Top 15+ Free Photography WordPress Theme (2020)
Last Updated: March 2, 2021 in Review
One of the most useful assets for a photographer is a personal website showcasing their works in a beautiful manner. While not as easy to set up as, say, an Instagram account, a good photography website can establish your reputation in the long term. With WordPress, you can start a quality website right away without having to invest in much money or efforts. It is, however, tricky to find WordPress themes that are truly designed for photography websites among the many options offered, and not all of them may be tailored to your taste, and not many are both free and qualified. Therefore, to help you with this process, we have compiled a list of the 15 best free photography WordPress themes of 2020 below.
TheFour Lite
TheFour Lite is a strong first contender for the best photography WordPress theme position. More than just a business theme, this one also gives you all the features you may want for a photography website. Firstly, you get a big front-page header image to quickly impress your visitors. Then there are 3 types of portfolio layout and an image gallery to show off your works in style.
In terms of appearance, the theme itself is incredibly light and quick, with elegant modern touches and a subdued color and font profile. This minimalist charm frees your viewers of distractions and lets your photos speak for themselves. Moreover, it also comes with a blog layout to allow for SEO and publishing useful content on your website to build and maintain your audience.
Read the review of TheFour Lite.
Highlight features
- Testimonials layout
- Speedy, translation-ready and responsive
- Google Fonts support
- Infinite scroll support
Silvia
Silvia is a simple and graceful photography WordPress theme for those who want to put their creations on a mostly blank, non-distracting surface. The demo’s front page has an elegant approach to showcasing your pictures: all images in the grid are shown in gray scale until you hover over the image. This allows for a uniformed, classy look. Besides, the Attachment page shows your image individually in a clean, uncluttered manner. Meanwhile, the Photo Gallery layout allows for different aspect ratios of images for a different look.
You can also use the WordPress Customizer feature to play around with color, layout, and typography settings. The demo is easily importable with one click to save your time building your photography WordPress website. Expect the theme to show up nicely on mobile too, thanks to the attention to responsive design.
Highlight features
- Clean, simplistic, coherent design
- Speed optimization
- Responsive
- Translation-ready
- Customizable with WordPress Customizer
- Blogging layout available
Photo Perfect
Photo Perfect is designed solely as a photography WordPress theme. You wouldn’t find layouts for written articles in the demo, therefore it is best suited for those who just want a website fully focused on showing off your pictures. In this respect, this theme offers a beautifully designed image gallery layout that comes with smooth transitions effects for hovering and clicking on individual images. Therefore, the entire photography website is almost in the form of a real-life photo book - simple but creative!
Highlight features
- Simple, elegant photo book layout
- Smooth animations
- Zero visual distraction
- Responsive design for mobile
Photograph
Photograph stuns you instantly with a big, high-resolution front page header image, then opens up to a beautifully designed image gallery layout that supports filtering. Besides, everything is carefully designed to the tiniest little details, and speed is blazing fast. Default font choice is sharply angular - unique, strong, and fits perfectly to the overall aesthetics. Additionally, you get a sidebar with an image gallery, full-width gallery, image carousel, quick preview, and a neatly organized HTML styling. To sum up, everything that a photography WordPress theme needs is in this free theme.
Highlight features
- Responsive on mobile
- SEO-friendly
- Compatible with most browsers
- Diverse collection of image layouts
Full Frame
Full Frame is nostalgic with a selection of classic layouts. First, the front page offers a full width slider that can be customized to immediately wow your visitors with your best photographs. Next, the neatly designed Featured Content section brings your best contents right towards the front. Besides, another nice design touch is that each post page has a large featured image to impress your readers.
The theme itself is fully responsive and built on HTML5 and CSS3, following WordPress theme guidelines for clean, secure codes. More notably, you can easily edit elements on your page and preview in real-time with WordPress Theme Customizer. Moreover, you also get customizable widgets to put on the sidebar.
