Are you looking for the best dark WordPress theme for your website?
Lighter WordPress themes are easier on the eyes, but they don’t suit every website. For some themes, brands, and niches, a dark WordPress theme is perfect.
The problem with most dark themes for WordPress is finding a balance between readability and design. You need to look for a theme that is easy to set up and looks professional for your business.
In this article, we will share some of the best dark WordPress themes that you can use.
Building a Dark WordPress Website
WordPress is the most popular website builder in the market. Many popular brands use WordPress for their websites.
When we say WordPress, we mean self-hosted WordPress.org. You can check out our complete guide on the difference between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org for more details.
To set up a dark website, you will first need a domain name (such as wpbeginner.com). This is the address of your website. You also need suitable WordPress web hosting for your website itself.
If you are unsure why you need a domain name and hosting, then take a look at our guide about the difference between domain names and web hosting.
We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest web hosting companies and an official WordPress hosting partner.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a BIG discount on web hosting.
After purchasing the web hosting, simply follow our guide on how to make a website. Then, you should check out our article on how to install a WordPress theme.
Now, let’s take a look at our handpicked list of the best dark WordPress themes.
1. Astra
Astra is a modern WordPress multipurpose theme with all the features you need to create any kind of website. It comes with built-in dark templates for certain types of websites, including legal, fashion, products, and other niches.
Astra also includes color choices, custom widgets, Google fonts, backgrounds, header layouts, and more. You can use popular drag and drop page builders like Beaver Builder to edit and customize your site.
There’s also a free version of Astra, which includes a number of dark starter templates. You don’t have to pay anything to use these.
2. SeedProd
SeedProd is the best WordPress website and landing page builder. It comes with a built-in drag and drop functionality to make a custom website in just a few clicks.
Moreover, SeedProd provides multiple professional website templates. This includes perfectly designed dark layouts for your fashion blog, art, and lifestyle sites.
You get complete control over the colors, fonts, and styling of your website. And it’s easy to customize your website using the visual builder with a live preview.
3. Divi
Divi is an excellent and highly customizable premium WordPress theme. It comes with an ultimate page builder to design custom landing pages and edit your website visually. You also get hundreds of website layout packs to quickly build your site. You can use different post formats, too.
It offers global elements and styles to follow a similar theme layout all over your site. Divi lets you undo, redo, and revise your changes to create a perfect dark website in WordPress.
Divi is also designed for good SEO (search engine optimization) to help your site rank highly in Google and other search engines.
4. OceanWP
OceanWP is a free WordPress theme with dozens of dark and black background templates. It also provides built-in premium layouts for your fashion, photography, and business websites.
With a 1-click demo content importer, you can launch a multi-page site in just a few minutes without writing any code.
OceanWP has a fast page load time that helps rank your website in search engines. It’s fully compatible with all popular WordPress plugins, and you can easily add elements, such as a contact form, to your site.
5. Beat
Beat is a dark WordPress theme designed specifically for music bands, producers, artists, street performers, nightclubs, and DJs. It comes with a fullscreen layout where you can display your featured work visibly.
Other theme options include a flexible header, footer settings, custom post types, and more. It seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce to start an online store.
6. Hestia Pro
Hestia Pro is a stylish WordPress multipurpose theme with a ready-made dark layout. It also offers a few dark templates designed for gym, yoga, coffee shop, and restaurant websites.
It supports drag and drop page builders like Elementor Pro to help you customize your website easily. You can also use the WordPress live customizer to edit your website settings.
7. Ultra
Ultra is an elegant WordPress theme suitable for blogging or for any type of website. It ships with multiple ready-made dark website templates for different niches.
Inside, you will find custom widgets, navigation menus, demo content, and more. With smart layout options, Ultra gives you complete control of your website’s template.
Ultra is also retina-ready, meaning it will look great on even the most up-to-date mobile devices. It’s also fully compatible with the WordPress block editor.
8. Inspiro
Inspiro is a dark WordPress business and WooCommerce theme. You could also use it for a portfolio website. It supports video embeds out of the box and lets you create fullscreen slideshows to immediately grab the attention of your visitors.
It provides an advanced theme options panel with all the settings you need to set up a perfect dark website. The theme features include an image gallery, page builder, video player, and so on.
9. Altitude Pro
Altitude Pro is a highly flexible WordPress business theme with a dark background. The theme comes with a built-in custom logo, header videos, image and video widgets, featured images, and more.
It has homepage sections to display your services and products professionally. With full eCommerce support, you can set up your business store and start selling online.
StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.
Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!
10. Blocksy
Blocksy is a free multipurpose WordPress theme with a dark design. It comes with a 3-column layout that starts after the fullscreen dark header background image.
It fully supports popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer. It lets you add a custom logo, navigation menu, online shop, and more.
11. Fargo
Fargo is a dark WordPress wedding photography theme. It’s also suitable for visual artists, photographers, graphic designers, and motivational speakers.
The theme has a fullscreen image slider on the homepage to display your most attractive photos stylishly. It offers a cinematic experience to users with zoom-in and zoom-out effects.
