Being a freelancer, one of the hardest parts of the job is sure to be marketing your services so you can get the job and bring the bacon home. Which is why having a reliable platform such as a WordPress-powered site is important: it ensures that you’ll have a place to showcase all your best work and provide additional details on the kind of work you do! Think of it as a sort of resume with a bit of added design flair, but more optimised for showing off past projects and elaborate as well.
In this article, we’ll be featuring the very best of the best WordPress themes that you can find on the market and going into what exactly sets them apart from the rest.
What to Look for in a WordPress Theme?
As a freelancer, purpose is the first thing to consider when building a site and picking a WordPress theme. You need to ask what you want to get out of your site and exactly how you intend to build it. Sure, that WordPress theme might have plenty of neat ecommerce features to sell products. But if you’re a freelance photographer, you might find that it lacks image protection and proofing functions and good gallery options; all features that you’ll want for your particular freelance website needs. And if you’re a personal trainer, you’ll definitely need something like a booking system and find no use in an online storefront.
We’ve compiled some of the most salient features that these themes have, and reflected the ones most freelancers might want to take note of when looking for a WordPress theme inside tables that you can quickly browse through if you’re strapped for time.
Some of the most important ones are as follows:
- Pricing Tables: Great for indicating what your pricing plans are for particular services. Illustrators and graphic designers might indicate different plans with more revisions, and videographers might indicate different rates based on filming duration. Pairs well with WooCommerce or other commerce plugins so payments can be done through the site as opposed to having to draft an invoice on your side.
- Contact Forms: It’s important for clients to be able to contact you easily and as soon as possible. A good contact form ensures that they may be able to not only send their contact details to you, but even send an overview of what they’re commissioning you for to save the time for both parties.
- Booking Calendars: Especially helpful if you’ve found yourself struggling to manage your schedule and planning liaison meetings with clients. These can help you indicate on which dates and timings you aren’t free, locking certain time slots from clients so they’ll know when to avoid contacting you. Personal trainers and any other freelancer that needs to meet clients frequently will get a lot out of quality of life features like these.
- Portfolio Functionality: This can be a bit more nebulous depending on your field of work. Some freelance jobs like copywriting and UX design (in some cases) can get away with not having visual portfolio spreads, but others will definitely want portfolio layouts to help with arranging examples of their work.
There are a few other features in the tables that are more self-explanatory too. A visual page builder, for one, is a great tool that will help you build and fine tune your website to really fit your personal vision. Responsivity is also good so that your site isn’t blocked to mobile device users, and SEO optimisation can help go a long way in ensuring people can find your site in the first place. The following video suggests some other themes we don’t cover, and also gives some extra insights into what you’ll want out of a freelance portfolio site theme.
Envato also has a great video guide about building portfolio websites.
And without further ado, here’s our list of WordPress themes for freelancers of all creeds and fields of work!
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1. Avada | Website Builder for WordPress & WooCommerce for Freelancers
Avada is a WordPress theme featuring a great amount of versatility, being easily changed to whatever purpose and niche your freelance work serves.
Boasting a modern and almost minimalist look, this WordPress theme looks incredibly good and will fit those with design sensibilities that favour modern web design trends. As if the 83 pre-made websites aren’t enough, you can innovate even further by using the packaged Avada site builder and its intuitive drag & drop system to make your own custom layouts.
Where most themes try to be as niche specific as possible, Avada is a great fit for those who don’t want to be too constrained by set layouts. And even if you are in a rush to build a site.
| Features | |
| Price | $60 |
| No. of Layouts | 83+ partial and full demos |
| Page Builder & Customisation | Avada Website Builder with 120+ page elements to drag & drop into your site & Avada Form Builder |
| Portfolio Features | Layer Slider & Slider Revolution |
| Calendar & booking | Events Calendar |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact Form 7 |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | Woocommerce, Multilingual translation plugins WPML and Polylang, |
| Last Update | 16 June 2021 |
Check out Avada’s product page and its live preview!
2. Divi Theme and Page Builder
Divi is another combination of a WordPress theme and page builder that can be very easily adapted to your niche.
We have a particular soft spot for this WordPress theme and builder because of the sheer amount of freedom to edit that this theme offers. Sure, if you’re a web developer with HTML and CSS knowledge you already had that freedom, but Divi’s visual interface ensures that switching up the look of your site is easier and faster.
Even better, the various themes built for Divi can be freely accessed upon purchase or throughout your subscription; all easily installed to your site with a few clicks. And if that isn’t enough, you’ll find that Divi comes with its own inhouse plugins for you to just plug and play, or at least has a module to manage functions that other plugins settle for other themes. You won’t need dedicated contact form builders or additional Woocommerce plugins since Divi does almost everything for you!
