Wanna create your own personal branding website? Wanna share your creativity, skills, innovations, thoughts, journey, or life-changing motivations with your audiences? It is only possible when you have your own personal blog website or portfolio website. Many developers and designers have come up with WordPress blogs and personal themes to make your website-building process easy advance and professional. With the help of themes, you can showcase your personality and credentials in an engaging format.
Yeah, you can be a celebrity, a popular figure, a professional expert, a vlogger, a blogger, a traveler, a trainer, or an ordinary or common person who wants to share hidden talent, skills, and experience with large audiences online. Building a website with the help of amazingly crafted themes is the best solution to create individual and particular platforms. On the other hand, you can tell the story you want to tell can make all the difference between you and a competing candidate.
This article will revolve around the personal and blog theme from which you can choose to create to brand yourself.
What is a blog?
The word ‘blog’ is a combined version of the words “web” and “log”. Generally, a blog is a weblog or webpage used for personal commentary and business content. It consists of a series of useful and informative articles or posts indicating an online community.
Whether it’s personal or professional, a blog provides endless opportunities for a website’s traffic growth. It also allows you to publish your thoughts and insights, and engage with other users who have similar interests. Bloggers write blog posts related to personal online journals or commentary on a business that’s regularly updated and targeted at the general public. We can use blogs as part of a marketing strategy, as a part of content marketing efforts, and also to educate and inform about a topic, process, as well as product.
You can interact with an audience through comments, live updates, and vlogs. In addition, you can share your blog on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites to get connected to all types of users.
Ultimately, blogs are the most effective ways to generate web traffic, build authority in their field, and attract customers.
Popular blog WordPress themes
Well, we need themes to create a website. Here we have handpicked the popular, best, and free blog themes of 2023. All of them are highly downloaded and five-star rated.
1. Hueman
Hueman is one of the popular blog WordPress themes. It is mobile friendly and easy to use theme. It comes with a multi-column layout and can be easily used on any kind of content-rich blog or magazine-style WordPress website. The theme Hueman is deservingly the best theme for content+image based websites.
It’s dynamic sidebars and widgets feature lets you customize how widgets appear on your site. Likewise, it is page builder compatible so you can customize each part with just drag and drop functionality. It provides 2 sidebars, 3 menu areas, 8 widget areas, a featured posts slider, and stylish grids for the latest posts and archives. Besides, on your blog section, you can add an optional heading, or subheading, a featured category, featured posts from 1-10, alter the excerpt length,& more.
Note that, the Hueman theme is only available in the WordPress.org theme directory. You cannot use this theme on a WordPress.com website, not even in any paid plan. So if your website is hosted on WordPress.com, you probably should skip this theme.
If you loved its free version you can go for premium as well. You can buy it at $49 (annual) but for a lifetime purchase, $99 is its value. With the purchase, you can get features like a post grid customizer, feature content builder, full background headings, share bar in posts, and infinite Scroll.
2. Hemingway
Hemingway is a clean and beautiful two-column theme for bloggers. It features a responsive design, retina-ready assets, block editor support, and a full-width header image with a parallax scrolling effect. Its custom accent color allows you to change it to whichever color you want with the built-in WordPress theme customizer.
With bold and beautiful colors and sharp typography, your site will surely stand out from other sites. It’s also retina-ready, meaning it’ll look great on high-quality smartphones or any other devices. It is completely free and doesn’t have a premium version.
Hemingway supports four post formats: the standard format with a featured image, the video format with a featured video, the aside format for short updates, and the quote format. Further, the theme enables you to upload your own logo, supports custom widgets, includes page templates, and more.
3. Writee
Writee is one of the popular, elegant, and free WordPress blog themes. It is crafted for bloggers, professionals, and creatives. It is fully responsive, mobile-friendly, and translation ready. Its features a pixel-perfect design, 3 custom widgets, customizer options, and a full-width/boxed slider to showcase your content with style.
Also, it offers unique header style options, unlimited slider options, several custom widgets, and multiple pagination options. Moreover, it comes with an author details box and a blog layout width adjustment option. Writee Comes with in-built Breadcrumbs, a navigational element that helps you stay on track of the location within your program, files, and websites.
