Only The Best and Free SEO Friendly WordPress Themes That Will Drive You More Traffic

In the modern age, it is very important that your writing shows up on different search engines. At the same time, it is also very crucial that you provide your users with engaging user experience.

Research says you only have 15 seconds to impress your users. Do not settle anything but the best WordPress theme for SEO, right?

Choosing a WordPress theme for SEO can be tough. You have to find out WordPress themes that not only loads incredibly fast but also provides users with a great user experience. Your visitors should be instantly comfortable and familiar while visiting your website.

For example, if you provide users with a dark background and white text it will take some time for your users to get used to it. As 90% of the websites on the internet offers texts in a white background, initially your visitors will find it hard to read your content.

Besides User experience, you also should concentrate on your page speed. Nobody likes a slow website, right? [Also read: Top 10 Ways to Improve PageSpeed on WordPress Websites] In this article, we will be providing a list of the best SEO friendly WordPress themes.

Google’s John Mueller clarified in July that if your website is slow, Google will penalize your site for rankings and tweaking will not help. You can check at https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/ to know if your website has been penalized or not.

To clarify on the mobile speed update: a) this only affects the slowest sites, b) those can incrementally improve (though ideally you'd significantly improve the speed…), c) we're still aiming for this month. If your site is reasonably fast, tweaking won't change things. https://t.co/4glNAFd0ww

— John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) July 3, 2018

There are many ways to increase your WordPress website’s page speed. In our studies, we have found out that using a great caching plugin can improve your site speed up to 3x.

Meanwhile, you should also concentrate on your Search Engine Optimization. If you do not optimize your content for search engines, people will not be able to discover your content. You can read our WordPress SEO Guide and the best WordPress SEO Plugins article to familiarize yourself with the art of SEO.

If you want to have a perfect balance user experience and SEO – you need to pick an SEO optimized WordPress theme.

Creating exceptional content, installing the best WordPress plugins, and having a fast pagespeed are just some of the measures you can take to improve your website rank in Google. However, none of that will matter if you don’t choose an SEO optimized WordPress theme.

In this collection of the best SEO optimized WordPress themes, you’ll find themes of broad categories. For example, we are covering business themes, theme for creative portfolios, best e-commerce WordPress theme for SEO and more.

Yes, choosing a WordPress theme for SEO is a tough job. It becomes more difficult when you want to have a faster loading speed. Nevertheless, we are making this more comfortable for you

How Did WPHive Choose Best Free SEO Friendly WordPress Themes?

• In this article, we are only covering the free WordPress themes for SEO. Why are we covering only free themes? That’s a very good question. When you search Google with best free seo friendly WordPress themes, you will find out that the top results have fake titles. Their titles say they are covering free WordPress SEO optimized themes, however, in reality – most of the articles will redirect you to buy the premium themes. Hence, we include themes that might have a paid version, but the theme must have a free version available. We are only covering the best free SEO friendly WordPress themes here.
• The theme has a fast loading speed.
• The theme complies with all the Google advised guidelines.
• Provides a great user experience.
• Aesthetically pleasing to eyes.

Without further ado, let’s find out the best SEO optimized WordPress themes that you don’t need to pay any penny.

A Comprehensive List of Best SEO Optimized WordPress Themes

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is one of the best WordPress themes around. The theme offers a clean layout, loads very fast and extremely SEO friendly.

Many top bloggers have used GeneratePress, and they have been pleased about how the theme performed. The theme is very lightweight and supports page builders like Elementor. You can choose from the best Elementor addons and can easily integrate them with GeneratePress.

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a very lightweight WordPress theme, and a fully running vanilla installation of GeneratePress is less than 15kb (gzipped) to your page size. GeneratePress is fully compatible with WordPress 5.0.

Fonts

Fonts is a minimal typography focused WordPress theme. The theme doesn’t add any bloat and does not use any particular frameworks or libraries. This gives the theme an advantage. The clean looking theme loads incredibly fast and standards-compliant code ensures the theme is Search Engine Optimized (SEO). The theme is fully responsive and WordPress 5 (Gutenberg) compatible.

Fonts

Neve

We love Themeisle themes. So when they introduced one of their new themes Neve that is focused on speed and SEO, we had to give Neve a try. Neve is a super fast and lightweight (Themeisle calls it featherweight) theme with full Gutenberg support.

Neve

The theme loads very fast and follows all SEO principles.

