40+ Premium and Free Portfolio WordPress Themes
A few months ago I searched for a long time through WordPress portfolio themes as I wanted a theme to showcase some of my designs. I found so many beautiful themes I decided to make a round-up of both free and premium portfolio themes.
Building your portfolio can be a difficult task and maintaining it also, especially when you need to modify it, add, or remove projects, change photos and such. Having a content management system do these things for you can be the simplest solution.
WordPress is one of the most obvious solutions if you are looking this way, being one of the most robust CMSs out there. Also the huge developer community as well as the great support you are getting and security updates makes WordPress one of the best solutions for managing your online portfolio. But WordPress doesn’t provide by default a gallery / portfolio to showcase your work. You will need a WordPress portfolio theme.
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You should also check out the beautiful free and premium Wordpress themes from My Theme Shop. [/zilla_alert]
With this much variety is quite hard to choose a theme that fits your needs and aesthetic expectations. This article aims to be a guide and provide you with the best WordPress portfolio themes available this year.
Free Portfolio WordPress Themes
Pure
Pure is a beautiful free portfolio WordPress theme, designed by the guys at GT3 Themes. This ready-made solution is specially designed for creating beautiful portfolio or blog projects which will compare favorably with the rest.
Charmed
Charmed is a beautiful, minimal grid portfolio theme for WordPress you can use to showcase your design work in style. A handsome theme built to power websites for creative agencies, freelancers, artists, designers, photographers and those who love to create.
Tesla
Tesla is a beautiful premium portfolio WordPress theme, designed by the guys at TeslaThemesand released for free to the community. The theme is based on the Tesla framework and has some limitations regarding the number of items that can be displayed.
Folder
This responsive theme its perfect for portfolio, product showcase and business comes with custom work posts to display your projects.
vFlex
vFlex is a Free Responsive WordPress Theme which has been made for bloggers and designers. A simple plug and play solution which has some amazing features such as Featured Flex Slider, Custom Featured Area, Inbuilt Vibe Options Panel, logo upload, custom settings import/export and many more.
Grid
Grid Theme Responsive is a WordPress Theme with mobile responsive design, featuring infinite scroll. Grid Theme is perfect for any creative to showcase their portfolio.
Shaken Grid Lite
Shaken Grid uses jQuery Masonry which “arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid.” The result is a gap-less layout even if you have varying post heights.
Imbalance
Imbalance is an excellent choice for any online magazine, blog or portfolio websites. This free wordpress theme designed with a contemporary modern vibe in a minimalistic style.
Portofolium
Portfolium can be used on portfolio web-sites or blogs. If you are designer, artist, photographer, or other creative specialist you can take a full advantage of Portfolium’s fresh minimalistic design that is perfect as is or as a foundation for your custom design.
Exposito
Expositio is a very simple & free portfolio WordPress theme for photographers, designers & artists. Expositio theme allows you in several clicks to showcase your works to the whole world. Adjustable main page lets you to provide any information. Integrated options panel helps to customize the template from font used to color theme.
FontFolio
FontFolio is a free WordPress Theme with a grid based layout. Design to showcase your typography portfolio. This theme was inspired by the works of Svetoslav Simov from FontFabric
Grid Portfolio
Gird Portfolio is a clean theme with grid like layout. This WordPress theme is perfect to showcase any portfolio. Grid Portfolio has a nice and unique structure to show any artwork in your portfolio.
Artworks
Art Works is a free responsive WordPress theme with infinite scroll great to showcase your portfolio. It has clean and appealing layout. Art Works theme has an elegant style & mobile unique design.
Architekt
Architekt is a free WordPress theme with a clean simple and unique design. It is built to showcase your architectural portfolio, but works with any portfolio. This theme was inspired by works of Fantastic Norway
Slider
Slider is a free theme that comes with custom background and modern design. It’s a great theme to showcase your portfolio, with elegant style & mobile friendly design
Digest
Digest is a free WordPress theme for your personal blogs or portfolio. The theme supports widgets and custom menus. Ideal for photographers, designers and anyone who wishes to show off their work.
Photo Book
Photo Book is a cool responsive WordPress theme for building online portfolios, gallery websites or image based blogs. The theme is great setting up an online gallery of your work, if you are designer, artist, photographer, or other creative specialist. The theme supports widgets and custom menus.
Panoramica
Panoramica is built with the intent of adapting to as many window sizes as possible. It has a fully fluid layout that gives it tremendous flexibility, allowing you to cater to both large and small screens alike. Its polished portfolio heavily emphasizes the use of images, displaying a clean slideshow in every portfolio item. And of course, you can customize its appearance through its extensive options panel.
Enclosed
Enclosed is a clean and modern theme made to be highly readable and appealing. It has a set of features ideal for bloggers and photographers alike, making use of large images in both its portfolio and blog page to impress visitors. The theme also provides a really minimalistic homepage, which can showcase your work, services, articles… you decide.
Illustrious
Illustrious is a clean and well-organized theme, ideal for business or portfolio sites that want to showcase their services in a visual and striking way. It comes with a highly modified homepage, making use of custom post types to display your site’s main features. Illustrious can be easily customized to match your needs by tweaking its options panel.
Revera
Revera is a free premium wordpress theme based on the Bootstrap 3 framework. This is a responsive wordpress theme with all the bootstrap goodness packed in it. The theme is WordPress 3.6 ready. The theme comes with features like, custom menu, featured images, custom homepage template, portfolio page template , widgetized sidebar and footer, custom widgets on homepage, theme option page etc.
