When designing different pages of your WordPress website, deciding on a layout is one of the biggest challenges. You might have so much you want to say and put on the page that you feel like there's not enough room.
In that case, a masonry grid layout would be perfect. Rather than build it from scratch with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can install a masonry grid WordPress theme.
Before exploring some of the best masonry grid WordPress themes on the market, let's take a closer look at this type of theme below.
What is a masonry grid?
A masonry grid is a layout based on columns that does not have a fixed height for rows. Without a row height requirement, you can place elements based on the vertical space available. This enables you to maximize space on the page and use images and other elements of different shapes and proportions.
The web design term “masonry” is based on masonry construction. Defined in Britannica as “the art and craft of building and fabricating in stone, clay, brick, or concrete block,” masonry has been practiced since prehistoric times. Here’s an example of stone masonry:
You can find this same structure everywhere online today. Take Pinterest, for example. Its homepage is a masonry grid with four columns of images that vary in height. There are no gaps in the layout, just a bit of white space separating one image from another. This is a great example of designing for the user experience. This layout makes it easy for visitors to view, like, and scroll through as much user-generated content as possible.
If you'd benefit from using the same layout on your WordPress site, then you can use a masonry grid WordPress theme. Below are some of your best options.
Best Masonry Grid Wordpress Themes
The masonry grid WordPress themes below are flexible, customizable, and fully responsive to make sure that your site looks great on all devices. Let's take a closer look.
1. Pluto
Pluto is a one-of-a-kind masonry grid theme designed for bloggers. With multiple pagination options including infinite scroll and support for reviews and ratings as well as YouTube, Vimeo, image galleries, quotes, audio files, and SoundCloud links, this theme is ideal for any type of blog, from cooking to tech. This theme supports WooCommerce as well so you can add a shop and monetize your blog.
2. Breek
Breek is a lightweight and fast loading WordPress theme. Its speed, vivid color scheme, and masonry layout make personal blogs. You can pick from over nine homepage layouts, four header styles, and seven blog layouts, and then customize them with a powerful theme options panel and 11 custom widgets.
Below is the minimal style demo.
3. DAZE
DAZE is one of the best creative WordPress themes. It comes with four unique masonry layouts. One is a classic masonry homepage. Another is a minimalist masonry that shows the featured images of blog posts without the sidebar. There’s also a new blog concept with blog posts in a masonry grid that incorporate sidebar elements throughout the page.
The final one — an advanced page with a featured slider showing the three latest posts at the top and then a super wide masonry grid with special boxes — is shown below. This demo uses GIFs and the infinite scroll effect.
4. Hive
Hive is a masonry grid WordPress theme designed for people with a strong passion for writing. Its powerful colors and fonts system allows you to choose between predefined color or font palettes — or create your own to match your brand. The special typography elements, including drop caps and highlights, will also help make each headline unique and draw your audience's attention.
These and other features will help you create an eye-catching masonry grid homepage for your blog.
5. Bou
Bou is a masonry grid WordPress theme that’s specifically designed for magazine and review sites. Created using the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques, the masonry layout is fully responsive so it will look great on any device. Bou also supports live search, categories and tags, Google snippets, reviews with unlimited criteria and colors, and other features required to create and customize a magazine or review site.
6. Showcase
Responsive and fully customizable, Showcase is a masonry grid WordPress theme best suited for blogs, photography websites, and other creative niches. In addition to coming with 10 homepage layouts, nine custom widgets, and sticky header and sidebar widgets, Showcase also supports frontend submission. That makes this theme perfect for sites showcase user-generated content.
Here's a look at one of Showcase's demos.
7. Werkstatt
Werkstatt is a stunning portfolio theme that offers several unique masonry grid demos and comes bundled with the Visual Composer page builder plugin. Using this plugin, you can drag and drop any design element between these predesigned sites. Because of its functionality and flexibility, Werkstatt appeals to freelancers, designers, agencies, photographers, and bloggers.
Below is a unique blogging demo.
8. Opus Masonry
Opus Masonry is a free masonry grid WordPress theme for blogs, news sites, and online magazines. In addition to providing multiple demos, including a masonry demo, this theme comes with a slider, multiple header and footer options, and custom typography. It also has custom widgets that are required for any blog or magazine, including ones for recent posts, featured posts, social icons, and author descriptions. The masonry demo is below.
9. Polite
Polite is another free WordPress theme for blogs and magazine sites. This minimalist theme not only has the perfect masonry layout for showcasing lots of content and images — it also has a sticky navigation menu with a search option, multiple sidebar and footer options, an off-canvas sidebar, featured slider, and more.
