As an artist, you know that a website is the best way to get your work in front of as many eyes as possible. With this in mind, knowing the best WordPress themes for artists is equally as helpful. It’s one of the easiest ways to build such a website. That is until it comes to picking a WordPress theme.
It’s often said that setting limitations can actually enhance creativity. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case with themes — there are thousands to choose from, many of which boast an array of fancy effects to drive engagement.
Among all the bells and whistles, it’s easy to forget that your art is the focus, not the page surrounding it. So, your theme should cut out the excess and include only the features that present your work in the best light. In this article, we’ve compiled the best well-crafted WordPress themes to do just that.
The Best WordPress Themes for Artists
- Astra
- Divi
- Impeka
- Portfolio
- Pixel
- Musisi
- Overable
- Oscillator
- OceanWP
- Kallyas
- Uncode
- Galleria Metropolia
- Pretty Creative Pro
- Flora
- Canvas
- Ronneby
- Stockholm
- Pofo
- Cigni
- Bridge
- BeTheme
- Jupiter
- Rhye
- Ohio
- SeedProd
1. Astra
To get your WordPress site up quickly, Astra is your best choice. This theme has maintained a strong reputation for its simplicity, lightweight layout customization, and wide selection of ready-to-use templates.
For some, Astra’s designs may seem too minimal. However, if you want your art to stand out against a clean and professional backdrop, give it a try.
In addition, Astra is one of the fastest themes around, and it’s compatible with all major WordPress plugins and page builders (e.g., Elementor, BeaverBuilder, and Brizy). These perks make Astra a leading option for artists looking to build a cohesive, high-performing website.
Pricing: Free plans are available. Pro plans cost $47 a year. An essential bundle costs $169 per year. A growth bundle costs $249 per year.
2. Divi
Divi is a multipurpose WordPress theme that can help you create any website, including one for showcasing art projects. Divi is highly customizable and offers numerous ways to present your media.
The Divi theme is powered by a flexible and intuitive WordPress page builder. With Divi’s drag-and-drop interface, you can implement custom layouts across your pages without writing a line of code. You’ll have access to ready-to-use designs, and you can tailor-fit each design to your liking.
For a more detailed look at this powerful theme, check out our Divi review.
Pricing: Plans start at $89 per year or $249 for a lifetime.
3. Impeka
Impeka is a multipurpose WordPress theme that’s a great canvas for your portfolio due to its keen attention to design and usability. The theme includes many pre-built websites that can be easily imported or used as a starting point for any creative project.
Impeka includes dozens of portfolio layouts that are designed uniquely for artists, architects, photographers, musicians, designers, and other types of creatives.
You can use Impeka with WPBakery, Elementor, or the Gutenberg editor — giving you several tools to choose from as you design your pages. Creatives will love Impeka for its scrolling one-page templates and its unique full-screen menus.
Pricing: There’s a $39 one-time fee.
4. Portfolio
The name says it all — Portfolio is a clean and minimal design for artists, designers, and freelancers to present their creative work. This fully responsive theme is created on the Bootstrap framework, making it especially accommodating for mobile viewing.
Portfolio offers five different post types and two blog styles, over 500 Google Fonts, and widgets for Instagram and Twitter to promote yourself over social media.
Pricing: There’s a $49 one-time fee.
5. Pixel
Pixel’s stripped-back aesthetic makes it a quality option created for creative professionals, freelancers, and modern startups. This theme provides a distraction-free experience to visitors to ensure engagement with your products.
Pixel is fully responsive and SEO-friendly, and it’s easy to play around with its layouts and adjust the overall appearance of your site. As a highlight, Pixel’s theme options panel ensures easy customization to create a pleasant navigation experience.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
6. Musisi
Promoting your band or latest music project? Musisi is created with musicians in mind. Alongside its design customization, this theme brings features specifically for promoting your music releases and events. These include page templates and post templates for events, news, videos, and even your discography.
Musisi also comes with a powerful theme options panel, where you can update the details of your site and view your changes in real time.
Now more than ever, music fans are discovering new bands through the web. That’s why Musisi is SEO-optimized, helping you to climb the results pages and build a loyal fanbase, and Musisi’s fully responsive design helps get your band heard across all common devices.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
7. Overable
Overable is a modern WordPress theme that makes a great option for musical artists of all types, including bands or solo artists (though you could certainly adapt it to other artistic niches, as well).
To help you get started, it includes 15+ importable demo sites — these span niches such as band/artist sites, music labels, recording studios, and more. All of the demo content is built using Elementor, which allows for easy drag-and-drop customization.
Overable also includes some special features just for musical artists, including stylish music players, discography listings, and more.
It even offers full WooCommerce support, which means that you can easily set up a merch store for your band/musical project.
