Whether you are a first time WordPress user or a seasoned professional, it’s always a relief to find that the WordPress theme you’ve chosen to work with is easy to set up and straightforward to maintain. While this it not always possible, many theme companies have worked very hard to find ways to provide enormous amounts of feature richness without overly complicating the user interface.
Oftentimes the easiest WordPress themes to customize are those that use the relatively new WordPress core customizer.
What Makes The Core Customizer So Great
These themes allow the user to quickly tab through the full range of options available on the theme while monitoring your website via a live preview pain. The customizer has come a long way since it was first released as part of the core. Initially, I found it to be clumsy both from a development perspective and for the user, but over the last year it’s improved in leaps and bounds and is now my preferred method of managing theme features.
Are There Other Ways to Easily Customize The Theme
Sometimes a theme may predate the customizer era or simply not lend itself to having its options managed via that interface. In these cases, the theme will most often have a custom theme options page driven by one of the many quality options frameworks, or by a custom platform developed by the theme foundry. In these cases, we’re looking for easy WordPress themes for beginners to build on or themes with clean back-end user experience. It’s these user-friendly WordPress themes that we’ll be highlighting in this post.
Best Easy WordPress Themes That Are Suitable Even For Complete Beginners
Simple Business
Simple Business is the ultimate, easy to setup, and simple to manage WordPress theme for small businesses. It offers unparalleled levels of rich features with an options panel that is wonderfully simple to use. Even someone who has never used WordPress before should have no issue setting up the Simple Business theme and building a beautiful small business website in short order.
The design is beautiful yet simple and offers a bold slider, multiple page layouts, a blog layout, Font Awesome icons, Google Fonts, custom CSS, a customizable options panel, and a responsive design that will look good on any device.
Simple Theme
Simple is a stylish and responsive WordPress theme that provides a customizable layout for building any kind of site you want with minimal fuss. It’s easy to setup–hence the name–and offers plenty of theme options for getting the look just right. It’s ideal for businesses and offers multiple front page layout options for adding service details, calls-to-action, and so forth.
This theme also comes with plenty of shortcodes, widgets, social icons, SEO optimization, scripts, slideshows, banners, and fonts to achieve the look you want. Plus, with a Nimbus Themes subscription, you get ongoing updates and support for Simple.
Portfolio
Portfolio by MyThemeShop is another easy-to-setup theme that’s sure to attract a lot of attention for all the right reasons. This theme offers prominent, featured images on each blog post, attractive typography, sliders, and parallax scrolling. Beyond the blog, this theme is designed with portfolios in mind and makes it easy for freelancers and designers to add their latest work to display.
This theme also comes with numerous shortcodes, attractive social icons, and a custom theme options panel that allows you to customize everything quickly and easily, including headers, styling, posts and pages, sidebars, social icons, typography, and even translation settings.
SteadyIncome
Another excellent theme for business sites is Steady Income by MyThemeShop. This theme looks totally professional without being stuffy or boring. It includes a prominent header image that can be customized to feature your call-to-action for building your social following or for purchasing products. It includes a great latest posts widget for displaying your latest or best blog posts with featured images, a mini-slider for displaying previous client logos or testimonials, and plenty of widgets.
The blog layout includes a right sidebar for displaying widgets, including ads and a newsletter signup form. Plus, you can add another CTA to the top of the blog page to increase conversions. This theme is all about helping you boost your sales in a subtle, yet powerful way.
Wright
This minimalist theme is perfect for portfolios and photography-oriented blogs. It looks high-class but it’s very easy to setup and maintain. You can build a professional-looking site in an hour or so with Wright by Made by Minimal. The homepage is a near fullscreen slideshow where you can feature your highest quality images with virtually no distractions for your visitors. It also sports a stylish navigation bar across the top and social icons at the bottom.
The portfolio section is laid out in a grid-based layout and offers lightbox displays when each item is clicked. Wright also comes with video gallery support, a dedicated contact page, and a responsive design that ensures your work can be seen on any device by anyone who wants to see it.
Milo
Another theme from Made by Minimal is called Milo and it, again, provides a minimalistic design that’s easy to customize and setup. The simplicity of this theme is its greatest attribute, primarily because it allows your content to speak for itself. There are no distractions here and your writing and photos take center stage.