Sparkling

Sparkling is a clean, responsive and minimal WordPress theme focused for travel blogs, health websites, business websites, design, photography, personal blog or e-commerce websites or blogs. The theme uses the Twitter Bootstrap 3 framework that makes it mobile, and tablet friendly.

Sparkling

Sparkling has a built-in full-screen slider, social media icon integration, author bio. Sparkling is an SEO optimized WordPress theme with clean code. You can change various settings, e.g, theme layout, colors, fonts, slider settings from WordPress Customizer.

Newspaper X

If you want a free and one of the best SEO optimized WordPress themes for WordPress, Newspaper X might just be the right theme for you. The theme looks clutter free, incorporates all the latest and modern web standards and extremely SEO friendly. Also, the theme provides great typography that can help you to improve user experience and user engagement on your website.

Newspaper X

Newspaper X is suitable for any magazine style websites such as technology, fashion, food, lifestyle, news, cars, gaming and more. Newspaper-X is a completely free SEO friendly WordPress theme that you can use for private and commercial use without any restrictions.

The Writers Blog

The Writers Blog is a funky, stylish, feature-rich, sleek and versatile SEO friendly WordPress theme. If you want to give some fresh vibes to your users, this theme can help you to achieve that.

The Writers Blog

The Writers Blog is a multipurpose SEO friendly WordPress theme that you can use on different occasions such as in blogs, informative websites, landing pages, online journals. Although the theme is targeted for writers, journalists, authors, poets, and similar people, you can use it for any niches.

Stackable

Stackable is a complementary theme for the Stackable plugin. Stackable aims to eliminate page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder and wants to replicate the same features with the new WordPress Gutenberg editor.

Stackable

You can create any type of websites with the help of WordPress 5, Stackable plugin and Stackable theme. Stackable already has 22 Blocks, and they are adding more blocks.

Newsmag

Another clean and beautiful magazine style SEO friendly WordPress theme is Newsmag. You can use Newsmag as a modern magazine website or as a news or blog website. The theme offers 4 different blog page style.

The theme is fully responsive, customizable and Search Engine (SEO) friendly. Newsmag uses Twitter Bootstrap 3 as its underlying framework.

NewsMag

Hestia and Tiny Hestia

If you love Google’s material design language and wants to have the same kind of look and feel to your WordPress website with unlimited customization – Hestia is a great WordPress theme. Built by

Hestia

The plugin is fully compatible with Flat Parallax Slider, Photo Gallery, Travel Map, and Elementor Page Builder. The theme is fully responsive, SEO friendly, and uses Material Kit for design.

If you do not want to use the multipurpose nature of the theme and just want a simple blog, there’s a child theme named Tiny Hestia (built by the same company) which cuts the extra features.

https://wordpress.org/themes/tiny-hestia/

Tiny Hestia is a child theme for blogging enthusiasts. The child theme is fully optimized for speed and designed to work well with: Elementor, Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin, Divi or Visual Composer.

WP Bootstrap Starter

WP Bootstrap Starter theme is a lightweight, uncluttered and very easy to customize. Wordpress starter theme based on Twitter Bootstrap v4. If you love Bootstrap, this theme might be the best option for you. If you are a developer, you can use this theme as a base to create a unique version of the theme as per your need.

WP Bootstrap Starter

WP Bootstrap Starter is a fully responsive SEO friendly WordPress theme licensed under GPL. You are allowed to remove the link at the footer or do whatever you want.

Astra

Astra is one of the best SEO optimized WordPress themes. Ok, don’t believe us? Check the reviews. Astra has an astounding 1200+ 5 star reviews from WordPress community. If the theme wasn’t great, people wouldn’t have rated high.

Astra

Also, the plugin has built in Schema.org code integrated. So you do not have to use another Schema plugin.

One of the best thing about Astra is, the theme is really really fast. The theme is very lightweight (less than 50KB on frontend) and offers unparalleled speed. Astra is also built with SEO in mind. Great speed + Great SEO. You can’t go wrong with Astra.

Astra also supports all page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, Divi, etc

Wrap Up

SEO is an extremely factor to get good ranks as we discussed earlier. If you choose an SEO friendly WordPress theme, you will have a good headstart to beat your competitors.

9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins and Tools to Own Google’s #1 Page [2022]

However, you should obviously use a excellent WordPress SEO plugin as discussed in our best WordPress SEO plugins and tools article.