It can be difficult to find the perfect WordPress theme that improves readability and simplicity while keeping business and sales in mind. This is especially true when you are trying to make money online from your writing.
Over the years, we have worked a lot with a lot of different themes for WPBeginner and our other business blogs. These include minimalist themes, featured rich themes, colorful themes, dark themes, and more.
When it comes to minimalist WordPress themes for writers, we recommend looking for elegant white space, beautiful typography, simplicity, functionality, and multiple content sections.
Keeping this in mind, we will share some of the best minimalist WordPress themes for writers and bloggers.
Building a Minimalist Website for Writers With WordPress
WordPress is the most popular website builder on the market. It’s the top choice of writers and bloggers all over the world.
There are two types of WordPress websites. WordPress.com, which is a hosting solution, and WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress. Take a look at our full comparison between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org for more details.
To create a minimalist website, you need self-hosted WordPress. It’s highly flexible and offers all the features you need straight out of the box.
Before you start, you will need a domain name and web hosting to launch your WordPress website.
A domain name is your site’s address on the web, like wpbeginner.com or google.com. Web hosting is the storage for all your website files.
We recommend using Bluehost. They are a popular web hosting provider and an officially recommended WordPress hosting partner.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a huge discount on web hosting.
After buying hosting, use our complete guide on how to make a website to set up your site.
Now, let’s take a look at the best minimalist WordPress themes for writers and bloggers that you can use.
1. Divi
Divi is a popular WordPress all-purpose theme. It ships with hundreds of page layouts, including minimalist templates suitable for writers or almost any blogging niche.
With Divi, you also get a built-in page builder for easy customization. This visual builder is user-friendly and lets you edit text, images, styling options, and so on.
Divi offers Google Fonts, unlimited colors, and more. This means you can easily make changes to how your content looks without needing to know any CSS code. You can also easily add features like a contact form.
2. SeedProd
SeedProd is the most popular landing page and theme builder for WordPress. It also lets you create a fully custom website theme with your choice of header, footer, sidebar, and other sections.
The best part is that you don’t need to write any code. It comes with a powerful drag and drop visual builder and live preview to create a website or customize your pages.
Moreover, you get multiple ready-made website templates that you can use as a base to set up your theme. These templates include landing pages for about, contact, and other pages.
SeedProd also provides built-in landing pages for coming soon, maintenance mode, login/registration page, and error pages. The website builder is beginner-friendly and easy to use for anyone.
3. Ultra
Ultra is a modern responsive WordPress theme that’s suitable for any type of website. It comes with a beautiful and minimalist template for writers, bloggers, authors, and storytellers.
It has a full-width custom background image, text snippets, a call-to-action button, different post formats, and more. The layout is lively and attractive to engage new readers right away.
Ultra is also SEO friendly, helping your site to be found in search engines.
4. Neve
Neve is a gorgeous minimalist WordPress theme. It comes with multiple starter sites for different business and corporate niches. It also includes ready-made templates for writers and bloggers.
With WooCommerce integration, Neve lets you easily create an online store or sell products from your blog. When it comes to customization, Neve is seamlessly compatible with page builders like Elementor and Visual Composer.
5. OceanWP
OceanWP is one of the best free WordPress themes. It offers dozens of built-in demo sites to launch your blog quickly. It’s a fantastic premium-like free minimalist theme for writers.
With full SEO optimization, OceanWP helps you rank your articles in search engines and get more traffic. It’s quick and easy to set up your site with this theme, and you can easily add an eCommerce plugin to create an online store.
6. Astra
Astra is a lightweight theme for WordPress with lots of gorgeous minimalist templates. The e-Book Author template is perfect for writers. It has clear typography and lots of white space.
You can use Astra straight out of the box or tweak it to look just how you want. It’s suitable for complete beginners but also offers power and flexibility.
Even better, it’s a fast, lightweight theme that can help boost your WordPress SEO (search engine optimization). This means your site will rank better in Google and other search engines.
7. Tinos
Tinos is a gorgeous WordPress minimalist theme for writers and bloggers. It focuses on improved readability with elegant typography and a distraction-free layout.
Tinos adds next and previous buttons to your blog posts on the homepage, allowing users to jump between posts on the screen. It’s super easy to set up with a custom theme settings page. Plus, it offers different post templates to help your content stand out in different ways.
8. Monochrome
Monochrome from StudioPress is an ultra-minimalist WordPress theme with lots of white space, clean typography, and an elegant design.
With Monochrome, you get customizable headers, a widgetized homepage layout, page templates, and a theme options panel. It’s fully compatible with the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg editor) to create posts and pages, or you can use any popular WordPress page builder plugin.
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!
9. Eclipse
Eclipse is an elegant WordPress blog theme for bloggers, writers, and authors. Its homepage offers a beautiful slider to showcase featured content, followed by link blocks to your pages.
Eclipse comes with a custom widget for Instagram photos and videos. Plus, it has beautiful gallery templates, a portfolio section, and full WooCommerce compatibility.
10. Pepper+
Pepper+ is one of the best WordPress themes and is suitable for building any kind of website. It comes with multiple ready-made designs and drag and drop modules to create a custom layout easily.
With Pepper+, you get Google Fonts, multiple header styles, icon fonts, an email subscription form, and more. Also, it’s super-flexible, letting you easily change colors and fonts.
11. Elegant
Elegant is a beautiful WordPress minimalist theme with a clean design. It has large featured images and crisp typography that improves the readability of your content and gives your visitors a great user experience.
