Are you a writer considering using a minimalist WordPress theme to start your blog and publish your content? The main benefits for using a minimalist WordPress theme are that it has a simplistic design, is easy to navigate and allows the readers to focus on the content without a lot of distractions. If this is your goal, you would be pleased to look through the curated minimalist wordpress themes that we have put together for writers, like yourself.
What to Look for In A Minimalist Theme Appropriate for A Writer?
Every writer should have a chance to fully express themselves and exhaust their creative juices through a conducive publishing platform. In the modern era, what better way to do this than through blog writing, online magazines or the like? However, the catch is knowing what to look for in a minimalist theme and finding a good one for use with WordPress.
There are thousands of themes out there that a writer can use but not all of them are minimalistic. Some themes appear too cluttered and can distract your readers from the main content in your website.
Below are some pointers to help you out as you sieve through options of wordpress themes that are minimalistic.
- Simple aesthetics
From the outlook, the theme should be simple. It should not be complicated such that it puts off a reader before they even delve into reading your content. The simpler it is the better. Complex aesthetics are good for some websites such as photography and design, but for a website dedicated to publishing a writer’s content, simple is best.
- Non distracting colors
You should go for a theme that does not have many distracting colors. Just like books have a contrast of black ink on white pages, your minimalist should not be much different. A colorful theme is okay, but it should be at a minimum so that the readers are not distracted from whatever is written. Also, the bright colors you use on your site should not hurt the sensitive eyes of your readers.
- Uncluttered and clean App design
The design of the app should be basic. There should not be unnecessary features that clutter the design, some of which you will rarely use. The goal is to write, publish and have your content easily readable, without features that work opposite to that aim.
- Easy navigation even for the blind
It should be easy to move from one page to another and scroll through the articles on your site. You should keep in mind that web users are of a diverse nature, including the visually impaired. If your theme is complicated and hard to navigate, then you will lose out a huge chunk of your audience because they cannot stand complicated systems. Truth is, very few people are patient enough to stick around a site that is hard to navigate. You don’t want that to happen on your site, you want readers to spend more time on your site and read as many articles as possible while they are there.
Top Technical Features A Great Minimalist WordPress Theme Should Have
- Should support the commonest WordPress plugins.
- Should be mobile-friendly. In modern times, most people browse the web on their mobile phones.
- Should be up to the industry standards (not wide variations)
- Should be fast loading, so that users don’t leave the site because of slow speeds
- Should be compatible with web browsers (at least the major ones such as Google Chrome, Mozilla etc)
- Should be easy to customize and build pages (if possible have drag and drop features). This is important to give you an easy time when you want to publish your content.
- Should be multilingual for usage across most of the continents across the world, so that you reach a wider audience.
- Should be SEO friendly, to increase you page ranking on Google and thus bring more visitors and even earn you more incase you monetize your website.
- Should offer technical support when need be, whenever you run into technical problems.
With this crucial knowledge of what a minimalist theme is and the technical aspects to consider when selecting a minimalist WordPress theme, let’s delve into helping you pick out the best ones there are among the thousands out there.
It is important to know how to choose the best for your needs. You should always pick the one that works best for you regardless of the hype given about a WordPress theme. The best place to begin is by finding one that fits your writing style.
A writer focusing on personal blogs may not use the same theme as a writer starting an online magazine for instance. Each has its unique style and the publication should be presented in the appropriate format to the readers based on the content.
Choosing a WordPress theme from the thousands out there may feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to worry about that. We compiled a list for you of some of the best minimalist WordPress themes for writers.
Read through to find one that suits you best armed with the pointers above as well as with your personal requirements.
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Authentic – Lifestyle Blog & Magazine WordPress Theme
Authentic is light and among the best minimal WordPress themes available for lifestyle bloggers or writers. The numerous features that are part of Authentic are to help you customize your site in a way that makes it stand out. Its clean design will make visitors enjoy being on your site without feeling like they are bombarded with unnecessary clutter.
Some of the unique features of this theme are; its clean yet awesome design that directs focus to the written content enhancing readability and browsing experience, easy customizability helping you to save time in managing your content, social engagement enhancement to help make your posts go viral, various display styles and quick turnaround time with the tech support whenever you encounter an issue.
Something unique about Authentic is its integration with Pinterest giving you a fairly easy time when adding images to your posts. There are many other additional features ranging from content formatting features to page responsiveness that make it a good one for a writer.
You will have to try Authentic for yourself to see the wonderful features that are available at your disposal.
