Blogging can be a tricky business – and it can be particularly tricky if you’re running a personal blog. Picking out a theme that works for both you and your audience, planning out enough material to keep the blog going, and thinking about your brand and color scheme can all be obstacles to even getting off the ground – let alone creating a successful and widely-read personal blog.
Fortunately, we live in the age of WordPress themes. While such themes cannot write your blog posts for you, the best WordPress themes for personal blogs can pretty much do everything else. Site layout and design, branding, color scheme, ad placement, eCommerce integration – you name it, and chances are that there’s a WordPress theme that can take care of it for you.
During the course of this article, we plan to run down the list of the very best WordPress themes for personal blogs – what makes them great, how much they cost, and why you should give them a shot.
Without further ado, then, let’s take a look at the best personal WordPress themes currently on the market.
Table of Contents
7 Best WordPress Themes For Personal Blogs 2023
- Best Overall Theme For Personal Blogs: Extra
- Best For Food Blogs: TinySalt
- Best Minimalist Theme For Personal Blogs: Akea
- Best For Gaming/eSports: Artorias
- Best For AdSense Optimization: Schema
- Best Customizable Theme For Personal Blogs: Thrive Theme Builder
- Best For Fashion & Lifestyle Blogs: Olsen
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Best Overall Theme For Personal Blogs: Extra
If you’re looking for something that can do a little bit of everything – and is simple and straightforward to use – then you could do a lot worse than Extra, one of the best WordPress themes out there for personal blogs. This WordPress theme combines ease of use with unparalleled versatility, meaning you get all the advantages of a pre-made theme while side-stepping anything that feels cookie-cutter or impersonal.
Though Extra markets itself as the perfect theme for magazine-style blogs, the truth is that it accommodates any type of blog at all. Photo blogs, vlogs and even blogs with integrated eCommerce stores can all be made to look amazing (and run amazingly) via the use of Extra.
Extra is powered by the hugely popular Divi, which is, in of itself, one of the most popular WordPress themes in the world. And while Divi is great, it’s not quite as optimized for bloggers as it could be. That’s where Extra comes in, bridging the gap and offering something that truly puts the blogging experience front and center.
Many of the backend tools featured on Extra make it quick and easy to lay your blog out in a way that makes it flashy and visually appealing, without needing to know any of the nuts and bolts of website design. You can set up tabbed posts, a post carousel, a newsfeed, and many more features with the theme’s intuitive drag-and-drop backend interface.
If you’re not into designing your own color scheme and layout from scratch, Extra has you covered, with a library of more than 800 pre-made templates to draw upon. It’s so easy, even a complete novice could use it and have their blog up and running quickly and smoothly.
All of these elements come together to make Extra one of the best WordPress themes for personal blogs that’s on the market – and certainly the best overall one.
What We Like
- Fully customizable in every way
- Can be integrated with social media channels
- Easy and intuitive backend interface
- eCommerce support
- Responsive customer support 24/7
What We Don’t Like
- Lacks some of the more esoteric tools of specialized themes
Pricing
- $89/year or $249 for a lifetime subscription; also includes access to Divi, Monarch and Bloom
Best For Food Blogs: TinySalt
Multi-purpose WordPress themes can be great for almost any kind of blog (hence ‘multi-purpose’), but somewhere where they fall down is in the area of food and cooking blogs.
The reason for this is that many food blogs revolve around sharing recipes, and recipes have a specific format that some traditional WordPress themes struggle to replicate – or, at least, cannot reproduce in a manner that’s both clear and visually appealing.
TinySalt ensures that your food blog – and all the recipes thereon – look the part. It’s jam-packed with features and layout options that are optimal for posting great-looking recipes, and foodies will be falling over themselves to be clicking on the next recipe in your back catalog with this theme.
Not only does TinySalt let you format your recipes in an attractive and clean way, but it also provides a lot of excellent quality-of-life features that make life easier for your readers. Insert an option early in the blog to jump straight down to the recipe, or access a printer-friendly version if they want to pin the recipe up above their cooker. There are also custom buttons for liking/disliking recipes, which can then funnel readers towards more of the same (or, if they dislike it, then dishes they’re more likely to favor).
