One of the most important considerations of any business’ blog is how effectively it can be monetized. Blogs can be monetized in various ways, but one of the most effective is making use of such advertising tools as Google AdSense. However, it’s not quite as simple as placing a bunch of adverts on your website and watching the money roll in. Ads need to be carefully and strategically placed, lest they be clunky, intrusive, off-putting, or a combination of all three. In addition, Google has strict requirements for websites that wish to use AdSense – one of the most important being that the website in question regularly puts out unique, high-value content.
One of the most important facets of your blog is the theme that you’re using. The best WordPress themes are clean, crisp, visually appealing, and – most importantly – lend themselves easily to monetization. For this reason, it’s very important to ensure that you choose from the best WordPress themes for monetizing your blog.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Themes For Monetizing Blogs 2023
For a quick overview of all of the themes featured in this article, please refer to the guide below. If you’d like a more in-depth examination of any given theme, refer to the individual section for that theme.
- Best Overall Theme For Monetization: Newspaper
- Best Beginner Theme For Monetization: Extra
- Best Theme for Integrated Blogs: Pearl
- Best For Blog Optimization: Elementor Pro & Hello
- Best Lightweight Theme For Monetization: Astra
- Best Visual Theme: Olsen
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Best Overall Theme For Monetization: Newspaper
Newspaper’s name is no coincidence – it was chosen precisely to reflect what the theme does – closely replicates the look and feel of legacy media websites.
Looking like a Washington Post or a Guardian inevitably has its advantages – by mimicking the look of big news websites, your blog will automatically come across as knowledgeable and authoritative, making it perfect for businesses who are hoping to use their blog to establish themselves as the voice of wisdom in their industry.
But Newspaper isn’t just about adding a slick veneer of professionalism to your content. It’s fully supported on the backend as well, with an integral page analyzer that works behind the scenes to optimize your content in ways that are not immediately obvious. Such tweaks include SEO support, load time optimization, and analytics that can tell you which blog posts are performing, and which could do with some further work.
The icing on the cake is Newspaper’s integrated ecommerce support. If your route to monetization of your blog is making use of such platforms as WooCommerce, you’ll find plenty to love in Newspaper. Throw in Instagram, BBPress Forum and BuddyPress support, as well as Google AdSense capabilities, and you have a WordPress theme that’s perfect for almost any blog out there. Therefore, Newspaper is definitely one of the best WordPress themes for monetizing a blog.
What We Like
- Multiple monetization options
- Professional presentation
- Excellent backend tool suite
- Great ecommerce support
What We Don’t Like
- Outdated page builder
Pricing
- $59 for the regular license
Best Beginner Theme For Monetization: Extra
If you want a theme that’s both all-purpose and incredibly easy to use, then Extra is the likely candidate. This powerful and versatile theme is perfect for pretty much any kind of blog you can imagine – but, importantly, it doesn’t overwhelm the user with difficult-to-grasp and unintuitive user tools. In fact, it’s perfect for complete newcomers to the WordPress scene.
Extra is powered by Divi Builder, which is itself the most popular WordPress theme in the world. This may lead you to think that it’s overused and that your blog will struggle to stand out from the crowd, but as we’ve pointed out, Extra is extremely versatile, and can create any sort of visual theme you can imagine. This makes it easy to craft a blog that looks completely unlike any other out there – even as a WordPress neophyte.
Extra further distinguishes itself from Divi by being designed explicitly for bloggers. Modules built exclusively for the theme reinforce this – users can enjoy tabbed posts, post sliders, carousels, and post feeds that are defined by categories that you choose by yourself. This leads to blogs that look amazing, but that require absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever.
With the power of Divi behind it, most of the behind-the-scenes page building on Extra is done with a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes editing your posts effortless. Even if you’ve no idea where to start, one of the 800+ pre-made templates will get you started, and allow you to go from there.
All of this means that you can focus on the important aspects of your blog – the actual content, and ensure that you’re making the most of your revenue streams. With integrated WooCommerce and full Google AdSense support, this shouldn’t be too difficult at all.