Do you know, you can get Writee in the premium version at just $49.99? When writing this article this theme was in sale and can be purchased at $39.99. Pro offers unlimited slider options, custom widget area, Writee Instagram, shop, Twitter widgets, header search, author page, and so on.
4. Olsen light
Olsen Light is a fantastic free fashion/lifestyle blogging theme for WordPress. It is a clean, minimal, stylish, and elegant theme perfect for lifestyle, food, cooking, fashion, travel, wedding, health & fitness, photography, and beauty blogging. It is well-documented, very flexible, and easy to use for beginners and experienced users alike. In addition, its responsive design will give your visitors the perfect mobile browsing experience on phones, tablets & retina-enabled displays. It is fast and lightweight, coded with best SEO practices in mind, supports RTL languages and is translation ready.
This theme supports single and two-column blog layouts, customizable excerpts, custom logos, a homepage slider, social icons and social sharing, a footer Instagram carousel, custom widgets, and more. Furthermore, it supports the WordPress block editor and is also compatible with page builders like Elementor, Divi, Brizy, and Beaver Builder. With this, you can showcase your content with an interactive front-page slideshow. It offers options like front-page carousel, custom widgets, post-social sharing, social networking, etc.
Olsen Light also has a premium version. It has 3 pricing plans ranges $34.55, $55.30, and $174 yearly which is a discounted price. You can buy a one-time lifetime plan at $ 174 accessing all WP themes, WP plugins, Elementor Starter Kits, unlimited websites, and updates.
5. Author
The Author blog theme is designed for publishers who want readers. Theme Author is fast, responsive, accessibility-ready, and optimally designed for reading. This blog theme allows authors to display author bio, book slider, the latest news/articles, email sign-up form, etc on the home page. Further, it also enables authors to create dedicated pages for books, blogs, about, events, contact, etc.
All scripts and stylesheets are minified, connected, and conditionally loaded to maximize performance. The layout adapts fluidly to all screen sizes to enhance usability. The theme is completely compatible with the RS WP BOOK SHOWCASE WordPress plugin, which allows users to create dedicated book pages including individual book pages, book author pages, and book category pages.
Check Premium WordPress Themes For Authors created by RS WP Themes: Author Portfolio Pro and Book Author Blog Pro. Go for pro if further customization and functionalities are required for your websites. At just $99 you can purchase them for a lifetime.
6. Maglist
Maglist is a versatile and modern WordPress theme designed for magazines, blog, and personal websites. Or you can tweak it to a news or content-focused website or other various types of websites. Using this theme you are able to elevate your website’s blog and editorial content. It is user-friendly, fast-loading, flexible, easily customizable, and fully responsive. It is unique with its dark bold look which will give a unique modern website.
Built with compatibility in mind, it seamlessly integrates with the Gutenberg editor and popular page builders, providing you with endless possibilities for customization. The theme has more flexible options like drag and drop, and enable/disable settings. Because of its elegant design, you can easily arrange and showcase your blogs, images, videos, and other media elements in a captivating and organized manner.
It is by far the most advanced free WordPress theme available today with loads of unmatched customization options. You can get a premium version of Maglist at just $59.99 yearly and for a lifetime update just purchase at $149.99. With Pro, you can get readymade templates, a multi-layout slider, a live customizer, various blocks and sections, a sticky header, post pagination styles, remove or modify the footer credits, and much more.
7. Fascinate
Fascinate, a blog theme is a slick, modern, minimal, and beautifully designed Gutenberg-compatible WordPress theme. It is an ideal and complete WordPress blog theme for creating a personal or professional blogging website. It lets you showcase your experiences and stories or write on different niches like fashion, travel, lifestyle, gourmet, and business. Fascinate is 100% media responsive, which means that Fascinate blog theme is compatible with all devices. This theme supports four types of post formats; video, audio, gallery & quote format which enables you to display your special moments with a featured image.
Fascinate extends WordPress live customizer functionality which will help you to build your blog website right from the customizer itself. It includes built-in features like a custom author widget, social widget, lazyload for images, etc. It is optimized for SEO and also supports third-party popular plugins like Jetpack, Mail Chimp, Contact Form 7, Yoast, & Ads Manager, etc.