Read WP – Minimalist WordPress Blog Theme
Just like the name suggests, Read WP is a great minimalist WordPress theme whose main objective is readability yet at the same time having a beautiful design. To realize this objective, this theme employs the use of various features. Among its top features which make it good for writers is the inbuilt complete blog system. Any kind of post format you could think of is incorporated into the blog system design, which is a big plus for any blogger. It has three options as far as the blog layout is concerned (with a sidebar, without a sidebar or the masonry layout).
Read WP is best for bloggers that want to increase their SEO rankings for it is SEO ready. It is also good for those who want to build their portfolio and share it on social media for it has more than twenty social media icons. Generally, it is a good and responsive design working perfectly for a blog writer. The best thing is that it is mobile optimized.
Look: Minimal Magazine and Blog WordPress Theme
Look is a multi-purposed theme, working well for news, magazines and bloggers. It would particularly suit those whose niche is in either the fashion, beauty, travel and craft industries.
Its greatest catch is that once you purchase one theme, you will receive a fully functional website that you will customize to your liking. The only adjustment you will make is selection of your preferable layout. Future updates are also free, saving you money in future. The support is offered for 6 months.
Look has many features; theme options, page builder, widgets, and one click installer. These features are good as they help you save a ton of time in customization; all you have to do is import and click.
Another unique feature of Look is its speed, the scripts are profiled to optimize the theme’s speed.
Readme – A Readable WordPress Theme
Readme is one of the simplest yet elegant themes available. Its design quality is its greatest strength. It is a responsive WordPress theme focusing on readability and great for mobile web users.
Apart from readability and a minimalistic design, here are other great features of Readme.
- Provides a good reading experience regardless of the device you are using it on because it is optimized for mobile use.
- Simple yet attractive typography to avoid distracting the reader.
- A number of blog layouts (5 in number) with the option of choosing a side bar or not, giving you an option of selecting the best one to match your type of content.
- It has over 30 social media icons, thus you don’t have to worry about missing the one you need.
- You can customize your widgets, either for Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Picasa, YouTube and Dribbble.
- It is fast loading and has cool buttons to help your readers take action.
Blank – Elegant Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme
Blank is a great choice for creating blogs for it is big on redirecting focusing to the content. It has a very clean design, minimalistic yet elegant. All the standards for blogging are adhered to in this theme, such as responsiveness, translation and retina readiness making it simple yet effective.
As a new or established blogger, you will have no problem with setting up this theme because of the ease of setting it up. You can begin publishing right away after setting up upon its installation. Meaning that it is easy to get started with blogging. You do not need to have coding skills to use this theme, making it great for everyone.
Overflow – Contemporary Blog & Magazine WordPress Theme
With Overflow, whether you are a blogger or an online magazine, you can create nine different designs. You have at your disposal various options for laying out your home and archive pages. You can choose to use either the list, grid, masonry or full-width layout designs. The pages can also be laid out as either full-width, on the left sidebar or right sidebar.
If you are keen on fonts, Overflow gives you some nice modernized fonts to use for your content. A wonderful feature of Overflow is the ability to use eye catchy video backgrounds on your featured posts, headers, and archive posts. You have the option of mute control and playback for these videos.
Editor – A WordPress Theme for Bloggers
Editor is a great theme for bloggers that are into storytelling. Its large images and features are suitable for magazine styled pages making it a great choice. It has a very intuitive interface.
Current users speak highly of its customer support. They are patient and do not tire of answering endless questions from newbies. Even for those who have no past experience with WordPress themes, its simple design makes it easy to work with and gives one’s page a clean look.
In as much as it is optimized for mobile and it is a responsive theme with a clean design, the quick and helpful responses from the customer support offers great value for money. It is like having an additional member on your team.
The Affair – Creative Theme for Personal Blogs and Magazines
The Affair serves creative writers best. It is a great theme for blogging and magazines. It comes with 7 ready demos, allowing you to create 7 different designs just by selecting and clicking.
It has a featured posts section where you can filter your posts by category and display them in grid style, classifying them either by date or time. The featured post section is good for bringing more page views and allowing visitors to navigate your site easily which encourages them to spend more time on your site. Something that is good for your page analytics.
It has a smart color feature depending on the background you select. If you select the dark background for instance, the font color automatically changes to white, that is a good thing for it saves you the hassle of having to change font colors whenever you change your background or header background.
