Are you an artist that requires a WordPress theme to showcase the work you’re proud of? No wonder—websites built in WordPress are a great way for visitors to find new or follow their favorite artists. They can stay updated on the latest work, consume text, image, audio, and video content creatives post, and even get in touch. Further, artists can use their sites as an always-online portfolio, helping them land a spot at an educational institution or find steady employment or freelance work. Regardless of the goal, art should be at the forefront. Therefore, we picked out the best WordPress themes for artists.
1. Astra
Astra is one of those gorgeous, responsive, fast-loading, lightweight (a public portion is less than 50 KB), and neatly designed WordPress themes that can work for nearly anything. Case in point, it was our first choice among WordPress blog themes. That’s because it’s the fastest-growing theme, based on their data, and has over 1 million installations on the WordPress repository alone. It is mobile-ready, translation-ready, SEO-optimized, and has AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). The best part is that it comes with lots of templates and supports all popular page builder WordPress plugins. Though there’s a paid version ($59 per license at the time of writing), you can customize the free one indefinitely.
2. Divi
Another multipurpose, highly versatile example among WordPress themes is Divi. It’s theoretically a theme, but primarily a foundation for roughly 2000 layouts, about 350 art-related. You can apply and edit these using Divi Page Builder in minutes, making the theme suitable for portfolios, art studios, and art galleries alike. You also get over 40 custom block-based elements on top of SEO-friendly design, responsiveness, mobile-friendliness, fast loading times, and support for RTL (read right-to-left). Finally, you can tweak global elements and styles to apply site-wide changes. Plus, it permits saving designs and accessing the Revisions feature to undo or redo changes.
3. Adios
Adios is an award-winning art theme for WordPress that ships with over 15 demo templates. These include one page or multipage, full-width, split-screen, or scrolling horizontally or vertically. They also come with or without a slider, for static and dynamic content, and with minimalist and content-packed pages. The theme is compatible with Elementor and has 4 portfolio page layouts. Plus, it features a blogging page, and 7 multipurpose pages you can customize. The only “downside” is that it’s a paid theme, costing $59 at the time of publication.
4. Artday
Besides showcasing work, are you a person who needs to make some sales, whether personally or as a shop or agency? Whether that’s commissions, art, or equipment, Artday is among the WordPress themes for creative artists with a shop. It features a large header and sliders to capture visitors’ attention right away and several eCommerce-optimized themes with single or multiple products. Every portion of the template comes in a PSD format, making tweaks easy. Artday is compatible with the Visual Composer (now WPBakery) builder plugin, HTML5, CSS3, has multiple layouts, menus, and font options, and is translation ready.
5. Blask
Are you seeking a great representative of free WordPress themes for artists? Blask, designed by Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com, is a black-and-white (demo only) modern theme designed for portfolios of art and photography. It has a preview of images of all sizes on the 70% of the window, with the menu and social media links on the left-hand side. Unsurprisingly, you can customize these positions, and use prebuilt blog pages to explain each piece of art featured on the home page. You can also add anything to the built-in footer widget area. Plus, adding blog pages and adjusting the site logo in the top left corner is simple.
6. Bridge
Bridge is a multipurpose WordPress theme whose superpower is compatibility with Elementor and WPBakery page builders and the availability of 600+ demos to import. There are a plethora of art-related layouts for all types of artists, saving you time and effort while producing outstanding results. You can create a portfolio, an art shop, a limited-time gallery exhibition, and so much more. QODE, the developer, has a written and video base of tutorials and Frequently Asked Questions. Plus, it boasts an award-winning design team that provides fast, effective Customer Support.
7. Red Art
Red Art is a paid theme for creatives of any type: sculpture, collections, photography, handcrafting, body paint, tattoo, and for portfolios, art galleries, or print shops. The theme comes with 6 demos you can import with one click. It also has 8 header styles (including a mega menu) you can pick from and over 20 color skins to recolor the demo effortlessly. The theme is compatible with WPBakery, WooCommerce, and Revolution Slider is SEO-optimized, mobile-friendly, and supports Retina screens. The best part is the shortcodes that let you make drastic changes with 1 click and over 600 Google Fonts.
8. FWRD
Musicians should forgive us for not thinking of them, but we’ll have a dedicated list of music WordPress themes. For now, we present FWRD, a drag-and-drop theme with 5 ready-to-go demos, all with sections that can also showcase images and videos. Templates consist of everything a creative would need, from art previews to tours, scheduling, and commissions, blogs, contact us, 100+ header options, and video and parallax backgrounds. The theme is built with Essential Grid and WPBakery.
9. AltoFocus
After a long list of paid themes, we’re back to AltoFocus, a free one Automattic designed, like Blask. Though the demo may look simple, with a straightforward header containing the logo, artist description, and menu in the top right corner, the design is complex. The preview you see below, also called a tile grid, is intricate and automatically changes shape to adjust to the newest art-based posts, images and videos, and their size. Clicking opens an accompanying blog post (templates included). AltoFocus also has a Gallery that lets you design the view mode, social links, and portfolio page.
10. Haar
Haar is at the bottom of our list of the best artists WordPress themes. That’s because it costs $89 at the time of publication. However, users state it has the best Customer Support they witnessed. The theme supports a myriad of one-click import demos and boasts a fast, lightweight, clean, responsive, Retina-ready design. It consists of inner and outer pages and shortcodes. The latter lets you enable and disable features such as animations, pagination, hover types, sliders, scroll sliders, and infinite scrolling. It also comes with infographics, interactive text, galleries, carousels, header types, social media feeds, and so much more.