10+ Best Minimalist WordPress Themes for Writers 2023

All that glitters is not gold. It is a new year and some of us may have decided to explore self-expression through writing but not through the dopamine-riddled social media but through independent means of publishing on WordPress.

Finding a basic blog theme and getting started on cataloging your stories, unique observation or analysis is one part of the challenge but why stick to a default WordPress theme when you can choose from similar minimalist themes that offer blog demos or have been specifically designed with independent writers in mind.

Your minimalist WordPress theme needs a few core features that keep everything clear while offering responsive views and also be accessible for the visually impaired.

 

What Is a Minimalist Theme?

A minimalist WordPress theme is a theme designed to emulate simplistic aesthetics without using distracting colors and a design that pops in your face. This makes the website appear less cluttered and clean.

Because of the sleek design and the focus it brings to the content, minimalist themes are often popular with creative types like photographers and writers to use on their websites. However, they look great for other purposes as well like a CV website.

If you have decided a minimalist WordPress theme is the right choice for you, then make sure to go over our recommended list of minimalist themes.

 

How Do I Choose a Theme for My Website?

Choosing the right theme to install on your website usually comes down to what team sparks a vision of your website and thus almost entirely subjective. But here’s a good list of essential features to look for when trying to choose a theme for your website:

• It needs to be fully responsive and mobile-friendly
• It needs to be close to what others in your industry use
• It needs to support a drag and drop page builder for easy customization
• It needs to be fast and light therefore nothing bloated that affects loading
• It needs to be compatible with all major browsers
• It needs to support popular WordPress plugins
• It needs to be SEO-friendly
• It needs to be fully customizable when it comes to colors and fonts (theme builder)
• It needs to be multilingual
• And lastly, offer technical support

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, it is completely fine! In this collection, we will introduce our top 10 best minimalist WordPress themes. By the end, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what’s right for your content.

 

The Best Minimalist WordPress Themes

Let’s go over some of the best minimalist WordPress themes the internet has to offer:

 

Astra

Astra is a lightweight theme for WordPress with plenty of marvelous minimalist templates. Their e-Book Author template is perfect for writers. It has clear typography and potential space for additional elements to be added. You can use Astra as is or configure it to suit your liking. It’s suitable for complete beginners but also offers flexibility for more experienced users.

Additionally, it is a fast, lightweight theme that can help boost your WordPress SEO, meaning your site will rank better in Google and other search engines.

Features:

• Includes support
• Insanely fast
• Build a site in minutes with 1-click setup website templates
• WooCommerce support for online stores
• Completely customizable

Astra's cost: $59/year or a one-time payment of $249

 

Deep

Deep is an excellent WordPress Elementor theme built with the Elementor page builder. It offers a visual footer builder, an advanced mega menu, and powerful theme options.

It comes with a 1-click demo sites installer to help you get started right away. An alternative to both the free and pro templates in Deep would be the new Deep Light theme that has a simple look and is fully responsive.

You can visit Deep theme minimal blog demo.

Deep features multiple custom widgets including social channels, post slider, testimonials, latest reviews, and newsletter subscription.

Features:

• Lifetime access to Deep
• Advanced Page Builder
• No codes, no stacking — just choose the plan that’s right for you
• Future updates
• GDPR compliant

 

Deep's cost: Deep theme has a free version that you can download. Also, its pro version has 3 tiers. The first is a 1 License that costs $59, the second is a 5 License package that costs $199, and last but not least is the 10 license package that costs $339.

 

Divi

Divi is a popular WordPress all-purpose theme. It comes with hundreds of page layouts, including minimalist templates suitable for writers of any niche (movie, fashion, philosophy, etc.)

With Divi, you also get a built-in page builder for easy customization. This visual builder is user-friendly and lets you edit text, images, styling options, and much more.

Divi offers Google Fonts and unlimited colors, meaning you can easily make changes to how your content looks without needing to know any CSS code. You can also easily add features like a contact form.

Features:

• Includes support
• A fantastic visual drag and drop builder
• Save custom layouts for reuse
• A/B split testing
• Total customization
• 20 pre-built layouts and templates

 

Divi's cost: $89/year or $249/lifetime (includes access to several other themes from Elegant Themes)

 

Sixteen Nine

Sixteen Nine is a black & white WordPress minimalist theme from StudioPress. It’s suitable for bloggers and writers and features a multi-column layout with sidebars. It also includes social media menus, a full-width page template, and more.

Features:

• Custom Page Templates
• Theme Customizer
• Customizable Header
• Mobile Responsive
• Widget Areas

Sixteen Nine's cost: $99.95 (one-time fee plus one year of support)

 

Hive

Hive is a stylish WordPress minimalist theme. It has an online magazine-style layout that allows you to feature content in multiple columns.

Your design will look great at any screen size and on any device. With additional WordPress theme customizer options, Hive lets you manage your website layout, buttons, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and more without editing any code.

