to craft a stellar portfolio. On top of that, its developers claim that Hello Elementor is blazingly fast, and there is no need to mention how important speed is nowadays.
OceanWP is a free multipurpose WordPress theme, and it could be a reliable solution for a portfolio. Head to the OceanWP site and check out the tens of demos—a few of them will give you an idea about how to use the theme to build a portfolio.
The theme is free, but you have to pay for extensions. A user with decent WordPress skills can design a good-looking portfolio, but the Portfolio premium extension streamlines the work considerably.
Like OceanWP, Astra is a genuinely multipurpose free theme suited perfectly to constructing an impressive portfolio. The theme is highly customizable. You can arrange the elements on the layout, control their sizes, and change the colors and the fonts without writing a line of code. Design your site from scratch or use one of the many pre-built portfolio templates.
The developers of the Elementor page builder recommend this theme. The Awwwards, CSS Design Awards, and CodeInWP all praised this theme too. We played with its features, and “Super!” was a general conclusion.
Phlox covers a large range of site purposes from blogs to online stores (it’s WooCommerce compatible). However, its primary usage is for creating portfolios—one of the theme’s slogans is, “the most complete portfolio ever.”
The theme includes tons of customization options, and it’s speed optimized. You have no excuse if your portfolio is plain when you use Phlox.
The name of this theme said everything about its purpose. It’s the perfect choice for designers and developers to show their past work. The layout design is clutter-free so that viewers can fully focus on the works exhibited. The WordPress Live Customizer is golden for people who don’t code because it allows you to style web pages visually.
Portfolio Web allows you to display your resume in a timeline—it’s eye-catching and efficient at the same time! Check out the theme, and you will enjoy many other cool options and features.
Activello is a multipurpose theme that fits portfolio sites. It offers various sliders with cool transition effects to feature images, different types of portfolio layouts, and unlimited fonts and color combinations.
A well-done portfolio without traffic is useless, so leverage the power of content marketing through blog posts. The blog is also fully customizable, so use your creativity with no restrictions. The theme loads fast, is SEO-optimized, and is schema compatible. You have all the conditions to generate traffic with quality content.
Divi is the flagship theme of Elegant Themes, and it’s one of the most powerful WordPress themes for portfolios. In fact, with Divi, you can literally create any type of website. There is no need to mention that it has hundreds of demos proving that its features are, indeed, countless. Divi comes with Divi Builder, an intuitive page builder that helps non-coders craft modern sites.
Bridge is a best-selling theme on ThemeForest—people have bought it almost 120,000 times and rated it as excellent. The sky is the limit with Bridge’s four layouts: Masonry in Grid, Masonry Wide, Pinterest Wide, and Pinterest in Grid. Next, select two to six columns for the gallery. Finally, you have six options for displaying a single-page project.
To give you an idea of Bridge’s versatility, the developers released 370+ demos.
Kalium is another famous theme on ThemeForest. It has been for sale since April 2015, but its developers have constantly improved it, and it’s still massively used. It has an unbelievable rating: 4.94 out of five stars! Kalium isn’t only a WordPress theme but a full framework that allows you to create amazing sites with no coding knowledge.
Do you own a portfolio? Please let us know which theme you used and which from the above suggestions look more interesting to you. We are eager to know your opinion.