Whether you’re an experienced designer or a newcomer to the field, Divi will give you the power to create without limits or even any coding knowledge.
| Features | |
| Price | $89 (yearly subscription) or $249 (one-time payment) |
| No. of Layouts | Hundreds of ElegantThemes and user-developed website packs |
| Page Builder & Customisation | Divi Builder |
| Portfolio Features | Layouts provided by Divi’s library |
| Calendar & booking | Divi plugins available |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Divi modules provided |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | Divi plugins |
| Last Update | Not indicated (Though regularly updated) |
So why not give Divi a chance and check out its website and preview?
3. Impeka – Creative Multi-Purpose Freelance WordPress Theme
Impeka is a WordPress theme for freelancers featuring modern, hip and widescreen layouts that’ll catch site visitors’ eyes and bring up conversion rates.
It’s an incredibly well-designed, multipurpose WordPress theme that’s great for building a site for all sorts of creative pursuits and portfolios. While allowing you to choose to edit this theme with the free Elementor Page builder, packaged WP Bakery, or even Gutenberg, you may also just choose to install the various demos pre-made for this theme and freely accessed by a simple installation process.
There are dozens of pre-designed starter sites that can be easily imported, either a few pages at a time or as full website packs. They can range from the more standard, grid aligned layouts to more avant-garde masonry arrangements. Additionally, the mega menu creator, custom font manager, and global model builder can also be tweaked and applied to ensure that your site looks as novel as it can be; a definite boon when developing personal portfolio sites that require more personality.
| Features | |
| Price | $39 |
| No. of Layouts | 23 Websites available |
| Page Builder & Customisation | WP Bakery Builder packaged, though also compatible with Elementor and the Gutenberg editor |
| Portfolio Features | Various portfolio options (grid, masonry, full width and carousels), Slider Revolution, Owl Carousel |
| Calendar & booking | Events Calendar supported |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact Form 7 supported with various styles |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | Font Awesome |
| Last Update | 21 June 2021 |
Take a peek at Impeka’s theme page and live demo!
4. Kalium- Creative Theme for Professionals & Freelancers
Kalium is one of the best WordPress themes to get started on building a freelance website with.
The various pre-made demos show off the range of options that this theme can offer you. But, if you’re tight on time, you’ll find the photography, agency, and freelancer demos to be the best suited for any kind of freelance business site purposes. Don’t be too worried about being bogged down by pre-set layouts, though. With the 30+ portfolio layouts, you can pick from a great abundance of ways to present images of your works.
This theme also offers good bang for your buck, with premium plugins like the WP Bakery drag-and-drop plugin, Slider Revolution, and Layer Slider all packaged with enough features you need to get your site up and running. These typically cost a lot more when purchased separately, and their being packaged with the theme helps ensure that the site and site building process run as smoothly as possible.
| Features | |
| Price | $41 |
| No. of Layouts | 21+ Custom demos with more planned for future updates |
| Page Builder & Customisation | WP Bakery |
| Portfolio Features | 30+ portfolio layouts |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact form widget provided |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | WP Bakery widgets for pricing tables, maps, blogs posts and more |
| Last Update | 6 April 2021 |
Get a better understanding of what else this theme can do here and through its demos!
5. SEO WP | SEO & Digital Marketing WordPress Theme
SEO WP is a WordPRess theme among the top contenders for themes that work great for marketing agencies and related freelance firms or professionals.
Though not featuring too large of a demo library (with only 2 styles provided), the theme does show off a very nice and trendy design that skews more minimalist. It also makes up for that with over 30 different inner page designs to be applied and dropped into your website, and 96 different premium illustrations that can help make things like infographics about your services and projects pop and catch the eye of site visitors.
With SEO WP, you can also expect to receive a mega menu customizer, live theme customizer, advanced social sharing options, and a one-click demo import to quickly build all the pages you need. All this on top of a selection of premium WordPress plugins such as Master Slider, Easy Social Sharing Buttons, Nex Forms, and plenty of others.
| Features | |
| Price | $49 |
| No. of Layouts | 2 styles, 33 different inner page layouts |
| Page Builder & Customisation | Gutenberg (requires separate install) |
| Portfolio Features | Built for accommodating text and image portfolio |
| Calendar & booking | Integrated as part of site features |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Ninja-Forms and MailChimp Opt-Ins provided |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | SEO Yoast integration, Social media sharing |
| Last Update | 12 May 2021 |
Learn more about SEo WP through the theme page and live preview today!
6. Vogi – Multipurpose WooCommerce WordPress Theme
A departure from the more vibrant stylings of the previous themes. Vogi will help you build an ecommerce-optimised WordPress-powered site in no time.
This WordPress theme will give you the choice of six different pre-built home-pages, a stunning mega menu, vertical menu options, and an intuitive product page with search filtering functions to help visitors get to the products and pages they’re looking for faster. Vogi is more commerce oriented, with its demo looking a lot like a digital marketplace.
