Collection of free and paid dark WordPress themes

Inspiring bright colors are everywhere in web design. However, more and more website owners are choosing another interesting option — dark design. Dark websites have an elegant, luxurious, and creative look, with maybe even a touch of mystery, making them stand out from the rest.

In the world of WordPress websites, dark WordPress themes are a trend these days. You can always order custom website theme design tailored to your business. But let’s review some ready solutions — both free and paid dark WordPress themes. We will also share a few tips on creating an effective dark design.

Tips for making an effective dark website

The elegant look of dark design does have a potential shortfall — let’s call it the “dark side.” Reading text on a dark background can create more eye strain for website visitors than reading it on a light one. So it’s important to make the website readable and clutter-free.

• Use more free space

To improve readability, you should avoid stuffing too much text into the website’s layout. It’s better to use more white space (or, in this case, “black space”), larger paragraph spacing, and fewer text areas with larger images instead.

• Choose readable fonts

The fonts for your dark website should be clearly visible. Serif fonts look more “mysterious” and elegant so they support the dark design concept. You can use them in headers, navigation bars, and other prominent text elements. However, Sans Serif fonts may be easier to read in more regular text areas. Also do not forget to make the font size large enough.

• Pay attention to the font colors

Designers like to make the font colors white against the black background, which looks really stylish and has high contrast. This works well in headlines and calls-to-action. However, for longer chunks of text, other light shades like gray look more readable.

• Pick the website color scheme carefully

To avoid visual clutter, you should keep the color scheme to two or three colors that create nice highlights against the black. Certain bright colors may look harsh on the black background. However, one bold color may add a touch of liveliness to a dark website — just used it sparingly throughout the layout. The glowing effects also look nice on dark websites.

• Provide a style switcher

Even if you have made your dark design super readable, give your users the freedom of choice. Offer them an alternative for viewing a dark text against a light background.

Free dark WordPress themes

1. Bold Photography

The phrase “bold and beautiful” suits the Bold Photography theme perfectly. It has a sleek and elegant design for the best possible presentation of a photographer’s creativity, although it will suit other sites as well. Bold Photography offers a Portfolio, Services, Testimonials, and other pages.

2. Dark

Its short name says everything about this theme — “Dark.” It is a multipurpose theme with a clean and elegant design, and is especially recommended for newspaper or magazine websites or similar ones. SEO-friendliness, cross-browser compatibility, support for WooCommerce and other key plugins make it a good choice.

3. Coral Dark

The Color Dark free WordPress dark theme has a touch of mystery and elegance that will especially suit portfolio gallery sites or photo blogs. It is fully responsive and optimized for SEO. It features a one-column or two-column layout, as well as a ready-made slideshow.

4. Tracks

A nice example of Black wordpress themes is Tracks. It will be a good choice for personal blogs, photography, and magazine websites. Its creators emphasize the theme’s compatibility with WordPress 5’s Gutenberg editor. It features 50+ social icons, a logo uploader, a search bar, and more. WooCommerce compatibility will allow you to set up online sales.

5. Newp

The Newp theme has a dark background with high contrast colors. It has a featured slider, featured content area, a configurable sidebar, several blog layouts, social icons, and more. Newp is built with Bootstrap 3 and is responsive to mobile devices and SEO-friendly.

6. Minimal Dark

The Minimal Dark is a modern, minimalistic, masonry-layout theme for WordPress. News, magazine, entertainment, and blog sites will especially benefit from it. Minimal Dark is compatible with the Gutenberg editor. Multiple footer widget areas, infinite scroll loading, custom widgets, and easy-to-read typography are just some of its nice features. Responsive design creates good user experiences on mobile devices.

7. Rock Band

The Rock Band is a child theme of the My Music Band theme. It is more specifically suited to rock and metal bands and has a darker color scheme. The creators say it has been made in response to numerous requests from users. It has the same functionality as My Music Band: hero content, featured slider, featured content, playlist, portfolio, etc.

8. Seos Music

The Seos Music is a dark multi-purpose WordPress theme with a clean and elegant design. It has a responsive two-column layout. Seos Music is built on HTML5, cross-browser compatible, SEO-friendly, and translation-read. It supports WooCommerce and other famous plugins.

9. MH MusicMag

As we can see, musicians particularly appreciate this style of dark themes. So here is another dark free WordPress theme in the musical area — MH MusicMag. It is especially great for content related to metal, grunge, punk or similar content. It has a dark color scheme and strong typography. MH MusicMag is a child theme of the famous MH Magazine Lite theme.

10. Gayatri

The Gayatri dark free WordPress theme allows you to present your musical band, art project, event, portfolio, business, and more. It offers customization options via the admin dashboard. Multiple header styles, navigation options, and layouts are available to you. It uses Elementor, WooCommerce, and Contact Form 7 plugins. Gayatri is responsive to mobile devices.

11. Valmiki

Here is a WordPress theme called Valmiki built by the same creators as the Gayatri — the Wpkoithemes team. So it is similar in features when it comes to the customizations and layouts. This is a fullscreen, dark, and minimal theme. It has an impressive black-and-white color scheme.

12. Koromo

Another dark theme in Wpkoithemes’s collection is Koromo. It is similar in customization and layout features to Gayatri and Valmiki. Koromo has a dark and clean black style. It looks like the authors of this series are keen on stylish black-and-white combinations.