GutenVerse – Magazine and Blog Theme
Gutenverse is a theme befitting bloggers and magazines and its sole focus is legibility. It offers you a lot of flexibility as a writer in terms of styling and the responsive layout. You will have the final say on how your homepage should look like.
The theme has tons of wonderful features and its functions have a solid backend framework making it a stable theme. Two of its top wonderful features are content management and Elementor support. You will be able to easily manage your content, taking advantage of the earlier simple WordPress features and functions and you can incorporate Elementor, which is good for building customized pages.
Calcium – Minimalist Portfolio & Blogging Theme
Calcium is yet another awesome theme favorable for bloggers and building of online portfolios. It is very minimalistic, having only a pair of options for most of the styling and layout designs. You can only select two types of headers and skins. Fortunately, the options for fonts and the theme look and feel are much more vast but not unlimited.
The theme has no issues with any types of device, it works perfectly well on any screen size and device type. Thus, users of PC, mobile or tablet will have no issues. You can select which side you want to have your sidebar, either on the right or left to suit your preferences. You can also opt for the dark or light theme. You can easily translate your pages by simply adding the respective language plugins.
Bone – Minimal & Clean WordPress Blog Theme
Bone is perfect for bloggers and offers you an array of choices when it comes to article page layouts, headers, and the homepage designs. It can also work well for magazines. Bone would work well for writers who love to write on culture, business, art and technology. But bloggers interested in journaling their personal stories or ideas are not locked out either.
The outstanding thing about Bone is how clean and minimal it is for writers. Unnecessary popups and objects are not found in this theme. It comes with predesigned demos, and you are free to make adjustments by borrowing from different demos to find your perfect combination from the settings panel.
Bone is speed optimized and has an almost childlike simplicity, thus perfect for those who are not tech savvy.
Elliot – Clean Blog-Magazine WordPress Theme
With Elliot you get both beauty and flexibility in one theme. If yours is a personal blog or you want to find a good theme for a small or medium sized magazine, then this is for you.
Elliot comes with 48 blog layouts, from which it will be almost impossible not to find one that suits you perfectly. The ability to import a demo makes it easy to set up and start off within no time.
Part of the package is a Visual Composer and theme settings. A Visual Composer is a multi-purpose plugin that gives you the ability to create attractive websites without the need to do any coding, all the way from the header to the footer. You can custom make your page layouts, sidebar templates and borrow ideas from global templates making all kinds of changes on your WordPress site.
Blogman – Personal Blog WordPress Theme
Blogman is good for professionals such as teachers and coaches who want a space to post their writing for sharing with others. It also works well for a personal blog. The color rich theme and unique design makes it a great fit for almost all bloggers, for it covers almost all the bases. You can even have different colors for different sections of your blog and articles.
When it comes to customization, you have an endless list of options, to ensure your site stands out from the rest. Blogman is one of the most customizable WordPress themes. The best part is that you can use the live customizer to see the changes you are making in real-time and you do not need to have coding knowledge.
An outstanding feature of Blogman is its incorporation of MailChimp (the most popular WordPress plugin) and Contact Form 7, helpful tools for growing your blog audience.
Ammi – Minimalist WordPress Blog
Ammi is built with Bootstrap 3 for those who care to know and are choosy about the tech specifics, but this does not make it complex. It is still elegant and clean, which is what a blog writer needs.
Here are its top features and their importance to you as a writer;
- Comes with 10 readymade post formats. This saves you time, all you have to do is copy paste your content and do a few edits and your content will be ready to publish within no time.
- Supports two types of layouts (left or right sidebar) which simplifies things for you as a blogger.
- Supports both Google Fonts and Standard Fonts, giving you an endless array to choose from and make your page attractive.
- Supports popup windows and images and also it is translation ready. You can use the popup windows to offer more content to your audience and probably for adverts to generate some income from your blog.
ZMinimal – Minimalist Blog Theme for Creatives
The greatest strength of Zminimal is the awesome browsing experience it gives the users. It is compatible with all major browsers. Apart from the minimalist design and color customization features, there are other cool and unique features found in this theme.
Zminimal has the option of a love post system which is solely dedicated to love related posts. If you are a romantic writer, this will serve you very well. This theme also has the option of selecting children’s themes. It would be perfect for writers who create content for younger audiences. Unfortunately, it only has share buttons for four social media handles, which is a bit limited. Thankfully, these are Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and twitter, which majority of people will appreciate.