However, the carousels can be easily repurposed to feature portfolio pieces, and having an online shop can help supplement your income if your freelance work lets you generate additional products that could be sold. Filmmakers could sell digital copies of clips that they don’t intend to use but can work great as stock footage; same with photographers too. If you’re a trainer, you could even sell fitness items to clients straight through the site too.
| Features | |
| Price | $59 |
| No. of Layouts | 6 home pages |
| Page Builder & Customisation | WP Bakery |
| Portfolio Features | Product layouts alternate between list and gird views that may be repurposed. Slider Revolution also provided |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact Form 7 included |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | WooCommerce supplementary plugins like the Currency Switcher, Marketplace and Vendors all compatible |
| Last Update | 17 September 2021 |
So take a trip to the theme page and check out the preview too!
7. H-Code Responsive & Multipurpose WordPress Theme for Freelancers
H-Code is a pretty good modern, multipurpose WordPress theme to build your freelance portfolio site on.
The theme features an entirely responsive design that can be switched between a single page or multipage layout. It’s built on the latest HTML5 and the Bootstrap frameworks. While this WordPress theme does feature a Freelance demo, you might find that the rest of the over 50 niche demos may fit your field of work too, and can be worked on with the WP Bakery Page Builder to get them more in line with your personal brand.
And if you intend to sell some products related to your freelance work, you also get access to some very nice looking shop and product pages.
| Features | |
| Price | $42 |
| No. of Layouts | 31+ home pages & 26+ one-page demos if you prefer something simpler |
| Page Builder & Customisation | WP Bakery |
| Portfolio Features | Slider Revolution also provided |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact Form 7 included |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | WooCommerce support, 200+ shortcodes for sliders, accordions and counters |
| Last Update | 15 April 2021 |
Learn more about this theme here and through the preview!
8. Empathy – Freelancer vCard WordPress Theme
Empathy is an incredibly sleek and stylish WordPress theme that can be used for vCards, freelance portfolios and even resumes.
Completely responsive and retina-ready, this theme will look good on all devices so that it’s accessible to all audiences. With animated page elements like typing effects, parallax scrolling and animated backgrounds, I personally recommend throwing in as many personal images as you can fit into this site because of how much personality this whole theme gives off. The various pages even have these very smooth and animated transitions that complement more visual portfolios or even boost the impact of more text-based project showcases.
Empathy theme is very easy to work with and personalise. And with WordPress theme customizer, feel free to edit all manner of page elements like text, icons, and images in real time!
| Features | |
| Price | $59 |
| No. of Layouts | 2 home pages |
| Page Builder & Customisation | WP Theme Customizer, no page builder |
| Portfolio Features | Simple filtered portfolio with lightbox effects |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Built-in contact form provided |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | Custom Widgets, social icons, one-click demo import |
| Last Update | 6 March 2021 |
Take a gander at the theme page and its live demo!
9. Flamingo – Agency & Freelance Portfolio Theme for WordPress
Flamingo is a WordPress theme that was more custom-made for creatives like graphic designers, illustrators, and artists.
You’ll find that this theme’s simple andminimalist aesthetic is a really well suited to visually focused websites such as artistic or design portfolios. Parallax effects and high resolution image support ensures that you can adorn the site with all sorts of images an spreads either through hero sliders on the front page or smaller but just as prominent image holding modules.
Flamingo gives you several layout options to select from, which you can further customize for a look and feel that’s unique to you.
| Features | |
| Price | $49 |
| No. of Layouts | 3 layouts available: Angled, Straight and Minimal |
| Page Builder & Customisation | Visual Composer integrated |
| Portfolio Features | Isotope filtered layouts and 4 different galleries to choose from |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Built-in contact form provided |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | Custom Widgets, social icons, one-click demo import |
| Last Update | 6 March 2021 |
Get a peek at this theme’s cool features here and here!
10. Pitch – Digital Agency & Freelancer Theme
Pitch is another very well and thoroughly designed WordPress theme that is an especially good fit for creative freelancers from fields spanning from design to UI and UX design.
Opening the live demo gives you just a taste of all the cool design features this theme has to offer. Its demos aren’t any different too, as they feature a range of different layouts for pages and elements, alternating between boxed, fullscreen, masonry and standard grid layouts that all loo good and cater to a good range of visual preferences.
The powerful admin panel offered by the theme will help you to get your site up and running quickly. Pitch even supports video backgrounds to make your site more interactive and visually engaging. Don’t get too worried about the design bits if you’re not experienced with web development, however, as a lot of what you’ll be doing is mostly entering your own content to the preset modules that already look very good.
| Features | |
| Price | $79 |
| No. of Layouts | 12 home pages |
| Page Builder & Customisation | Admin Interface and WPBakery |
| Portfolio Features | Lists, masonry and even single portfolio layouts provided |
| Calendar & booking | NIL |
| Newsletter & Contact Forms | Contact Form 7 integrated |
| Additional Plugins & Functions | 80+ shortcodes, interactive infographics, Woo Commerce integrated |
| Last Update | 6 March 2021 |
So take a chance on this theme and check out its page and preview!
If you need frequent access to a variety of premium plugins, themes, logos, video footage and audio files to power up your WordPress site, do also check out envato elements‘ unlimited subscription plan starting from just $16.50/month.