What We Like
- Extremely beginner-friendly
- Excellent customizable options
- Ecommerce integration
- Specifically designed for blogs
- Access to hundreds of other themes included
What We Don’t Like
- Lacks some of the tools of more advanced themes
- On the expensive side
Pricing
- $89/year
Best Theme for Integrated Blogs: Pearl
Pearl is regularly mentioned as one of the best WordPress themes for a multitude of applications, but especially for monetizing a blog. If your blog is part of a larger website (e.g. if you’re a large business) then Pearl makes for the best choice for your WordPress theme. It also includes a whole slew of powerful monetization options that make it fantastic for maximizing the revenue that your blog is generating.
Pearl allows you to put out a blog that’s perfectly weighted for the needs of your particular niche, and ensures that you’re getting the most out of your content. Pearl has a wealth of premade content that is designed for different specific industries, making it easy to make use of their themes out of the box to make sure you’re hitting the sweet spot for your niche.
And if your blog is part of a bigger site, Pearl is great for ensuring that it’s tied into the bigger picture and that you have the tools necessary to ensure your audience is engaging with the other parts of your website. It’s easy to make sure that your posts are interactive, too, with the option to allow readers to react, leave comments, and share content quickly and easily.
If monetization is one of the key purposes of your blog (and it almost certainly should be), then Pearl is one of the best options on the market. You can embed more than 55 kinds of UI blocks directly into your posts, making it easy to add music players, pricing tables, ecommerce widgets and CTAs without interrupting the flow of your blog posts.
You can even embed 24/7 help desks to make sure that your customers can get immediate help on any issues that they might have, further driving engagement and ensuring that your users come away from the experience happy.
Pearl manages to do all of this without overwhelming you with an elaborate UI or an overabundance of tools, and it’s also not going to break the bank – great considering it’s the sort of theme that’s geared towards larger businesses. What’s more, it comes bundled with a good number of premium plugins worth more than $300, making it excellent value for money.
What We Like
- Great for blogs that exist as part of a larger site
- Large number of premium plugins included
- Excellent monetization options
What We Don’t Like
- Overkill for smaller businesses or standalone blogs
Pricing
- $59 for the regular license
Best For Blog Optimization: Elementor Pro & Hello
If you’re an experienced blogger who likes to get under the hood and really tweak your content, then Elementor Pro is an excellent choice that any veteran should seriously consider.
Elementor Pro is not just a single theme, but a whole library of themes. If you find yourself being left in the dust by your competitors and are looking for a complete overhaul of how your blog is presented, you won’t be left wanting by this theme’s powerful and comprehensive suite of tools. This also makes it great for monetizing your blogs, as there is no shortage of features that lend themselves to affiliate marketing, Google AdSense and much more.
Elementor Pro comes out of the gate strong with its kits library, which allows you to get to work revamping your blog with some easy-to-use yet powerful tools. Playing around with these allows you to drastically alter the look and layout of your site with just a few alterations. You can also deep-dive into blog customization with a wealth of further options – search bars, ecommerce widgets, sticky menus, roll-out menus, sidebars, popups and many more features are readily available to be used (or omitted).
There are more than 100 kits, and it takes a matter of minutes to apply them to your site. From there, you can get to grips with any of the features listed above, and then use the visual builder to further tweak your blog.
Beginner blogger? Elementor’s flagship kit, ‘Hello’, is perfect to use right out of the box, and sidesteps a lot of the minutiae that you’ll find if you get deep into any of the other kits. It’s not quite as novice-friendly as, say, Extra, but if you’d like to dive right into the deep end from the get-go, it’s a decent option.
If all this sounds extremely expensive, then you’ll be shocked to learn that Elementor Pro actually has a free version. You’ll only get the Hello kit and you’ll lack access to many of the theme’s cooler bells and whistles, but it’s a good taster and is a great choice for people who are curious about Elementor Pro but aren’t ready to pull the trigger on buying it.
What We Like
- Exhaustive supply of kits and features
- Excellent customizability
- Ecommerce integration
What We Don’t Like
- Unexciting free package
- Intimidating to first-timers
Pricing
- $59 (1 site), $199 (25 sites), $399 (1000 sites)
Best Lightweight Theme For Monetization: Astra
When talking about the best WordPress themes for monetizing your blog, we have to mention Astra. Not all blogs need a plethora of widgets, plugins and backend features to get the job done. If you need something simple and unassuming for your blog monetization needs, then you could do much worse than Astra – one of the most popular WordPress themes in the world.
