There are plenty of free blog templates out there for WordPress, Joomla and other CMS platforms, which match the quality of many premium templates. Whether you are looking for a personal blog template or Professional Blog Themes for a business blog, you don’t need to spend a fortune on a web designer. Most of the free templates released in 2016 and listed below come with modern coding like HTML5 and CSS3 which allow special effects, bootstrapping that make websites responsive and other features.
Ignite is a clean and simple WordPress blog theme with which you can let your posts speak for themselves. It is not only suitable for personal blogs but for business blogs as well. It is easy to customize and the developers offer good support to users. You can highlight feature images and create a friendly and welcoming website for your visitors. You may also see Blog Themes.
Magazine Free Joomla template is designed for modern blogs with a magazine-style article listing feature on the frontpage. The Tabs module and the News Show Pro plugins make it easy to update article links and link site traffic through your posts. The responsive theme is a two column theme built on the Gavern framework. You can also see News Blog Templates.
The Light Blog template is a free Joomla template with a clean and fresh style. It is bootstrapped and responsive across all screens and transforms well on screens with all aspect ratios. The theme is compatible with Joomla 3 and comes with features like FlexSlider, Responsive Menu, a fully CSS-based tableless design, 11 possible collapsible module positions and more.
Vina Bakery is a custom-built blog template for bakeries or food themed websites. It is a flexible and responsive template built on the Helix framework. Features include support for right to left languages, shortcodes, three preset styles, Mega Menu, HTML5 and more. The theme includes plenty of other Joomla features to let you build a personalized blog for free.
Amadeus is a simple WordPress blog template with clean and validated code and a responsive layout. It comes with a theme options panel that lets you easily change settings, colors, logo, layout, social links, etc. without having to be familiar with coding. If you do want to edit the code, you’ll find that the clean code can be easily edited if you have adequate PHP or HTML knowledge. Other features include major browser compatibility and easy localization of content.
RockWall is a template designed for music reviews and news. For this special purpose, the template has been designed with a grid style layout on the front page. You can also easily update the news posts with the template’s dynamic controls. The template has a three column layout and other highlights include the News Show Pro module and Tabs module that let you animate tabs and more.
Minimalist blog themes have been big in 2016. The Gazette theme is one such template with an attractive and flexible layout where you can feature images in a grid at the top of the frontpage.
Prolog is a free and responsive WordPress blog theme released in 2014 and is still popular with bloggers. It is a responsive and neat template with a flat layout. The layout draws focus to the content with an aim to increase user engagement. To that end, it gives you six color presets, an excellent author bio page, the ability to add an image gallery and video clips from YouTube or Vimeo and music from SoundCloud.
Fashion bloggers who prefer Joomla templates to WordPress may find the highly rated Vina Fashion II responsive template suitable for their blog or eCommerce website. The template is built on the powerful Helix framework and comes with five preset options and plenty of support for JShopping extension. The theme is highly customizable and looks great too.
This business template is fuss-free and bare-bones. But it does use some stylistic elements that elevate it to an attractive professional template. These elements include a dark menu design against light colors, and boxes with round corners and light shadows. Other features include slideshow, drop down JQuery menu with special effects, and a lightweight layout made possible because of the HTML5 and CSS3 coding.
Riba Lite is a beautiful photography blog with no distractions and only a minimal space for your visual storytelling. Features include built-in SEO, unlimited color, and the ability to add as many carousels and sliders with various effects. This powerful template comes with the Power Slider Builder, WooCommerce support, unlimited Google fonts and is translation ready.
Vegeta is a simple but elegant blog theme that focuses on typography and content. You can highlight featured images at the top of your frontpage, showcase recent posts and social icons in the right sidebar, embed a search box in the sidebar and do a lot more. The simple black and white blog template comes with a powerful back end customizer.
Kotha is an elegant and responsive blog for WordPress, it’s designed ideally for lifestyle and leisure blogs. It is a minimal blog layout with easy customization options for widgets, layouts with sidebars or full-width, color and more. The theme is retina ready as well and comes with Contact Form 7, WooCommerce support, sticky post, translation readiness, etc.
Hermoso uses bright and trendy colors for a friendly and welcoming blog. The template comes with highlights such as preset color schemes or unlimited color customizer for each post. You can fit the custom audio player included in the bundle to play your favorite tunes. Make your various post formats stand out, upload logos, set up Google Analytics, offer translations with single edits on one file and more.
Here is yet another photography or architecture blog template for Joomla. It is a template with two grid layouts, full-width pages with custom animation and other effects to showcase your photos or architecture portfolio. The beautiful one page design makes a great impact and the K2 Joomla extension makes it easy to publish your posts.
Here’s another free WordPress theme for writers or photographers. The one-column Revelar theme lets you showcase your work with the oversized layout support that is trendy at present. You can insert large featured images, add multiple post formats, overhang images, place widgets in any of three areas and customize them, customize menus and do more with this template.
DualShock is a free magazine and blogging theme for WordPress. It is a fully responsive and SEO ready theme with an options panel to quickly customize elements with a few clicks. Other features include custom widgets, a sleek meta info box for each post, the ability to translate your posts quickly and easily with a single edit and more.
This is a theme for Joomla users. Purity III is a responsive template that is free but as powerful as many premium Joomla themes. The template is fully customizable and lets you create everything from personal and business blogs or portfolios to other complex projects. It is bootstrapped and built on the T3 framework and comes with bonus typography pages such as Support Policy, Pricing Table etc.
Travelers, food bloggers and other lifestyle bloggers will find Zinnias Lite to be responsive, elegant and easy to customize. The fully responsive template gives you the Revolution Slider for free and also offers over 700 Google Free fonts, over 100 live customizer options, several post formats include video posts, audio posts and slider posts etc. You can add over three custom widgets and quickly set up a blog from the three home template layouts.
JA Simpli is a free magazine and news blog template that is built on the Joomla bootstrap. It comes with lots of features without the need for any coding knowledge. Highlights include four premade homepage versions to quickly set up a blog from, a layout manager and theme customizer, and support for third -party Joomla plugins like EasyBlog, EasyDiscuss etc.
This list rounds up some of the best free blog templates to come out of 2016. Many of these are elegant one page themes, and others are 3 column Blog Templates that you can customize into news or magazine style websites. Whether you are a personal blogger or looking for a corporate blog theme, you can find a free theme to suit your needs.