If you want to get off to a running start, there are twelve pre-designed demos so that you can have your blog ready to go as quickly as possible. These feature a high level of customization, so that you can tweak the templates and make them completely your own.
Bottom line: if you’re starting a food blog, then it’s really hard to recommend anything other than TinySalt. It’s the best recipe-focused WordPress theme on the market, period.
What We Like
- Excellent tools for recipe blog posts
- Easily-added share, review and rating buttons for recipes
- SEO optimization available
- Excellent choice of demos
What We Don’t Like
- Unsuitable for more generalist blogs, or blogs on other topics
Pricing
- $64 (6 months’ support), $83.50 (12 months’ support)
Best Minimalist Theme For Personal Blogs: Akea
When talking about the best WordPress themes for personal blogs, we have to mention Akea. The mission statement of Akea creators GoodLayers – less is more – couldn’t be more self-descriptive, or more indicative of the design philosophy of Akea.
Akea doesn’t complicate things with hundreds of extra bells and whistles. It offers a simple yet effective package that is perfect for bloggers who like to keep things clean and minimalist. If you believe that your words don’t need a lot of fancy set dressing to stand on their own two feet, then Akea is perfect for you.
Yet despite this minimalist design philosophy, there’s still a lot of opportunity for tweaking and customization. You have a lot of control over how your content is displayed, including how items are spaced and the size of individual images and thumbnails.
Unlike some other themes in this list, you won’t find hundreds of pre-made templates to play around with. Whether or that’s to your taste is entirely up to you, but it’s definitely worth knowing that going in.
There are, instead, 14 blog layouts, each with a decent amount of customizability. That said, your blog is very much going to look like an ‘Akea’ blog, so bear that in mind.
This, however, doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak individual layouts to your satisfaction. The elements that you might expect of other blogs, such as headers, sidebars, galleries, thumbnails and everything else, are all present and accounted for. It’s just that they’re designed in such a way as to be clean and unimposing, leaving the focus on the content of your blogs themselves.
If you’re looking for something clean, minimalist and unobtrusive, then Akea may be the WordPress theme for you.
What We Like About It
- Clean and crisp design
- Good level of customization
- Social media and eCommerce integration
What We Don’t Like About It
- A little limited compared to some competitors
- Not much in the way of pre-built templates
Pricing
- $54 (6 months’ support), $69.75 (12 months’ support)
Best For eSports And Gaming: Artorias
If your personal blog is all about video games and/or eSports, then Artorias is for you. This WordPress theme is designed with such content in mind, and will you allow you to produce a top-tier gaming website with little to no experience required.
The backend tools used on Artorias are deceptively simple, and it’s possible to import other websites into the theme wholesale, making it quick and easy to convert your existing website.
It’s also the best WordPress theme on the market for those personal blogs wishing to cover big eSports events. Alongside Twitch and YouTube integration, there are a number of tools that can make displaying league and tournament listings quick and easy. This ensures that your blog looks crisp, clean and informative, leaving you to spend more time on putting out quality content while the theme takes care of the nitty-gritty.
If you’re looking to sell merchandise Artorias also has full Shopify integration, making it easy to run an online store in tandem with your gaming/eSports content. And if you’re simply running a gaming blog? Artorias is great for that too, with attractive layouts and a number of pre-packaged demo websites ensuring that, no matter how little experience you have with website design, you can focus on gaming first and site presentation second.
What We Like About It
- Excellent suite of tools for eSports and gaming
- Great for beginners
- Twitch and YouTube integration for live tournament/eSports events
What We Don’t Like About It
- Not suitable for generalist websites
- A little expensive
Pricing
- $89/year
Best For AdSense Optimization: Schema
Just because you’re starting a personal blog, doesn’t mean that you can’t look at monetizing it. Personal blogs can be an excellent source of revenue, particularly because they’re not usually perceived as ‘marketing’ blogs – and so sidestep a lot of the stigmatization that such blogs receive.
Schema is perfect for personal blogs that want to make use of Google AdSense to turn a profit. It combines a slick and professional-looking layout with great AdSense integration that means your ads are inserted seamlessly and in a manner that isn’t distracting or annoying to your readers.