Features:

• Fast Loading
• Easy Translation
• Good SEO Practices
• Responsive
• Unique Typography
• Adjustable Homepage

Hive's cost: €70/annual or €100/lifetime

 

Elegant

Elegant is a simple yet beautiful WordPress minimalist theme with a design that is easy on the eyes. It has large featured images and extensive typography options that improve the readability of your content and gives your visitors a great user experience.

Elegant is designed to be a blogging theme. It includes multiple header styles, portfolio and team sections, color schemes, and a built-in drag and drop page builder.

Features:

• Custom backgrounds
• Portfolio option to display your work visually
• 100% responsive
• Visual builder
• eCommerce ready
• Masonry grid layouts available
• Color customization
• Includes page templates

Elegant's cost: Starts at $59

 

Eclipse

Eclipse is a gorgeous WordPress blog theme for bloggers, writers, and authors. Its homepage offers a beautiful slider to showcase featured content, followed by link blocks to your page.

It’s simple but offers a full of range features so you can leave a lasting impression without overwhelming your visitors.

Features:

• Adjustable visual customizer for colors and fonts
• Responsive on all devices
• Rotating featured images slider
• WooCommerce support for online stores
• An Instagram widget to display your Instagram posts right on your website while directing traffic to your social media pages to get more followers

Eclipse's cost: $69

 

OceanWP

Another incredible yet fast minimalist-style theme on our list is OceanWP. It is a multi-purpose theme with more than 80 demos. Maybe we could say that some of the designs are a bit too similar, but all of them are well-coded and modern.

They work on 4 different styles which are Blog, Corporate, E-Commerce, and One-page website. It also offers over 20 different plugins you can purchase and use on your websites.

However, 13 of these plugins are premium ones. It allows you to control how your website looks without ever getting very technical.

Features:

• Supports popular page builders for easy site creation
• WooCommerce support
• Fully responsive
• Image sliders and custom widgets
• Fantastic customer support
• Unlimited color schemes

OceanWP's cost: Free but $39/year or a one-time payment of $159 access all features (and top tier support)

 

Proton

Proton is one of the greatest minimalist WordPress themes that you can use to promote your works. It is a portfolio style tool with a noir yet modern touch to it that will wow and amaze all your visitors and potential clients.

The bulk of work has been done already, all you need is to implement the predesigned content to use and you will be ready to go in no time.

Some of the key features of Proton are WPBakery Page Builder, unique portfolio pages, three enticing headers, and an online shop.

Features:

• SEO optimized
• Fully Responsive
• Dark and Modern Skin
• Visual Composer Compatible

Proton's cost: $59/single license

 

Read WP

Read is a responsive WordPress theme that emphasizes readability with a minimalist twist.

It is not quite the old HTML minimalist design of the early 2000s and late 90s but this theme is as minimal as it gets while keeping stunning design elements, and usability.

In conclusion, this is a stunning blog theme that focuses on readability and nothing else.

Features:

• Unlimited Sidebars
• Responsive mobile-optimized image gallery
• Minimalistic design focused on readability
• Complete blog system (all post formats supported)

Read WP's cost: $49/single license

 

Total

The Total theme is a premium multipurpose theme that includes the WPBakery page builder.

This flexible theme has easy options to create your own custom layouts including a drag and drop frontend builder, advanced live customizer settings, unlimited color options, custom font manager and more.

Plus the theme is developer friendly. There are built-in hooks, filters and more than 600+ snippets that make it easy to tailor the theme to your clients needs.

Features:

• Drag & drop page builder
• 40+ Theme demos (and 1-click importer)
• 60+ Styled section templates
• 500+ Live customizer settings
• Mobile responsive design
• SEO optimized and fast loading

Total's cost: $59/single license + 6 months support

 

Bonus Theme: Kata

Kata is a part of the new generation of WordPress themes compatible with Elementor page builder. It makes the user-experience ever more smooth and appealing to both professional and beginner users.

Kata is equipped with a powerful tool call Kata Fast Mode. This tool allows users to build, run, and launch their websites in less than a couple of minutes.

It offers visual Page, Header, and Footer builders that allow you to simply customize your headers, pages, and footer to your liking, and there are a million ways you can design your website with them.

It has an addon called, Kata addon which works alongside Elementor to enable a wide range of customizability features for professionals and beginners.

It uses Page, Header, and Footer builder alongside a Blog builder in a tool called the Styler which is a tool that makes your theme work like Photoshop or other designing tools with an easy-to-use interface. It’s a relief since you won’t need a single line of code even!

Kata's cost:

• $0 Kata Lite (Free)
• $29 One Website License
• $99 10 Websites License

 

Final Thoughts

And that’s the end of that. We hope our list of favorite minimalist WordPress themes helped you find one that will work great for you and your website.