The “Work” page is setup in a gallery fashion, allowing you to feature your best work with captions. Visitors can click the right or left arrows to browse through or they can click the grid in the middle to view thumbnails of everything. Navigation is in a lefthand sidebar that’s widget enabled and there are dedicated blog and shop sections, too.
Dorsey
The Dorsey theme is very similar to Milo, but it has its own subtle attributes that are worth mentioning. This theme offers a wider view of portfolio pieces, a narrower sidebar, and a streamlined social icon bar across the bottom of the site.
The blog maintains the lefthand navigation and adds a righthand sidebar for placing widgets. This theme is ideal for photographers and artists looking to create a portfolio that puts their work on display and gets their information out there in a straightforward and highly appealing manner.
Zoomy
Zoomy is an attractive, minimal theme that’s perfect for portfolios and super easy to setup. You don’t need to know a thing about WordPress to use this theme and to use it well. Made by Tesla Themes, Zoomy includes an attractive homepage slider, simple service widgets, portfolio thumbnails with hover effects, a skills graph, testimonials widget, partner/client widget, and footer widgets–and that’s all just on the homepage!
This theme also includes social icons, a grid-style portfolio, multiple blog layouts, video support, several page templates, as well as integration with Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, and more.
Revoke2
Another easy-to-setup theme you should have on your radar is called Revoke 2. Made by Tesla Themes, it’s incredibly feature-rich and walks you through every step of setup, so there’s no guesswork. You won’t want for anything with this theme. It comes with six custom post types, the Tesla Framework for making quick customizations, demo data, Revolution Slider, and support and updates.
It also comes with WooCommerce compatibility, a lovely grid-style portfolio, a testimonials widget, a latest blog posts widget, a partners/clients widget, and plenty of footer widgets to accommodate all of your needs. It also has a great contact bar across the top of the site for featuring your email address, phone number, social icons, and a search bar.
Brutal
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Now, this theme looks like it would be really complicated to setup but it’s actually quite easy. Brutal is perfect for fashion websites and offers a fullscreen slider on the homepage to really immerse visitors in the site experience. It’s also blocked out to include several sections on the homepage that you can enable or disable depending on your needs and what information you want to include on your website.
This theme also includes a masonry layout gallery for your latest work or fashion designs, a section for partners, news, latest blog posts, a map, and a contact form. Everything is connected through parallax scrolling, which adds a great one-page look while still utilizing a multiple page design.
Novo
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If you’re a Genesis theme enthusiast, then you’ll appreciate the Novo child theme. Not only is it gorgeous, but it’s also incredibly simple to set up and gives you plenty of opportunity to customize it and create precisely the kind of site you want with not much effort. It includes numerous predefined skins, a large homepage slider, multiple post formats, large featured images, a company member profile widget, and social icons.
It also comes with several page templates, shortcodes, page templates for blogs, landing pages, archives, and a contact page, as well as stylish call-to-action buttons, a services widget, tabs, and so much more that it can’t all fit into this post.
Djazz
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Djazz is another beautiful theme that’s easy to setup, requires little to no WordPress knowledge, and still manages to look incredibly professional. It’s designed for bloggers of all types, offering gorgeous and large featured images, custom tiled galleries, beautiful post type formatting, video support, gallery support, and footer widgets.
A true notable feature here is the typography, which is simple and super easy on the eyes, making it ideal for long reads. The sidebar is also hidden behind a plus sign expandable menu that allows you to call out featured posts, a search bar, along with any other widgets you need. Coupled with the included customizer, this theme packs a serous punch.
Cinch
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The Cinch theme has an appropriate name because it has a wide set of tools that are easy to understand for beginners who are new to WordPress. The ZigZagPress theme is clean, modern and perfect for bloggers who don’t have much experience with development. It has a responsive design which looks great even on mobile devices. The localization support allows you to translate your entire website to expand your audience. Light and dark color schemes are both provided, which provide a nice starting point for your customization. Various page layouts allow you to add variety to your website and you can choose from full-width or sidebars to fit your content in properly.
The Cinch theme comes with a large image header, which can be used to provide a short description of your blog. The theme supports images and videos and all you have to do is upload them from your computer. Show off quotes and testimonials, and take advantage of the stunning blog layout to boost your SEO and share valuable content with your visitors. A WordPress gallery is one of our favorite areas since you don’t have to design the gallery yourself. Just upload your images one by one and enjoy the resulting professional layout.