This WordPress theme isn’t just a gimmick designed to prop up your advertising, though. It has an easy-to-use editor that makes getting your website online quick and painless, and it has integrated SEO tools to ensure that your blog posts are ranking high on Google and actually generating traffic to your blog – remember that without readers, those AdSense ads are useless, after all.
Schema also features Shopify integration, as well, meaning that you don’t have to stop at AdSense. Multiple methods of monetization are, ultimately, much better than only having a single one.
What We Like About It
- Excellent AdSense Optimization
- eCommerce integration
- Affordable
- Has a free version
What We Don’t Like About It
- Design is a little old-fashioned
Pricing
- $39/year
Best Customizable Theme For Personal Blogs: Thrive Theme Builder
If you’re an experienced blogger and website designer, it may be that you’re comfortable with having more options on the technical side, and don’t need quite as much assistance when it comes to building your blog.
If that’s the case, then Thrive Theme Builder is an excellent choice. The level of customizability offered with the theme is simply unmatched – every aspect of your blog and individual blog posts can be altered to your specifications, from page layouts, headers and footers, category and search pages, and any other conceivable element of your website.
Despite its level of relative complexity, you can still get a new website up and running from scratch in less than an hour, provided you have some experience working with WordPress themes. And Thrive Theme Builder is, ultimately, not all that complicated – its editor is drag and drop, making it fairly intuitive to get to grips with in a short period of time.
Thrive Theme Builder is also great if you’re looking to monetize your personal blog, too. With integrated Shopify support, you can be sure that you’ll be making plenty of conversions while blogging about the things that you love.
What We Like
- Extremely in-depth and detailed level of customizability
- Relatively easy-to-use backend editor
- eCommerce integration
- More than 300 landing-page templates
What We Don’t Like
- Not terribly beginner-friendly
- Expensive
Pricing
- $299/year
Best For Fashion & Lifestyle Blogs: Olsen
If you’re a fashion or lifestyle blogger, you want a website that is cleanly laid out, quick to load, and visually appealing. For a WordPress theme that satisfies all of these requirements, look no further than Olsen.
Olsen allows you to put together a slick and professional-looking blog with very little work – even if you’re not the most experienced website builder. It’s quick and easy to publish blog posts that are clean, visually appealing, and easy to follow.
One potential downside of this is that any blog built with Olsen looks a lot like other fashion/lifestyle blogs – but part of its strength lies in its familiarity, which makes it instantly accessible to readers.
A particularly important aspect of both lifestyle and fashion blogs (but particularly the latter) is photos and other images – and it’s here where Olsen shines. The theme’s featured content slider lets you pick up to six images and feature them at the top of the blog, allowing readers to quickly look through the images found throughout the blog post. This is great for fashion bloggers who are looking to show off endorsed products, as readers can easily review all of the items in the featured content widget.
But one feature that really sets Olsen aside from the competition is its Instagram footer widget, which allows you to seamlessly link your IG content with that appearing on your blog. This makes it even easier for you to make recommendations and suggestions for your readers even if you haven’t written a dedicated blog post, and – if you’re looking to monetize your blog with affiliate links and endorsements – ensures that those conversions come in thick and fast.
The icing on the cake is SEO support, which means that your blog posts will be ranking top of Google without too much effort (provided the quality of writing is there). With this support, you can focus on what matters – putting together great-looking blog posts and photos – while the theme does the heavy lifting of ensuring that readers actually end up checking out what you’ve published.
What We Like
- Simple to use
- Great-looking blogs
- Excellent widgets that add to your content
- Free version available
What We Don’t Like
- Blogs can look a little generic and samey
- IG widget not available on the free plan
Pricing
- $49/year
Conclusion
Whatever your particular flavor of personal blog, we hope that the best WordPress themes for personal blogs outlined in this article have proven useful for you when it comes to deciding upon the right WordPress theme for your requirements.
Whether you’re starting a generalist blog or doing something a little more esoteric (like food, fashion or lifestyle) there is almost certainly a WordPress theme out there that’s perfect for you and your content. It’s just a matter of doing your research, trialing a few potential themes, and deciding upon the one that’s the best fit for you.