Codate – Modern Magazine and Blog theme
Codate is beautiful and handcrafted, making it pleasing to the eyes. It is best for blogging and magazine and offers you much flexibility in terms of the layout you prefer to use. The good thing with it is the level of control it gives you over your homepage, literally unlimited. Remember, the homepage is where people first land and if it is not so good, then they will probably go away. You don’t want that. Therefore, having the ability to tailor make your homepage to attract your audience and encourage them to explore your site is a huge plus to this theme.
It is quite easy to use and has a classy look for such a minimalistic theme. If you are after making a statement as a blogger or with your magazine then you should not even think twice, go for this theme.
Eskimo – Minimal Personal WordPress Blog & Shop Theme
The perfect personal blog theme and shop theme combination is this one. Eskimo allows the chance to have your own personal blog and yet create a page to sell your products in a minimalist environment. You can thus explore your writing and your entrepreneurial skills with this one.
It is a modernized yet minimalistic design. Eskimos has live customization, giving you an easy time in setting the layout of your blog and shop, rather than loading and reloading your page to check only to realize you made a mistake. It also offers great typography and is keen on enhancing readability for your audience. You can be sure; the readers will not be distracted from any keen details you want them to focus on in your posts. You can import demos by a single click. Eskimo is one of the best minimalist wordpress themes for writers to consider.
Mini is arguably one of the most versatile blogging themes. It can suit travel, food, music, politics, parenting, business, movie, news, gaming blogs and even much more. Consider it a multipurpose theme. Unfortunately, it only offers three blog template types. But that is what you get when you are seeking for minimalism in a theme. The upside though is that you have many other options to adjust the nitty gritty of each page to bring out the difference, such as the slide menu categories.
You do not need to have coding skills to use this theme successfully. It supports all major plugins you can think of, such as MailChimp and Buddy Press. You will simply click and import, the rest is pretty straight forward.
It is actually best for feminine blogs and travel related content.
Norge – Responsive Blog WordPress Theme
Norge is yet another responsive blog related theme. It is made for crispness and clarity on Retina displays, so that the pixels are not seen by the naked human eye and that the theme is as clear as possible. It is good for blogging, giving you an effortless publishing experience while retaining the minimalistic nature.
The theme comes with several widgets, sidebar, post templates, typography, text decorations among many others. You can choose different text options for different screen resolutions with this app. It has a powerful yet simple to understand administrative panel.
Saara – Minimal Blog WordPress
Saara stands out for its artistic design while managing not to lose the element of minimalism. It comes with six demos for the homepage. Customization is easy because of the drag and drop functionality. It is totally responsive with all modern devices.
It is good for lifestyle bloggers, particularly feminine writers. You can use it for female themed writing, because it is elegant and reverberates well with the girl world. If you are an author, personal blogger focusing on feminine topics, and are looking for something simple but cute, this is the one for you. Also check out the best feminine wordpress themes for coaches.
Candor – Responsive WordPress Blog Theme
For creative and entrepreneurial writers looking for a clean, good looking and simple theme, Candor will work well. It has a nice look and is designed specifically for that category of people. It comes with four blog style variations and other creative ideas that bloggers need. It is highly responsive, and easy to use. The outlook will give your readers a fulfilling experience. When you purchase it, you will get a free demo version that you can use to quickly set up.
Landyland works well for both blogs and magazines. Despite the device you use it on, the theme still looks nice. You will have the option of choosing between four header styles. It supports eight post styles, and 15 blog styles. You will have a wonderful time with it because it comes with 25 templates. You will simply cut and paste your content and be ready to publish.
If as a writer, you are keen on making readers focus on photos because they complement your story, this theme will be great for you. Navigation has been simplified, and user experience is regarded highly in this theme design to keep your site visitors coming back for more.
Wheats – WordPress easy blogging theme
It is updated and compatible with the latest WordPress version. Wheats is good for blogging, freelancers, and personal travel diary. You will not struggle with setting it up and customizing to your liking. It is minimalistic and takes elegance and creativity to a whole new level.
Which is the best minimalist wordpress themes for writers?
That is the end of our list of the best minimalist WordPress themes for writers. It is quite hard to pinpoint what is the best minimalist wordpress theme here as different themes have different unique functions. It would be better if you can list down the factors that are must-haves and those that are good to have. Use the shopping list you have and evaluate the theme that you like most; this would be one of the surest way in helping you decide the best minimalist wordpress theme for your writing blog.
Hoping that you found this helpful in shortlisting at least your best 3 minimalist wordpress themes or your perfect one. You might also be keen in the best creative multi purpose wordpress themes and the best drag and drop page builders.
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