Fascinate Pro has 3 multiple pricing; $49 for a single site, $69 for multiple, and $89 for developer pricing plans. Pro offers 7 Header Variations, 5 blog variations, 5 Pagination Variations, Advance Preloader Options, Featured Categories Section, and many more.
What is personal Branding?
Personal branding is a willful effort to create an influential public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry. Personal branding elevates credibility and helps advance their career or widen their circle of influence and impact. In short, branding yourself whatever you are engaged in is personal branding which leads you to your popularity and success.
In fact, building a strong online presence and sharing your best skills add more value to your career and business activities and make you stronger enough to compete. With your personal website, it accesses to sell services, showcase your work, or foster your personal brand. Moreover, it creates gateways to impress potential employers or attract new clients.
On the other hand, it also creates opportunities to share experiences, expertise, competencies, actions, and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.
If you as a person want to brand yourself then choose a perfect WordPress theme to fulfill your desire by creating a website. There are four types of personal WordPress themes; portfolio, resume, brand, and blog. A good-looking website is an absolute must to get reputed and successful with a high fan following in no time.
Popular & free personal branding WordPress themes
A collection of the best personal branding WordPress themes is shared with you so that you can quickly get started with a high-quality website contributing to the promotion and branding of your personal initiatives or business venture.
1. Personalblogily
Personal Blogily is a responsive blog and personal theme made for personal bloggers and lifestyle bloggers. Its beautiful and minimalistic look gives this theme a perfectly stylized image whether you’re a food-, fashion-, travel- or lifestyle blogger. The theme is SEO friendly( Search Engine Optimization ) which will help you get rank first on search engines like Google and Bing.
In PersonalBlogily you’ll find a stylized and highly optimized theme with swift load times across the board without any loss of performance and responsiveness. You can unlock features like customizing Logo & Title/Tagline, header background color/image, and hide logo text on your free version.
Whereas premium features include show post categories on the post feed, making posts & pages full-width, customizing all fonts, and so on. The pricing plan starts at $29 supporting one domain. With business subscriptions($69) and a lifetime access plan($149) you can access unlimited domains, all premium themes from superb themes, access more than 135 child themes, etc.
2. Blossom Coach
Are you a coach, trainer, mentor, motivator, or speaker? If yes, Blossom Coach is the perfect theme for you to create a website. Blossom Coach is a free WordPress coaching theme designed to create websites for coaches, mentors, speakers, and therapists. It is responsive, Schema.org compatible, SEO friendly, RTL compatible, speed optimized, and translation ready.
With this theme, you can display social media icons, use the newsletter section to grow your email subscribers, and CTA (call to action) sections to attract visitors to take action. The theme accesses you with the features like a full-width banner/Slider Section,3 blog layouts, about, service, blog, and testimonial sections, advanced typography options, and more.
It also allows you to the stylish author box which is added to every post-page layout to help readers connect with the authors. Blossom Coach theme allows you to display your social media links on your website and also supports Russian and Chinese social media like OK, VK, qq, Zing, and others.
For advanced seekers, it offers 2 pricing plans at $59 and $149 offering multiple premade templates and layouts, 6 elegant CTA banner layouts, 3 stunning newsletters, and appointment layouts, 10 gorgeous header layouts, attach a newsletter on your banner, sliders to your banners, 16 different Elementor landing page templates and so on.
3. Personal CV Resume
Personal CV Resume theme is a modern, minimal & creative WordPress theme for online resumes, CVs, or personal websites. It loads fast, is fully optimized, clean coded, 100% responsive, and has a live theme customizer. Designers, developers, freelancers, photographers, architects, Artists, and many more individuals who want to showcase his/her work can use this theme. Similarly, the theme supports both one-click demo import and manual XML content upload from the admin panel.
Basically, it comes with several online resume templates that inherit a built-in portfolio type so that you can showcase your qualifications, experiences, skills, and your subject of interest. With the help of this theme, you can create a portfolio or resume website in the quickest way to introduce yourself to prospective employers in an attractive way.