‘Popular’, in fact, may be an understatement. Astra is used by 1.6 million websites worldwide, and claims to be the fastest growing theme on the globe. It’s also great both for novice and veteran bloggers alike.
Astra is fast and easy to get to grips with. Although everything is customizable, the UI is so intuitive and quick to learn that you’ll soon be tweaking every aspect of your blog posts – even if you have absolutely no experience. More experienced bloggers won’t be found wanting, either, and it’s a great way to give your existing blog a quick once-over in order to make it more appealing and keep it fresh and competitive.
Astra comes with integrated SEO optimization too, which offers you tips and tricks as soon as you’ve uploaded your blog posts. This makes it easy to edit your blogs on the fly to make them more SEO-friendly, and ensures that you’ll be routinely hitting the top of the Google hits for your chosen topics.
On the backend, Astra has plenty of features for more experienced bloggers to make use of. The theme boasts seamless integration with plenty of WordPress tools – Yoast, Elementor, LearnDash, WooCommerce and many more are fully supported, making Astra a fantastic option if you’re looking to make use of any of those.
Because of how lightweight it is, Astra’s speed is unparalleled, making navigation of your blog quick and easy. This is of massive importance if you’re heavily invested in content marketing, and making it so that readers can quickly and easily skip between blog posts and check out your other content is crucial. If you’re using Google AdSense or WooCommerce, this also means that everything will load in quickly and smoothly, making it that much easier for your readers to respond to your CTAs or shopping links.
What We Like
- Lightweight and easy-to-use design
- Great backend tools
- Fantastic customizability despite its lightweight nature
- Excellent customer support
What We Don’t Like
- Lacks the suite of tools offered by more intensive themes
Pricing
- $47 (Pro), $137 (Essential), $187 (Growth)
Best Visual Theme: Olsen
For a clean, attractive theme that emphasizes your content in a way that’s visually appealing, look no further than Olsen. This easy-to-use and intuitive WordPress doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but that’s a good thing for both you and your readers – good for you because it’s easy to use and get new blog posts published, and easy for your readers because they’ll have navigated similar blogs before.
In addition to the text content of your blogs, Olsen is great for including photos and pictures in a way that makes for a visually arresting experience. This is particularly important for lifestyle content such as fashion or makeup blog posts, where it’s important for your words to be complemented by relevant imagery.
What’s more, Olsen is easy to link to your other social media content – particularly Instagram, for which it has an integrated widget. This widget is a feature unique to Olsen, and allows you to display your most recent Instagram posts at the bottom of the page in a row – perfect for businesses that use their IG accounts to market products or services.
Topping off Olsen’s impressive list of features is the featured content slider. This lets you feature up to 6 blog posts or images on the front page of your blog, making it quick and easy for you to get your readers where you want them to be. Therefore, Olsen completes our list of the best WordPress themes for monetizing your blog.
What We Like
- Unique Instagram widget makes it easy to link to your IG account
- Crisp and clean layout
- Easy to use
- Integrated SEO assistance
- Free version available
What We Don’t Like
- IG widget only available on paid version
- Design isn’t especially unique
Pricing
- $49/year
The Verdict
Though there is no magic bullet when it comes to a WordPress theme for monetizing your blog, the fact is that there are plenty of options out there that will go a long way toward making sure that your content is complemented nicely by an appropriate theme. The best WordPress themes for monetizing your blog described above are a starting point.
And great themes for monetization go far beyond simply adding in ecommerce support or making optimal use of Google AdSense. Remember that blog marketing and monetization start with content marketing, and so it’s important to make sure that you’re putting out quality blog posts.
Once you’ve got that foundation in place, the right WordPress theme can help immeasurably with ensuring efficient monetization of your content. That may mean direct ads, it may mean CTAs that link back to your online shop, or it may mean user-engagement tools like forums or the ability to post replies and share content. Whatever form your preferred route to monetization takes, there’s sure to be a selection of the best WordPress themes for achieving your goals and monetizing your blog.