Pricing: There’s a $79 one-time fee.
8. Oscillator
Want another theme option to promote your music? Oscillator serves up a minimal but appealing design to help your site stand out in the entertainment industry. It includes a built-in streaming audio player, which you can place into your pages so users can listen to your music straight on your website.
Your player can follow a set tracklist or stream from a live station, making it useful for broadcasting organizations too.
Like Musisi, Oscillator offers post types for discography, events, and promotional media galleries, and your pages are optimized for search. While Oscillator lacks more advanced visual effects, this keeps your pages fast and keeps viewers’ focus on what really matters: your sound.
Pricing: There’s a $34.30 one-time fee.
9. OceanWP
OceanWP is a leading multipurpose WordPress theme with millions of downloads and endless ways to style your creative website. It works with most popular page builders like Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery, and offers its own extensions, including an Instagram integration.
Check out the OceanWP demo options to see for yourself what this theme can do. If any stick out, you can import the demo straight to your own site and populate it with your creative content.
Pricing: Personal plans cost $27 per year. Business plans cost $47 per year. Agency plans cost $77 per year.
10. KALLYAS
KALLYAS is one of the most popular and widely trusted multipurpose WordPress themes. You can create unlimited designs for your site with its over 100 design elements or import a demo design from its collection of examples. There are even specific site examples for photographers, freelancers, and general creator portfolios.
Pricing: There’s a $69 one-time fee.
11. Uncode
Uncode is a beast of a theme — no matter your creative specialty, you can find an Uncode layout to match. Uncode is constructed around the WPBakery page builder, and it shows. Intuitive and extensive customization lies at the heart of this theme.
Highlights of Uncode include images that automatically compress and resize to decrease page load time, easy toggling between light and dark color schemes, and specialized tools for media gallery creation which allow for easy additions of new art.
No time to build from scratch? Quickly import one of Uncode’s 70 demo layouts and make it your own. You can then check out the hundreds of individual section templates for building specific pages and page sections.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
12. Galleria Metropolia
If you’re creating a website for a museum or art gallery, your visitors will expect a visually pleasing website to match. Galleria Metropolia is made to frame your collections within a clean and contemporary aesthetic.
This theme offers a handful of options that can serve a wide range of needs, including portfolio modules for showcasing a series of professional blog layouts for sharing news and WooCommerce functionalities so you can sell merchandise. Assemble all this with a drag-and-drop builder, and you’ll channel visitors from your homepage straight to your exhibitions.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
13. Pretty Creative Pro
Pretty Creative Pro is an all-inclusive WordPress theme for the visual creator. Pretty Creative Pro is a polished and fully mobile-responsive theme. It’s fully customizable and includes six different homepage layouts.
You‘ll also get templates for essential “about,” “archive,” and “blog” pages. There’s a built-in store feature, widgets for adding visual content, and a theme customizer with live preview.
Pricing: There’s a $99.99 one-time fee.
14. Flora
Flora is a bold theme, ideal for artists who are eager to put their work on full display. It’s loaded with design options and creative features to make this possible, including fullscreen and parallax sections, a modern mega menu, hundreds of Google Fonts, and four pre-built navigation layouts.
Additionally, Flora’s one-page site can turn your content into a single stream, and its user-friendly interface minimizes the learning curve for new site owners. With this theme, you’ll spend more time perfecting your craft than adjusting page elements.
Pricing: There’s a $69 one-time fee.
15. Canvas
Canvas is a multipurpose WordPress theme that offers more than 150 portfolio layouts for you to showcase your creative work. While most of its demos are geared toward non-creative businesses, you can choose any design you like and then add a customizable portfolio page. Alternatively, you can build your site manually using its premade section templates.
The one drawback of this theme is that it doesn’t offer portfolio pages with large images, which may be required to show the details of your work. The largest you can get is a 1-column layout in full width.
Its individual project pages are robust — you can choose from a single image layout to a slider gallery layout. The designs are relatively standard; they feature no unique stylizations. If you’re looking for a more eclectic theme, this isn’t the best option for you.
Pricing: There’s a $16 one-time fee.
16. Ronneby
Ronneby is a premium WordPress theme that offers more than 80 demos to build your portfolio website. It offers nine portfolio demos, including Contrast Portfolio and Portfolio Full Screen. Some demos aren’t for creatives but are so well-designed that you could still use them for your artist website, such as Floristic Studio.
Ronneby comes with the WPBakery page builder for easy, code-free customization. It’s compatible with WooCommerce, allowing you to sell your art online if you want to.
Pricing: There’s a $49 one-time fee.
17. Stockholm
Stockholm is a modern premium WordPress theme that offers more than 140 demos to create your website. Of these demos, 13 are specifically designed for artists, including Alf, Lene, and Lovisa. You can also browse through portfolio demos such as Melker and Ludvig.