Highlight features
- Nostalgic, classic design
- Customizable sliders and widgets
- Responsive and translation-ready
- Secure and well-optimized code
Fukasawa
Fukasawa stands out from the other free photography WordPress themes with it’s minimalistic, premium look and feel. Images are put in a grid that resembles picture frames neatly lined up on a white wall. Furthermore, animations are smooth and every visual element compliments each other. Therefore, the overall appearance is cohesive, organized, and elegant.
On the functional side, the theme is both responsive and retina-ready with a wide range of supported screen sizes - anything from 3.5 inches to 27 inches. Besides the traditional post format, you also get image, video and gallery post formats. Moreover, all these posts can be edited more conveniently thanks to the theme’s support for the new Gutenberg editor. Besides, Jetpack Infinite Scroll and Jetpack Tiled Galleries are also cleverly implemented in this theme.
Highlight features
- Mobile Responsive and Retina-supported
- Jetpack Infinite Scroll and Jetpack Tiled Galleries supported
- Gutenberg supported
- Jetpack Infinite scroll supported
PhotoWay
Photoway is designed with a clear vision to become the WordPress theme for photography businesses. Not only do you get different gallery layouts, but you can also show off your team members, your previous clients, testimonials, Instagram profile, and even your products beautifully.
Furthermore, the contact form is also customized with a background image to make it more compelling. In short, this WordPress theme adds business elements to already well-designed photography layouts. It also brings about support for Gutenberg editor and RTL language for translation. The result is a beautiful and highly functional theme for your WordPress photography website.
Read the review of PhotoWay.
Highlight features
- Diverse customization choices: Archive Page, Single Post Page, Post Layout, Sidebar Position, Color,...
- Translation-ready and RTL Language supported
- SEO-friendly
- WordPress Gutenberg compatible
Pixgraphy
Pixgraphy takes everything that makes a great photography WordPress theme and puts them in one package. You get a full-width front page slider with smooth animation, a neat image gallery and well-optimized styling for texts and headings to suit the overall aesthetics. Notably, demo importing is easy for this theme thanks to the instant demo import feature. Moreover, you also get support for popular plugins: Contact Form 7, Jetpack, Polylang, wooCommerce,... that not many free themes do. To sum up, there are no gimmicks in this sweet photography theme, just quality.
Read the review of Pixgraphy.
Highlight features
- Clean layouts with smooth animations and properly scaled visual elements
- Support for popular plugins: Contact Form 7, Jetpack, Polylang, wooCommerce,...
- Instant demo import
- SEO-friendly and responsive
Infinite Photography
Infinite Photography is simple yet highly effective. The front page offers a full-width image gallery with quick view functionality. This design choice is highly intuitive, clean-looking and nostalgic. Meanwhile, each category has its own gallery. In addition, post pages show off your image in large size along with written content and other sections including author details, comments, related posts, and navigation. This simple aesthetics is neat and truly effective in keeping visitors focused on what truly matters - the images.
Function-wise, we get quite a few customization options: Replaceable logo, different layouts of homepage and category pages, integrated social icons, and your chance to add in your own copyright text. Overall, while this theme can be a bit simple for some, for many photographers out there, this photography WordPress theme has exactly everything they need.
Read the review of Infinite Photography.
Highlight features
- Translation-ready and responsive
- Responsive and compatible with most browsers
- Diverse options of customization: logo, layouts, icons, copyright text,...
Bold Photography
Bold Photography comes with a dark and contrasty appearance. The impact of this aesthetics on viewers is significant - your visitors would be instantly intrigued by the fully black background that makes every image pop 2x more. Furthermore, image gallery layout lets you have some freedom when arranging pictures, and the grayscale-to-colored hover animation is very well done. In general, this theme is very well-crafted with attention to smaller details.
Its selection of features is impressive as well: you get a lot of customization options regarding layouts, colors, fonts, favicon and even CSS. Along with that, the Testimonials, Featured Contents and Services section is available and well designed in case you run a photography business and want your website to give out useful information to help establish your brand.
Reading the review of Bold Photography will help.