June
June is a photo gallery theme. This theme is useful for photographers or other creative professionals to setup a photo gallery site based on WordPress. With this theme you can create albums of your works or photos. In each album you can add multiple images. The images are thickbox enabled, which is a light-box plugin built in wordpress. Theme is built with features like custom menu, custom post type, featured images, meta boxes, jQuery slider, Custom page templates, Theme option page etc.
Axis
This is a premium quality theme with features on par with paid themes.The theme use WordPress 3 features like Custom post types, Custom taxonomies, Custom menus , featured thumbnails etc. This will be a n ideal theme for professionals to exhibit their portfolio in style.
ShutterShot
Shuttershot is a fullscreen slideshow template. This theme is ideal for photography websites to showcase their portfolio in style.The theme has option to use either a full screen slideshow on the homepage or a regular blog with image slideshow as the background. If you are using a slideshow on the homepage you can set a custom page template as the blog.
Wallbase
This too is a fullscreen slideshow portfolio theme. .The theme has option to use either a full screen slideshow on the homepage or a regular blog with image slideshow as the background.
Workality
A fully responsive portfolio theme for creative people and agencies. It’s great way to display your portfolio through 4 different thumbnail size types and responsive layout.
Premium Portfolio WordPress Themes
Cartel
Cartel is a fully responsive HTML5 theme that is ideal for design and photography studios or freelancers.It offers a masonry gallery, awesome hover effects, full width sliders with touch support, fullscreen backgrounds, fashionable captions and tons of professional styling options.
Extinct
Extinct is a WordPress Portfolio theme delicately handcrafted to meet the needs of a creative agency or similar businesses. The name Extinct is derived from the fact that this theme is a celebration of old style, what is known as Vintage and Retro style designs and incorporates various unique design elements inspired by these styles.
Cesar
Responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme designed with built-in gallery and portfolio modules that support multiple content types (image, videos, custom HTML).
Weald
Weald is a Powerful Responsive WordPress Theme and its a great asset to any creative freelancer or agency, everything is flexible and easy to customize.
Ideo
ideo is a minimal portfolio theme. It’s very clean, sleek and modern design. This theme also uses Masonry grid for portfolio layout and blog layout, It makes your website looks very cool. Also, with the admin panel and page builder in this theme, you can discover unlimited possibilities of what the theme can do.
Nero
Clean, modern design can be used for any portfolio, photography website. 14 gallery templates and 10 portfolio templates among many other features.
StrictOne
A responsive, HiDPI ready theme with multiple color schemes available.
Riviera
Riviera Theme offers a lot of benefits for those who seek to create a website that will reflect individual style, feature the most up-to-date design and functionality and be really user-friendly both on front-end and back-end.
Folo
Complete with a snazzy infinite loading portfolio, masonry layout, neat lightbox portfolio post, clean / minimalistic design & a powerful Theme Options Panel — Folo is nearly the perfect setup for your online portfolio.
Hikari
Hikari is a premium responsive theme perfect for blogs and portfolios. Using the latest Bootstrap is truly using the latest CSS3 and HTML5 techniques to give you the possibility of creating awesome, eye-catching and sleek websites. Hikari is fully responsive, so your site will look stunning everywhere.
Division
Division is a premium wordpress theme suitable for freelancers, creative agencies, art directors, illustrators, photographers or bloggers.
Illustrate
Created with designers and artists in mind, Illustrate elegantly displays your portfolios. The theme features a drag & drop homepage, custom post types for the portfolio and slider, unique color overlays based on your featured image.
Klasik
Klasik is a clean, minimalist wordpress theme suitable for designers, artists, and other portfolio sites. It contains three types of homepages, light and dark skin together with color option. Responsive design for phones and tablets, responsive design etc. Compatible with the latest WordPress 3+
Skylab
Skylab is a Premium Portfolio / Photography WordPress Theme with an innovative, touch navigation super smooth hardware accelerated slider designed for photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, art and creative directors, movie directors, architects, luxury businesses or bloggers. It’s equally adept at showcasing design or photography projects. Its page templates accommodates multiple galleries, each with as many images as you want.
Nerva
With a powerful live customizer, a well built admin panel, the 2 overall styles, dark and light and responsiveness, Nerva is one of the most equipped portfolio WordPress themes you can get.
MagicBook 3D
MagicBook is a real 3D flip book WordPress Theme with unlimited page number,cool 3D menu, responsive feature and easy customization etc.
Section
A premium content-focused WordPress theme. Mobile-friendly masonry layout, you’re bound to receive the attention your website — and more importantly your content — deserves. Section is a perfect fit for bloggers, creatives of all sorts, photographers and other enthusiasts.
Kabuto
Kabuto is a gorgeously minimalistic WordPress theme. Quick to setup and easy to customize, thanks to a detailed manual, and the carefully structured code, Kabuto is the perfect theme for showcasing your work in an elegantly beautiful way.
Bedford
Bedford is a responsive portfolio theme that enables you to beautifully showcase your work on any device. Its layout based on flexible Grid system, it is Retina-ready and produce valid modern HTML5 markup.
What do you think ?
Let us know what you think about this huge collection in the comments below. Do you have a favorite portfolio WordPress theme ? Do you know any other themes we didn’t feature in this article ? We’d love to hear from you.
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