Elegant is designed to be a blogging theme, but you don’t have to use it for a personal blog. It’s also an excellent option for agencies, magazine websites, and online stores. It includes multiple header styles, portfolio and team sections, color schemes, and a built-in drag and drop page builder.
12. Sydney Pro
Sydney Pro is a clean and spacious WordPress theme for lifestyle bloggers, photographers, travelers, and writers. It comes with lots of customization options to choose different layouts, colors, and fonts for your beautiful blog.
The homepage lets you drag and drop content widgets to display your top articles. It also includes custom widgets for social media and content discovery features.
13. Hestia Pro
Hestia Pro is a multipurpose minimalist WordPress theme for writers, bloggers, and content creators. It offers multiple website templates with ready-made page layouts.
The theme has color options, font styling, a custom background, header and footer layouts, and more. It supports WordPress page builders as well as the built-in WordPress block (Gutenberg) editor.
14. Hive
Hive is a black-and-white WordPress minimalist theme. It has a magazine-style layout that lets you feature content in multiple columns. Your site will look great at any screen size and on any device.
With additional WordPress theme customizer options, Hive lets you manage your website layout, buttons, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and more without editing any code.
15. Authority Pro
Authority Pro is an excellent WordPress minimalist theme for all kinds of websites. It features a beautiful homepage layout with a large image on the top, a welcome message, and a newsletter subscription option.
It has a separate blog page, navigation menu, custom header, and theme settings page. The beautiful color scheme and simple design make your content highly visible to readers.
16. Corner
Corner is a WordPress theme for creative professionals, including writers and bloggers. This beautiful theme features a minimal layout, a homepage slider, and a portfolio section.
The theme is also WooCommerce-ready and comes with custom widgets for social sharing and content discovery. It includes a theme options panel for quick and easy setup.
17. Katib Writers
Katib Writers is a free WordPress blogging theme for writers and authors. It has a minimalist design and a classic blog layout.
The header includes a custom logo and a navigation menu with a beautiful background respectively. Katib Writers is translation ready and lets you easily create a multilingual website.
18. Binder Pro
Binder Pro is a smart and beautiful WordPress minimalist theme for writers, publishers, authors, and storytellers. It has a white background that makes your content highly visible to readers.
In the featured content section, you can showcase your best content with images. Binder Pro also offers multiple homepage sections to display content categories. It’s fully compatible with all popular WordPress plugins.
19. Elemin
Elemin is a classic WordPress blogging theme featuring a 2-column layout with a right sidebar. It also offers multi-column and grid layout options on the homepage.
It includes a lightbox popup for image galleries, RTL language support, footer widgets, and color schemes. It lets you import demo content or use a theme options panel to set up your website quickly.
20. Parallax
Parallax is an all-purpose WordPress minimalist theme well-suited for all types of websites, including blogs. It has a fullscreen background slider and fully functional parallax scrolling on the pages and posts.
It has the Themify Builder support to customize and design your landing pages. You can also use the drag and drop builder to create custom page templates easily.
21. The Writers Blog
The Writers Blog is a free WordPress minimalist theme for writers. It has an elegant and sleek design with eye-catching colors to improve user readability.
You can put content in categories and also display important content on the homepage. Other features include an image slider, social media icons, a custom logo, and more.
22. Gema
Gema is a striking yet minimalist WordPress theme for bloggers and writers. The homepage display is visually attractive and displays articles in a masonry style.
The single post and page layouts are stunning. With boxed headings, your content looks great and attracts attention. Gema is easy to customize and manage, even for beginners.
23. Spencer
Spencer is a fantastic WordPress minimalist theme for personal bloggers and writers. It has a fullscreen image background with welcome text and a call-to-action button.
Other notable features include a sticky navigation menu, social media integration, font styling, eye-catching colors, and custom page templates.
24. MrWriter
MrWriter is a dark WordPress minimalist theme for writers and bloggers. It features a fullscreen black background layout with lots of space and beautiful typography, which would also suit authors, travel bloggers, or even some portfolio/resume websites.
The theme has a simple layout, offering multiple style variations that make it unique and attractive. It’s designed to work out of the box with minimal effort to set up the theme.
25. Paperbag
Paperbag is a stylish WordPress minimalist theme for writers and authors. It comes with a beautiful header layout with a custom logo, a dropdown navigation menu, and social icons.
The theme includes social media menus, landing page templates, an image slider, call-to-action buttons, and more.
We hope this article helped you find the best minimalist WordPress themes for writers. You may also want to check out our other WordPress guides that can help writers grow their online presence and make money online.
Best WordPress Guides for Writers
- How to Start a Blog – Beginners Guide
- Proven Ways to Make Money Online with WordPress Blogging
- Plugins to Efficiently Manage WordPress Multi-Author Blogs
- How to Write a Great Blog Post (Structure + Examples)
- How to Write Irresistible Headlines That Work
- Best Ways to Use OpenAI on Your WordPress Website
- Best ChatGPT Prompts for Bloggers, Marketers, and Social Media
- How to Create an Author Website 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.
Constanze
Hi there,
I’m looking at buying a blogging WP theme but none of the sites answers my question: What about compliancy to GDPR standards? My site will be hosted in Germany = EU so it falls under these regulations. Since most themes come from non EU sellers I’m not sure this topic is covered.
Thanks for your input!
Best,
C.
WPBeginner Support
For that question, we would recommend first taking a look at our article here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-and-gdpr-compliance-everything-you-need-to-know/
Admin