5+ Free Portfolio WordPress Themes You Could Be Using Today
If you’re a creative — a writer, photographer, designer, even furniture upholsterer — you probably know how important it is to build a good portfolio. Getting jobs you’ll be able to refer to when showcasing your skills is important. But how you display and package your portfolio items matters a lot, too.
The days when you had to lug around a binder bursting with examples of your work are long gone. Today, you can share your portfolio by giving people a link to your website, where they’ll be greeted by your select work products and the portfolio WordPress theme you choose.
That’s not everything they’ll see, of course. You can always do something extra like adding testimonials with testimonial WordPress plugins to create a richer portfolio experience. In the end, however, it comes down to two things: your work, and how you display it. To help you with the latter, here are a couple of free portfolio WordPress themes you can pick from when making the perfect online portfolio.
Qi theme is setting standards among free WordPress themes since it has absolutely everything you could wish for. The theme is packed with 100 free demos that are not only beautiful but also rich in essential features. So, if you are looking for a free, yet stunning theme for your showcase, search no more.
Qi integrates tons of fully customizable portfolio lists, diverse single project templates and easily implementable CSS animations. In case you need a fully customizable theme that looks amazing on all screen sizes and that has it all, get Qi right away!
But, not before you take a look at the premium version of Qi Theme. Beautifully designed and packed with 50 premium demos, this theme includes advanced headers, limitless footers, advanced styling options and amazing portfolio module you can use to showcase your works and projects.
Features that make Qi Theme the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- Fully customizable portfolio lists
- Modern, diverse single projects
- Support for SVG vector graphics
A portfolio is just one of the possible uses of Astra. The theme was built to help you create everything from portfolios to blogs and even online storefronts. That’s a lot of versatility packed in one theme.
To make it easier and more convenient to use, Astra comes with a library of pre-made demo and starter sites built with different site builders and optimized for conversions. And if you want to let your creative side take over, you can play with the layouts, create page-specific sidebars, pick a Google Font or import your own, and do many other creative things.
Astra is a free portfolio WordPress theme, but it has a “pro” version with a host of nice features hidden behind the paywall. You get the advanced color and typography options, advanced site layout options, custom layout options, above header layout and content options, below header layout and content, and many more great features and options.
Features that make Astra the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- Quick loading times
- Lightweight, as it requires less than 50 KB of resources
- Options to position your logo in the header
You can’t talk about portfolio WordPress themes without mentioning multipurpose themes. That’s exactly what OceanWP is — a WordPress theme will serve you well for many different projects, including building a portfolio.
OceanWP is compatible with most of the popular page builders such as Elementor, Visual Composer, Brizy, and SiteOrigin. If you don’t want to spend too much time using a page builder, you can simply choose one of the free demos that come with OceanWP.
The thing with using OceanWP for an online portfolio is that the portfolio extension is available only for a fee. In fact, there are quite a few nice features OceanWP is offering as premium features, including a white label that lets you replace the OceanWP name with your own, a sticky header and footer, and a posts slider.
Features that make OceanWP the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- Fully responsive for viewing on mobile devices
- Built with SEO best practices
- Support for RTL languages
Here’s a theme designed especially to help you show what you can do to your prospective clients or employers. Perfect Portfolio is a genuine portfolio theme that comes in both free and premium versions and has something to give you whichever of the two you choose.
In the free version, you get to use one portfolio layout, with a predefined portfolio page. The theme is responsive, so your future work associates won’t have trouble seeing it on mobile devices. It’s also optimized for speed, providing a modern, snappy viewing experience.
With the pro version, you get many additional options for finely-customizing your portfolio. You get four more portfolio layouts to choose from, the ability to use Google Fonts, set font sizes, and set colors. You also get a couple of other predefined pages, including the “about us” page, the “services” page, and the “resume” page. Finally, you can have an unlimited number of sidebar options, and up to 67 background patterns.
Features that make Perfect Portfolio the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- Cross-browser compatible
- Social media integration and support
- Built-in live customizer
Wide Range Lite is a beautiful multipurpose WordPress theme that can easily help you build an online portfolio, as long as you want to create a full-width portfolio. The free version of the theme will provide you with the basic tools you need to create a functioning portfolio. For anything else, you’ll have to invest in the premium version.
Here’s what you get for free: a responsively designed theme with three slides, one full-width page template, and the ability to add two custom widgets. It might sound basic, but in lots of situations, this would be enough to create a stylish portfolio.
If you want something more, the premium version allows you to change colors, use Google fonts, access typography settings, adjust slider settings, have ten slides, pick from ten templates, and add eight custom widgets. And it doesn’t stop there — the premium version has shortcode enabled, as well as a number of different website sections.
Features that make Wide Range Lite the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- A sliding menu bar with social media icons
- Custom widget for the footer section
- Image plugins compatibility
Dark and visually stunning, Bold Photography is a WordPress theme centered on photography, just like its name says. This means that, if your creative pursuits involve photography, this theme could serve you incredibly well. It doesn’t really matter if you want to create a website for your photography business, a portfolio, or both — the Bold Photography WordPress theme will be able to handle it.
In the free version, Bold Photography gives you just enough options for some basic customization of your website. You’ll get to add media to the header, pick the type of posts you want to populate your portfolio with, and create various posts, including portfolio-themed ones.
With the premium version, Bold Photography becomes more exciting. You get access to four additional color schemes, various new page types and categories, new layout options, and a bunch of other things that will help you turn your website into an awesome portfolio.
Features that make Bold Photography the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- Featured content highlighting
- Variety of custom post types
- Floating testing menu
If clean and simple is what you want from your free portfolio WordPress theme, then Hamilton is the theme you should get. It offers an experience devoid of anything that’s unnecessary or superfluous so that you can focus only on your portfolio items and their description. It could be said that Hamilton is best suited for creatives who use visual expression in their work.
Hamilton works great for displaying the default WordPress image gallery, and if you stack galleries with varying numbers of columns on top of each other, you’ll get an interesting image grid. Hamilton also has a resume page template, the option to display either two or three columns on a desktop, and support for translations. And it offers all of this completely free of charge — although you’re more than welcome to make a donation to the theme creator.
Features that make Hamilton the best free portfolio WordPress theme:
- A fully functional dark mode
- Block editor/Guttenberg support
- Jetpack infinite scroll support
Let’s Wrap It Up
Because your previous work is sometimes — if not often — what will get you hired for the next gig, and the one after that, you have to pay a lot of attention to how you present it. Having a professional-looking portfolio isn’t optional if you work in a creative field. But it’s also important that your portfolio is convenient to present and share with others, which is why creating a digital, online portfolio is such a good idea. And with some help from these free portfolio WordPress themes, and especially their paid versions, you can have an amazing portfolio up and running in no-time.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