Highlight features
- Testimonials, Featured Contents and Blogging layouts
- Mobile responsive and speedy
- Creative use of contrast and dark colors
- Customizable: layouts, colors, fonts, logo, favicon, background, custom CSS,...
Image Gridly
Image Gridly is another simple, straight-to-the-point photography WordPress theme that does not try to do more than the essentials. You are offered a nice full-width featured image on the front page, followed by a nice image gallery to show off your pictures below. Meanwhile, article pages give you a neat coupon reveal button for promotional programs. Especially, there is no clutter to be found in this theme - everything is kept to a minimum. As a result, your images can truly shine on the website without the bells and whistles that intimidate your visitors.
Highlight features
- Responsive design
- SEO optimization
- Easy customization
- Full-width featured image
ePortfolio
ePortfolio is an exceptionally creative photography WordPress theme with a frontpage layout that is unlike any other: you get a side image gallery, a pinned About me section, and a middle section for other contents. The Blog layout is sleek and clean with a slider and different ways to view your list of posts. While the visual appeal of the theme comes from the photographs themselves - the layout made sure to put your images front and center. Notably, when it comes to features, you will be impressed: the theme supports Gutenberg editor and one-click demo import, and the globally loved Elementor page builder for exceptional customization options.
Read the review of ePortfolio.
Highlight features
- Gutenberg support
- Responsive and Translation-ready
- 2 portfolio layouts
- Sticky sidebar menu
- One-click demo import
- Support page builder like Elementor
Fotografie
Fotografie is smart, sharp, and well-crafted. This beautiful photography WordPress theme utilizes Jetpack’s Tiled Gallery well to create a nicely structured image gallery. Moreover, the layouts are all spacious and impactful with big margins between content elements. “Less is more” indeed applies to this theme: Although simple at its core, this free photography theme still manages to keep a premium, sophisticated look.
Another aspect that it excels in is functionality: not only is it responsive, translation-ready and RTL Language compatible, it also allows for a great deal of customization: Header / Logo, Favicon, Menu and even custom CSS.
Read the review of Fotografie.
Highlight features
- Jetpack’s Tiled Gallery support
- Optimized code for excellent speed and compatibility
- Responsive
- Translation-ready and RTL Language compatible
- Clean, spacious, and minimalistic design
Chique
Chique is impressively sleek and attractive. The bright, uncluttered look of this WordPress theme is charming and brings out the best of your photographs. Additionally, this theme makes use of big, full-width blocks and a pinned sidebar that is not only beautifully laid out but also easy for navigating. Besides, you can showcase your images on the front page alongside blog posts to retain your visitors with useful content.
On the feature side, you get a truly robust set of templates, a gallery that is based on Jetpack’s Gallery Module, responsive design, and a blog layout that will nicely show off written contents on your website.
Highlight features
- Sleek, impactful design
- Optimized for speed
- Customizable sliders
- Beautiful blogging layouts
Blossom Pin
Blossom Pin lets you have a chance to give your WordPress website a Pinterest-inspired look. This style of website is just perfect for a photography website because the layout itself is great for showcasing images. Notably, appearance-wise and sweet pink are used as the default accent color and the overall vibe of the theme is girly, trendy, and approachable.
In terms of features, the header image carousel on the front page is a nice touch to show off your best images. Moreover, you also get Related Posts functionality, support for comments and the Gutenberg editor. In addition, other impressive features that can be added through the author's suggested plugins is Advertisement, Instagram Feed and Email Newsletter.
Read the review of Blossom Pin.
Highlight features
- Beautifully inspired by Pinterest layout
- Unique slider option and a diverse range of widgets
- Well-designed visual elements and animations
- Responsive design
- Clean code
These free photography WordPress themes all possess certain levels of creativity, polishedness, and charisma. However, there is no one-size-fits-all option for everyone out there, so it is up to you to find the perfect match for your style of photography. Whatever the choice, these lovely themes will surely impress the audience of your WordPress website. Good luck building your photography website!