13. Ambika

Here is a clean dark multipurpose WordPress theme from the same collection called Ambika. You can use it to showcase your business, art, event, blog, or even an online store. The default layout offers users a way to quickly navigate to the blog, shop, or contacts. It uses Elementor, WooCommerce, and Contact Form 7 plugins.

14. DarkElements

The DarkElements is a clean and minimalistic dark WordPress theme. It features a custom header image, footer widgets, sidebar, sidebar navigation, custom background, custom logo, and more.

Premium dark WordPress themes

1. Essential

The Essential — Responsive Minimal One Page WordPress Theme is a clean and elegant responsive theme with a minimal design. It is built on the Bootstrap framework, as well as HTML5 and CSS3. The Essential uses the Parallax effect and content animations. It is highly customizable with plenty of sections, header and footer options, sidebars, and more. The WPBakery Page builder inside will make your customizations easy.

2. Crexis

The Crexis — Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme is multipurpose, with a big selection of dark and light demos (47 homepage demos in total). The Visual Composer page builder allows you to easily customize your layouts. It supports WooCommerce for your online sales and WPML to make your site multilingual. Premium sliders, Google fonts, powerful options panel, responsive design are some of its benefits.

3. Lumos

The Lumos – Multipurpose Single/Multi-page WP Theme is a single/multi-page theme with horizontal/vertical header. As well as being flexible, as we can see, it is also presented in multiple dark and light layouts. It features 500+ retina-ready icons, custom image cropping, the Visual Composer page builder, different header options, support for Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7, and more. Lumos is built on Bootstrap 3 and is responsive to mobile devices.

4. Foreal

The Foreal — Director, Writer WordPress Theme is a clean black-and-white WordPress theme, easy to customize with the Visual Composer. It has a dark and light design. It is a good suit for a personal portfolio, design agency, photographer’s site, newspaper or magazine site, or other business. It includes a portfolio carousel in full width, separate breadcrumb image option, a “load more” AJAX option, Responsive Styled Google Maps, LayerSlider WP, Revolution Slider, and more.

5. Shoot

The Shoot — Fullscreen Photography WordPress Theme is primarily meant for photographers, visual artists, and other creative professionals. In its selection of demos, there are ones with a dark color scheme. The creators list it as ultra responsive, Retina-ready, with valid HTML5 and CSS3, as well as cross-browser compatibility. It offers 8 fullscreen types, Revolutions Slider, sticky navigation, filterable AJAX masonry portfolio, Google fonts icons, and more.

6. Archi

The Archi — Interior Design WordPress Theme has 60+ dark and light homepages to choose from, including the “Original dark.” You will find multiple navigation styles, 70+ custom elements, 24 options for Home Page, 5 for landing pages, 4 for the “coming soon” page. The WPBakery Page Builder, Slider Revolution plugin, and more will help you shape the look and feel of your site. Archi is compatible with the WPML plugin for multilingual websites. It also supports WooCommerce.

7. Minimalize

The Minimalize is a single page responsive WordPress theme that allows you to showcase your brand. It comes in a light and dark version. It has a portfolio with a “load more” option, Parallax effects, contact forms, useful shortcodes, drag-and-drop page builders, and more. Thanks to WooCommerce support, you will be able to set up a store. WPML plugin compatibility will make your dark single-page WordPress website go multilingual.

8. Candy

The Candy is a single and multi page WordPress theme for corporate, portfolio, personal, and other types of websites. It is clean and sleek, with responsive and Retina-ready design. Candy has easy-to-customize Parallax layers, 3 unique layouts, two sets of icon fonts with 1000+ icons, Visual Composer page builder, 30+ shortcodes, AJAX portfolio, and much more.

9. Vigor

The Vigor — Vintage WordPress Theme comes with a collection of creative multipurpose templates. It is compatible with powerful plugins such as WooCommerce, WPBakery Page Builder, and Slider Revolution. You can use multiple header layouts, Edge Slider, Parallax functionality and zoom animations, masonry gallery, fullscreen menu, and many other design features that will come in very handy.

10. Kinetika

The Kinetika | Photography Theme for WordPress is a sleek and elegant option for fullscreen photography and video. Kinetika has both dark and light color schemes. It supports WPML so it is multilingual ready. WooCommerce helps you start selling online. Its powerful features include 7 menu styles, fullscreen HD Youtube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos, slideshows with Revolution Slider, event promotion boxes, and much more.

11. Annie

The Annie — Creative Photography WordPress Theme is best for designers, photographers, and other specialists who need a creative way of sharing their work with the customer. It is responsive and Retina-ready. Annie is built on Visual Composer (WPBakery), which is a convenient drag-and-drop page builder. It offers Shortcode Generator, Animate CSS, custom widgets, and many other useful features. The theme has a dark and a light version.

12. Bayan

The Bayan — Newspaper and Magazine Dark WordPress Theme is a responsive and Retina-ready theme built with Bootstrap 3. Bayan is tailored to magazine and news websites. Among its layout demos, there is a nice dark version. Among its great features are the Ajax Mega Menu, Ajax Search, 10+ slider layouts, unlimited header styles, WooCommerce support, AMP compatibility, PixelLab Page builder, customizable mobile menus, and more.

Order professional dark theme creation

If the above examples of dark WordPress themes look interesting to you, you can reach out to our WordPress support experts so they help you with the choice and installation. An even better option is to get a unique custom theme created for you by our WordPress developers and designers. Enjoy your website’s new and stylish design!