Best free WordPress themes

[tonyp11]

I know this question has been asked a million times but allow me to make it a million and one.

I am about to launch a second website and have been scouring all the articles and blog posts on recommendations about which free WordPress themes are the best.

My current theme is Sparkling by Colorlib and although satisfactory for what I use it for, it is a bit too minimalist.

I don't want a theme that requires an engineering degree to operate but by the same token nothing that is so minimalist that I need a herd of plugins to get it to do anything.

I have had Hemingway suggested and it looks quite decent.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[Harold Mansfield]

It's an impossible question to answer. You can't give enough information for us to know your tastes, abilities, or even what the website is about.

Unfortunately you're best bet is going to be looking through them yourself.

It would be better to approach it the other way, maybe ask about specific themes or developers and maybe some of us will know something about them, or can offer insight about that particular one. Otherwise this thread because a round robin between people promoting their own themes ( which we don't allow) or just random guesses pulled out of this air that aren't what you're looking for.

My #1 suggestion would be not to use free themes. The ones in the WordPress repository are about as trustworthy as you can get, but free themes all come with baggage that I would not want to use on my business website. If budget or abilities is the problem, honestly stick with one of the default WordPress themes with as much customization as you can do, until you can do better.

If this is just a hobby site, then it doesn't matter.

[turboguy]

I haven't used too many free themes. If I had to recommend a good theme that isn't minimalist I would probably suggest the Vantage theme by site origins. Even their free theme is pretty complete as well as easy to work with. Now however if you want to go the paid version they allow you to pick how much you want to pay. They suggest $ 15.00 but will sell it to you for $ 1.00. I worked with the free one for a while but did kick in the 15 bucks not so much for the added features as much as to support them for the efforts they have made.

Some of the paid themes seem to me to be a bit of overkill. The first paid WordPress theme I used had stuff flying in this way and sliding in that way and I think it was more distractive than beneficial.