The blog layouts in this theme are attractive, with beautiful animations and bold styles. Moreover, it provides ample widgets, shortcodes, and elements to showcase your education, experience, previous employers, portfolio of work, past projects, and future goals. The homepage features a large header image with your name and title and a spot for your profile photo.
It is available in a pro for just $25 with additional and advanced features.
4. Perfect Portfolio
Perfect Portfolio WordPress theme for a perfect portfolio website! Isn’t it? Create an easy-to-use website to showcase your work, case studies, and achievement without writing a single line of code. Perfect Portfolio is Schema friendly, Speed Optimized, fully mobile-friendly, and ultra SEO-ready. It is ideal for freelancers, photographers, digital marketers, agencies, graphic designers, video producers, web designers, developers, and professional bloggers that want to depict their work elegantly.
The theme has an eye-catching blog layout which will help you show your expertise in your field through informative content. The advanced features like Call To Action, services section, social media integration, WooCommerce integration, and so on are backed with quick human support whenever you face any issues. Additionally, it allows you to import free demo content with a click with this theme.
Perfect Portfolio also comes in a premium version starting at $59. Or if you want it for a lifetime you can purchase it at $149. You can get 5 portfolio layouts, unlimited color options, 900+ Google fonts, various pagination types, and many more.
5. Videolife
Alike youtube, do you want to create a website to post videos of your interest and goals? Whoever you are, a traveler, mentor, instructor, or anyone else, creating videos is the best idea for easy understanding of things, places, and concepts. As a result that increases credibility and website traffic. VideoLife is a responsive and mobile-friendly WordPress video theme that can be the perfect choice for you if you want to build a website focusing on sufficient videos. It is user-friendly and well-documented, SEO friendly.
VideoLife theme is ideally built for video bloggers, sponsored videos and blog content, influencer marketing, vlogger, videography, and online video streaming. Moreover, this theme allows you not to only post your personal videos but enables you to publish videos from various sources. This theme’s entire focus is on the video content and giving a sophisticated appearance to your site. The basic idea behind its creation is to find a clean and elegant design that speaks volumes regarding your work.
Its key features are header layout, footer layout, social icons, ajax search, preloader, and more. It is available in both free and pro versions. It has 3 types of pricing plans starting at $49, $69, and $89 for 25 site licenses. Pro features include video duration options, header search on mobile, extra video embed field, featured content option, and so on,
6. Inspiro
Theme Inspiro is a professional & lightweight photo and video-focused WordPress theme with a modern design. the theme is compatible with WooCommerce and popular Page Builders such as Elementor, and Beaver Builder. Moreover, the theme is fully GDPR-compliant and doesn’t use any external Google Fonts. Inspiro is perfect for showing off your photography and video portfolio.
It features a fullscreen area that supports Vimeo, YouTube & self-hosted video background, Page Builder integration, etc.
Inspiro’s premium version is also there for you. It has 3 pricing plans beginning at $69, $99, and $299 for Forever. Premium provides video slideshows, 9 demos, video on hover, 1 click demo content importer, built-in portfolio, and so on.
7. Shapely
Theme Shapely is a powerful and versatile one-page WordPress theme with pixel-perfect design and outstanding functionality. The theme is SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, and fully responsive making it your best partner for any project and website. This theme is suitable for landing pages, portfolios, eCommerce, local businesses, and personal websites but can be tweaked to be used as a blog, magazine, or any other awesome website.
This theme comes with several homepage widgets and you can use them to add portfolio, testimonials, parallax sections, your product or service information, call for action, and much more.
Shapely supports most free and premium WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, Jetpack, Kali Forms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Google Analytics by Yoast, and much more. It is available only in the free version.
Conclusion
Thus, this is a wrap. We hope you like our collection of beautiful blog and personal themes for your website. Compare all of these and select the preferred one that best matches your interest and vision. When talking about blog themes, we can use news or magazine themes for your blog sites as well. Because they do match in design, format, and functions.
These blog and personal themes are just some and are highly downloaded, most activated, and 5-star rated free themes. If you want to enhance with additional functionalities you can buy the premium version of them.
Make your personality a brand delivering insightful knowledge, experience, and skills.