10. SimpleMag
With SimpleMag, you can create and customize a magazine site in no time. Simple Mag has a responsive design, drag-and-drop page composer, configurable dropdown mega menu, smart footer, and various homepage and category page layouts. When displaying your latest or featured posts, you can choose between a basic, grid, or masonry layout. Below is a look at a post display from the demo site.
11. Moon
Moon is the perfect theme for blogs and photography portfolios. With this theme, you can display your images, videos, audio, and blog posts in multiple layouts. You can also password protect your pages and galleries, sell your images, and let visitors book appointments on your site.
Moon comes with over 24 homepage demos, including the Masonry one below.
12. Jevelin
Jevelin is one of the best-selling multipurpose WordPress themes in the Theme Forest marketplace. Purchased over 10,000 times, Jevelin has been used to create corporate websites, photography portfolios, ecommerce stores, and many other types of sites.
Driving its versatility is its library of website demos. These demos can be installed in one click and customized with the built-in Unyson drag-and-drop page builder. Here’s a look at one of the many masonry grid demos Jevelin offers.
To customize these premade demos, you can add testimonial carousels, video backgrounds, maps, social media icons, and over 40 animation effects, among other design elements.
13. Fab Masonry
Fab Masonry is one of the best and free photography WordPress themes. Compatible with the new block editor, this theme enables you to create a custom background, header, logo, and menu. This grid-based theme supports full-width templates and those with two columns and three and a right sidebar as well.
With the masonry grid, you can display as many image cards as you want to create a truly unique portfolio site. Check out the example below.
14. Phoenix
Phoenix is a multipurpose WordPress theme that’s ideal for agencies and freelancers. It comes with over 10 demos, including masonry portfolio layouts, and the Visual Composer plugin. Using this drag-and-drop builder, you can add full-screen backgrounds, parallax sliders, and videos as well as other scroll animations to keep visitors engaged.
15. Notio
With full video support, adaptive images, and smooth animations, Notio is ideal for agencies or freelancers creating portfolio websites.
Notio provides several portfolio layouts, blogging templates, and shop pages so you can build your site quickly and easily. In addition to these templates, Notio offers several pre-designed masonry grid demos. Below is one example called Masonry Style 1. You can also create your own with Notio's powerful masonry builder.
16. Sun
Sun is the ideal masonry grid theme for WordPress bloggers looking to monetize their blog. Whether you're a home decorator, cook, or fashion blogger, this theme can help you make money with WooCommerce, affiliate links, and ads.
17. Coast
Coast is a premium WordPress theme designed for image-rich blogs. Modern and easy-to-use, Coast has a responsive design, unlimited color schemes, custom widgets, and three homepage layouts, including masonry or a basic grid. Here’s a look at the masonry layout.
18. Lemon
Want to create a home decor shop? Fashion blog with affiliate links? News site with ads? These and more sites are possible with Lemon. Fully responsive and retina ready, Lemon can help you create a wide range of WooCommerce sites. In addition to its built-in functionality, Lemon comes bundled with the Masonry Grid Resize Builder Plugin so you can create optimal masonry grids for your products and images.
19. Arvo
Arvo is another easy-to-use, customizable, retina ready WordPress theme with masonry portfolio layouts. In addition to these layouts, Arvo comes with over 20 homepage demos, multiple header and footer styles, and parallax image and video background sections. These and additional features can help you build and customize a website that best showcases your content.
20. Bauhaus
Bauhaus is a minimalist WordPress theme for portfolio websites, especially those of architecture firms. In addition to About and Service Templates, Bauhaus comes with portfolio and blog templates. To display your blog and portfolio, you can choose from three layouts, including a masonry grid. This layout will look great on any device because Bauhaus is both responsive and retina ready. Take a look at the masonry blog demo below.
21. Peak
Peak is a modern grid-based WordPress theme by Themify. It features a masonry tile layout that is both responsive and customizable. Whie the tiles layout is automatically populated and aligned in a grid, you can set your own custom tile size depending on the images you want to feature.
You can also leverage any of the other theme’s features, including a mega menu, various post layouts, slide-out widgets, portfolio section, and WooCommerce compatibility, to create and customize your site. Peak is a multipurpose theme, but it’s most ideal for blogs, portfolios, magazines, and ecommerce sites.
Selecting Your Masonry Grid WordPress Theme
Any of the themes above can be used to create a visually striking WordPress website. Whether you want to showcase your own high-quality images, provide a unique layout for your blog listings, or make clickable product displays, a masonry grid theme can help you achieve your goals.