12. Vigour
Vigour is an interactive WordPress dark theme. It comes with parallax scrolling, stylish homepage elements, great typography, and a single-page layout to create any type of website.
The theme features include unlimited color choices, custom backgrounds, mega menus, RTL language support, and more. It integrates with your favorite WordPress page builders like Elementor Pro to customize your website easily.
13. Mies
Mies is a stunning WordPress architect and interior design theme that’s also suitable for realtors. It has a full-width, dark-featured image slider in the top section of the homepage.
It also comes with multiple sections to showcase your properties, embed property videos, display images, and add photo galleries. It supports WooCommerce to sell your listings online.
14. Auberge
Auberge is one of the best free dark WordPress themes for restaurants and cafes. It has a dark color scheme that you can customize using the theme customization options panel.
It comes with a header slideshow, custom colors, and a layout. The theme is fully translation-ready and also supports RTL languages.
15. Tusant
Tusant is a fantastic WordPress podcast theme with a dark template and a modern homepage layout. It supports multimedia content and lets you create a music and video streaming website easily.
The theme is suitable for podcasters, musicians, bands, and vloggers. It integrates with third-party WordPress podcasting plugins to add more features to your site.
16. Neve
Neve is a fast WordPress multipurpose theme. It comes with dozens of built-in templates for business niches, including dark website layouts for fashion, photography, and consultancy agencies.
It features custom header and footer layouts with drag and drop elements to set up your website quickly. Neve is a responsive WordPress theme and looks great on all screen sizes and devices.
17. Wallstreet
Wallstreet is a free corporate theme for WordPress sites. It comes with ready-to-use dark templates for your homepage, blog page, and corporate pages.
It’s WooCommerce ready, which means you can add an online store to your business website easily. The theme also supports WPML to create a multilingual website.
18. Monochrome Pro
Monochrome Pro is a minimalist WordPress dark theme. It comes with a full-width custom header background that you can use to add a featured image.
This theme comes from StudioPress and is powerful and robust. It gives you homepage widget areas to set up and customize your website quickly.
Parallax Pro is also fully mobile responsive, meaning it looks great on mobile devices.
19. Modern
Modern is a great free WordPress theme. It’s fully responsive with a nice grid layout to display your important articles.
It has a custom background, header layouts, featured images, a social icons menu, and more. The theme offers built-in speed and performance optimization to load your website pages quickly.
20. Rosa
Rosa is an eye-catching WordPress theme built specifically for food bloggers, restaurants, and cafes. It could also be a good fit for small businesses looking to present a dark, bold image.
This theme has a carousel slider in the header section to share your featured stories with thumbnail images. It also offers page templates, post layouts, dropdown navigation menus, contact pages, and social media integrations.
21. DarkElements
DarkElements is a free, lightweight WordPress dark theme. It comes with multiple widget areas on the homepage to add content, images, and useful sections.
It has a sidebar navigation menu and custom widgets to display important links. You can use the WordPress customizer with a live preview to make changes to your site.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress dark themes for your site. You may also want to check out our other WordPress guides for business websites.
Best WordPress Guides for Business Sites
- Useful Tools to Manage and Grow Your WordPress Blog
- The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide (Step by Step)
- How to Start a WordPress Blog (Beginner’s Guide)
- How to Start a Fashion Blog (and Make Money) – Step by Step
- How to Start a Video Blog (Vlog) And Make Money
- How to Add Dark Mode to Your WordPress Website (Easy)
- How to Get Website Design Feedback in WordPress (Step by Step)
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Dennis Muthomi
is there a plugin you’d recommend to easily add a light/dark mode switching functionality?
having both a light and dark mode option could really enhance the user experience on my blogs. Thanks for putting this together
WPBeginner Comments
There happens to be a way to add this mode. For details, check out: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-dark-mode-to-your-wordpress-website-easy/
Dennis Muthomi
hi WPBeginner Comments, thanks a ton for the helpful link! I’ll definitely check out that tutorial on adding dark mode to my WordPress site. It’s awesome that you guys are always sharing such valuable resources for the community
Keep up the great work
D
Hey, the first one is gone.
Cheers,
WPBeginner Support
Thank you for letting us know, we’ll be sure to add this post to our list to update.
Admin
John D
You wrote: “Lighter WordPress themes are easier on eyes”. I would dispute that. I have switched to dark themes for my desktops and such as much as possible because I find the white backgrounds of many desktops and websites to be blinding. Worse, the themes of Office and online alike keep touting stupid gray, not black but gray on white, fonts, which means my eyes hurt at the end of the day after staring at many screens.
There was a reason that the old fashioned terminals were black with white or green characters. It wasn’t about saving electricity, but it was about eye strain.
Bhongo
Lovely! Keep up the good work guys.
Gaurav Khurana
Free things are always nice to have,, thanks for the list. It would be great if within the article you can share some other evergreen themese or i would say best themes you can share
Kay Collier
I can’t thank you enough for all of these themes once again…you’r brilliant Syed…you sent them just when I needed a really good one for Halloween…and more besides.
You, your team and WordPress really are the best thing since sliced bread!!
Sincerely
Kay