Many website owners want a theme that truly reflects their brand, and at WPBeginner, we often get asked about dark WordPress themes. 🌙✨
While lighter themes are easier on the eyes, they are not always the best fit for every website. For certain brands, industries, and creative websites, a dark theme can create a sleek, modern look.
That said, the problem with most dark themes is finding one that balances aesthetics, readability, and functionality. 🔍
The best dark themes should be easy to set up, visually stunning, and professional enough for your business. In this article, we’ll share some of the best dark WordPress themes that you can use for your website.
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Quick Pick: The Best Dark WordPress Themes
Low on time? Check out our top picks to quickly find the perfect dark WordPress theme for your brand:
🥇First choice | 🥈Second choice | 🥉Third choice |
SeedProd | Elegant Themes Divi | ThemeIsle Neve |
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Popularity: 1M+ active installs | Popularity: 2M+ active installs | Popularity: 300,000+ active installs |
Rating: 4,500+ 5-star reviews on WordPress.org | Rating: 20,000+ reviews on Trustpilot | Rating: 1,000+ 5-star reviews on WordPress.org |
350+ site kits and starter templates | 300+ website and page templates | 100+ starter sites and templates |
40+ dark theme options | 35+ dark theme options | 25+ dark theme options |
90+ premium page blocks | Built-in website elements | Ready-made block patterns |
Built-in page, website, and Theme builder | Works with Divi Builder and other page builders | Compatible with popular page builders |
Read more » | Read more » | Read more » |
How We Test And Review WordPress Business Themes
Typically, a dark theme uses darker and bold colors for the background. This is to create a sleek, modern look while reducing eye strain.
However, not all dark themes balance aesthetics and readability well.
That’s why we personally installed and tested each theme in this showcase to evaluate its design, usability, and customization options. This hands-on approach ensures we recommend only the best dark themes for your WordPress site.
From our testing, a great dark theme should offer a balance of these key features:
🖤 Striking yet professional design: A dark theme should enhance your brand’s aesthetics without compromising readability or user experience.
🎨 Customization flexibility: This allows you to change colors, fonts, and layouts without touching code.
🛠 Page builder compatibility: Support for drag-and-drop builders lets you design pages effortlessly and create a unique look.
📱 Mobile-friendliness: A good theme is responsive to all screen sizes to make sure your site looks great on any device.
⚡ Optimized speed: Website performance matters! A well-coded theme ensures fast load times and a smooth browsing experience.
Ultimately, the right dark theme will depend on your design needs, technical skills, and budget. So, we’ve considered all these factors while curating our top picks.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
We’ve worked with WordPress for over 16 years – testing themes, plugins, and hosting providers while also running our own websites. This hands-on experience helps us understand what makes a site both visually appealing and effective.
Every theme in this list has been carefully tested and reviewed to help you find the best dark theme option for your website.
📌 Want to know how we do it? Check out our complete editorial process.
Now, let’s take a look at our handpicked list of the best dark WordPress themes.
1. SeedProd
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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.
Some of our partner websites use SeedProd to design their entire sites. Curious about what makes it a great tool? Learn more about its features in our complete SeedProd review!
During our testing, we found its dark-themed website templates well-designed for various niches. These include themes for fashion blogs, art portfolios, and lifestyle sites.
Plus, the SeedProd dark layouts looked sleek, and the contrast was optimized for readability.
We also tested its customization options and found that adjusting colors, fonts, and styling was effortless. The visual builder’s live preview made it simple to work on the design and get the perfect dark aesthetic for your business site.
2. Divi
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Divi is an excellent and highly customizable premium WordPress theme. During setup, we found its drag-and-drop page builder made it easy to design custom landing pages and visually edit a site without touching code.
We also learned that Divi has hundreds of website layout packs to help you quickly build your site. You can use different post formats, too.
Need an in-depth breakdown? You can read our comprehensive Divi review.
When we explored its customization options, we liked how global elements and styles kept branding consistent across the site. The ability to undo, redo, and revisit changes was especially useful for fine-tuning the perfect dark aesthetic.
Performance-wise, Divi is built with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, ensuring your website is optimized for search engines like Google.
3. Neve
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Neve is a fast, multipurpose WordPress theme. We’ve tested it thoroughly and found this theme to be ideal for business websites.
It has various built-in templates designed for different business niches, including sleek dark layouts for fashion, photography, and digital agencies.
Neve works with your favorite page builders out of the box. And it was impressive for us to see how it adapts a page builder natively to use its drag-and-drop features for customization.
The theme’s responsive design makes sure your site looks great on any device – something we confirmed when viewing it across different screen sizes during our tests.
4. OceanWP
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OceanWP is a free WordPress theme with dozens of dark and black background templates. Its built-in premium layouts are ideal for fashion, photography, and business websites.
Based on our experience, customizing the theme’s dark layout was a breeze, making it a solid choice for creating a sleek, professional site. Then, the 1-click demo content importer made it easy to launch a multi-page site in just a few minutes.
We also tested its performance and appreciated how quickly pages loaded, which is crucial for both user experience and SEO rankings.
In addition, OceanWP integrates seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins, which allow you to easily add elements like a contact form.
5. Ultra
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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.
6. Beat
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Beat is a dark WordPress theme built specifically for music bands, producers, artists, street performers, nightclubs, and DJs. We tested its fullscreen layout and loved how it showcases featured work, providing an engaging, immersive experience for visitors.
The flexible header and footer settings made it easy to personalize the theme to match our branding.
Plus, the ability to add custom post types gives you full control over how content is displayed.
We also tested the WooCommerce integration, and it worked seamlessly. This means you can easily start an online store for selling merchandise or tickets. With its clean design and customization options, Beat is a great choice for any music-related site.
7. Inspiro
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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.
8. Astra
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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, tech, 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.
9. Altitude Pro
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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.
10. Blocksy
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. Hestia Pro
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Hestia Pro is a stylish WordPress multipurpose theme with a pre-designed dark layout, which we tested and found to look professional. The dark templates made for various niches like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants, and they were easy to implement with just a few clicks.
It also offers seamless integration with Elementor Pro. And with its drag-and-drop builder, and the customization process was smooth.
17. Wallstreet
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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
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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
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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, featured images, header layouts, a social icons menu, and more. The theme offers built-in speed and performance optimization to load your website pages quickly.
20. Rosa
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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
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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 Guides for Launching Your WordPress Site
If you’re looking to dive deeper into starting a WordPress site, check out these additional guides that cover essential aspects of site development and optimization:
- 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)
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
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