Awaken
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The Awaken WordPress theme has a clean design and it provides a trendy and premium choice for those users who want a simpler theme. The theme has localization files for translating your website and the multipurpose nature of the Awaken theme means that you can create a blog, store or informational site for your company. This is a completely responsive theme that looks equally good on desktop computers, tablets, and phones. The slider module in the header supports high-resolution images, and you can implement overlaying text and buttons to send people to other pages throughout your site. The header can easily be managed in the backend. Upload an image and change the text to create your own unique message for your visitors.
The homepage is organized in various sections so it allows you to showcase your products or services and you can easily add a call to action that sits on top of a parallax image. The parallax feature is one of the easiest ways to grab attention without slowing down your site with bulky animations. The About Us section presents team member information, along with pictures and links to their social media profiles. The pricing table is great for companies selling software or other products and it helps you keep your hands away from plugins and coding files. A filterable portfolio comes with the Awaken theme, which is a beautiful way to show off your past work for future clients. Along with testimonials, a blog, social media buttons and a contact form, the Awaken theme is one of the simplest you can find.
Drone
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The Drone WordPress theme offers clean and modern frontend designs, making it a rather easy theme to play around with. It’s completely responsive so you don’t have to worry about being demoted by search engines or your visitors on mobile devices not being able to view your site. The localization files help you translate your website and reach an international audience. The top part of the site displays a header and message which is a great area to provide a brief description of your company. Creating a portfolio only takes a few moments, since the Drone theme provides filters, thumbnail images, and links to more information about your portfolio pieces. The page templates come in handy, while the fully-featured blog is exactly what a beginner needs to start sharing content with the world.
The majority of the homepage is taken up by the portfolio, so the theme is a great choice for those who are trying to bring in clients for freelance work. A contact form is also included which makes it easy for anyone to get in touch with you, be it for a project or collaboration. A few widgets are included for those who are more comfortable with simple drag and drop interfaces. For example, the entire footer area can contain widgets with post lists, tweets, and tags. Overall, the Drone theme is a great theme for just about any blogger. It screams elegance and eliminates the need to customize any code. Simple bloggers are going to enjoy it quite a bit, but if you’re a more experienced user or a developer, you can still take advantage of the source code.
Neo
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Neo comes from the folks over at Zigzagpress which means it’s a child theme for Genesis Framework. Genesis Framework is one of the best frameworks on the market not only because it has a clean and valid code but because it’s very easy to use even for complete beginners. Neo is no different and it’s even easier to use this theme when you consider the fact that the entire homepage is constructed with the help of widgets and shortcodes. This means you can simply drag and drop widgets where you want them to appear on the homepage. Using shortcodes allows you to generate sliders, buttons, lists, and more without touching a single line of code.
The theme offers plenty of customization options which are available through the theme options page and you can easily customize the colors and the fonts. The theme is fully responsive and looks great even on mobile devices. Along with built-in SEO support and translation files, Neo is one of the easiest theme you’ll find.
Vanilla
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Vanilla is another easy theme from Zigzagpress. Considering it’s another child theme for Genesis, it’s natural to assume it will be easy to use. The theme is best suited for busy business owners or freelancers who want their website to work without spending too much time on complicated setup. Present your company with a beautiful slider which can easily be added with a simple shortcode and use the feature boxes to highlight your services.
You can showcase your past work easily with a portfolio which can be constructed with the help of widgets on the homepage and the theme even includes a separate page where you can feature even more projects and details about particular projects. Social media icons can be added to the header through a widget by simply dragging and dropping them into place. This is a great way to grow your online presence while a blog allows you to drive traffic to your website and boost your SEO. Easily customize the colors, fonts, and more through the theme options page and rest assured your website will look great even on just about any device.
Zen
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Zen makes it incredibly easy to integrate your brand thanks to the 10 predefined color schemes. The included Flex slider is an easy way to feature your best posts, include a description of your business or highlight your services or products. Zen is a rather minimal theme with plenty of white space to bring your content into focus. The homepage is created with the help of widgets which you can easily drag and drop into place.
You can also easily change layouts of any of your pages by simply clicking on the desired layout below the post editor. Several page templates are also included to make it as easy as possible to create a landing page or a portfolio page. Customizations are also easy to make and the responsive design looks great no matter which device your visitors are using.
Epicurean Theme