Out of all the websites on the web, about 34 percent of them utilize a content management system (CMS). From those 34 percent, more than half use WordPress, 58.5 percent to be exact. The ease of use and developer support has surged WordPress to the top of the industry. Other CMS like Joomla and Drupal have lost a lot of market share as WordPress has become more and more popular.
In this article, we will go over the 10 best free WordPress themes of 2013 so far. [However, if you want something a little more unique — and you have some money to spend — check out my list of the 10 Best Paid WordPress Themes of 2013.] WordPress themes that are free usually tend to lack in the quality department; however, I’ll go over 10 that match the paid themes and maybe even exceed them in certain areas.
1. zAlive
zAlive is a fully responsive and feature-packed theme that’s very versatile and multi-purpose. The main theme colors are green and black; however, those can easily be adjusted with CSS. Some of its key features include a slider and built-in advertisement positions.
2. Customizr
This is a WordPress theme unlike any other you’ve seen before (at least free ones!). It allows you to completely customize the way your website looks with sliders, layouts, featured blocks on the homepage, and much more. Customizr was built with Twitter Bootstrap framework so there are even more options when it comes to customizations.
3. Corpo
Based on its name, you would probably think that Corpo is a corporate theme, and you’d be right! It is a very simple, yet clean and professional theme. It includes a slider on the homepage, various custom widgets, and two menu locations. Like many of the themes showcased in this article, Corpo is a flat design theme.
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4. Attitude
Attitude is another simple and professional WordPress theme. It is also retina-ready which means it looks good even on high-DPI resolution devices such as smartphones and tablets. It has a myriad of options to choose from so you won’t be bored from customizing this theme, that’s for sure.
5. MultiPurpose
MultiPurpose is a theme that does its name justice. It is a multi-purpose theme that has many uses but it would best fit as a corporate website for your company. This theme was also built on Twitter Bootstrap framework. In case you don’t know what that is, you should read up on it.
6. MesoColumn
You will be shocked to see that this magazine-style theme is actually free! It is built with the latest coding standards using HTML5 and CSS3 and has support for BuddyPress, BBPress, and WooCommerce. It also gives you the ability to color-code categories as well as use more than 600 webfonts from Google.
7. zeeDynamic
zeeDynamic is a responsive magazine-style theme that places heavy emphasis on an article’s imagery. If your website or blog tells its story primarily through imagery, then you should give zeeDynamic a try. The theme was coded so that it looks and works well on screens of all sizes.
8. SuevaFree
SuevaFree is a responsive theme that presents content in tiles similar to Pinterest. Tiles are becoming more popular in web design and part of it is because they allow content to be neatly organized. Although you could probably use SuevaFree for multiple purposes, it would best fit a blog website where each post would be a tile on the homepage.
9. Terrifico
Terrifico is a fully responsive blogging theme that comes with an advanced admin panel for easy customizations. It was designed and coded to look great on any device and any screen size. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Terrifico is that it just looks like a premium theme. Everything seems to have been thought of and widgets blend naturally within the theme.
10. Duena
If you’re looking for a colorful, yet modern looking WordPress theme, then Duena might be the answer. Duena is another theme that uses Twitter Bootstrap framework to control the layout of the pages. Although Duena is pretty simple, it also has a sense of depth due to its glowing and gradient-filled background.