Stockholm is compatible with both Elementor and WPBakery, allowing you to build your site without writing a single line of code. And if you’re ever feeling lost, you can watch a dedicated list of tutorials straight from the theme’s creator.
Stockholm is a great fit for artists who are looking for a less business-like site, as the designs are less practical than some other themes on this list.
Pricing: There’s a $69 one-time fee.
18. Pofo
Pofo is a creative portfolio theme that’s designed primarily for creative businesses — so if you’ve turned your art into a full-time hustle, this would be the theme for you. Its portfolio demos include Parallax Portfolio and Personal Portfolio, and it offers impressive project pages to showcase your work in greater detail.
Pofo comes with the WPBakery page builder. Its one-click demo importer allows you to get started with any demo and go.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
19. Cygni
Cygni was featured in our best themes for graphic designers list, and it makes a great theme for visual artists, too. It’s specifically designed to showcase creative work — your homepage is your portfolio.
Cygni features eight showcase layouts to put on your homepage, and you can choose between dark and light modes.
Cygni uses the Elementor drag-and-drop page builder. While its customization options are limited, its simplicity makes it a great choice for artists who don’t want to tinker too much with their theme. It’s highly recommended for those with little coding knowledge.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
20. Bridge
Bridge is a premium WordPress theme that’s geared toward artists of all types. Its Artist Minimal demo site is ideal for visual artists, while its Pianist demo would be a great fit for any classical musician (or try this one for singer/songwriters). Bridge even has a demo for a film director.
In short, you’ll find a demo that fits your needs regardless of the type of artist you are. If you don’t like any of the demos, Bridge offers powerful personalization options such as full-screen sliders, music modules, and parallax sections to show your work.
Pricing: There’s a $69 one-time fee.
21. Betheme
Betheme is a creative WordPress theme that has over 45 demos for “Arts and Culture” websites alone (it offers more than 600 demos overall). Betheme has a premade website for you if you’re an artist, a filmmaker, a dance teacher for hire, and an 80s-inspired band. That’s only a short list of the potential websites you could build for yourself using Betheme.
If you’re a visual artist, you have several portfolio styles available, including grid, flat, masonry, and list layouts. Betheme uses the Muffin Builder and is compatible with the Elementor drag-and-drop page editor.
Pricing: There’s a $60 one-time fee.
22. Jupiter
Jupiter is a premium WordPress theme that offers more than 45 demos for creatives alone. Most of its creative demos are geared toward freelancers, so if your practice is also a freelance business, this is most definitely the theme for you.
Jupiter features a versatile header builder that allows you to completely customize your header, and you can also design your footer. In WordPress, you would edit your footer using widgets, but Jupiter allows you to do it within the page editor. It offers a diverse array of portfolio styles, which you can customize down to gutter width.
Its Bellona, Freelance Illustrator, and Photographer demos would be of special interest to artists. If you’re a musician, you have a few options available, including their dedicated Musician demo. It uses the Elementor page builder for beginner-friendly customization.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
23. Rhye
Rhye is a premium portfolio theme that’s specifically designed for creatives and artists. It shows your work using full-screen sliders with elegant typography. Its features include engaging AJAX animations and access to Google Fonts.
Like Cygni, this theme offers limited customization options — but that makes it a great fit for artists who don’t want to spend too much time building their website. Just import one of Rhye’s demos, and you’re good to go.
Rhye is a great fit for photographers and independent filmmakers. If you’re an illustrator, designer, or musician, you would be better served by another option on this list, such as Betheme or Jupiter.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
24. Ohio
Ohio is a creative WordPress theme that mostly offers demos for agencies — but its strong portfolio options make it a great fit for artists. With its minimal type in the margins and hyper-stylized design, Ohio is unlike any other theme in the creative space.
Ohio comes with more than 300 WPBakery shortcodes and Elementor widgets, plus more than 80 pre-made elements and templates. You won’t have to build your site from scratch. You only have to drag Ohio’s premade layouts into the editor.
Because it’s mainly geared toward agencies, Ohio is a great fit for artists who’ve turned their practice into a business. Ohio is optimized for conversion, providing CTA buttons and CTA footer banners.
Pricing: There’s a $59 one-time fee.
25. SeedProd
SeedProd is a user-friendly drag-and-drop WordPress theme. The builder also contains adjustable options for getting your art on display for more experienced artists.
Expert-level integration with your favorite tools and mobile adaptability enable you to reach every aspect of your target audience. With SeedProd, navigating the drag-and-drop interface has never been easier.
Pricing: Plans cost $39.50 annually.
Grow Your Artist Website With a Premium WordPress Theme
Your WordPress theme is the most important design choice you’ll make when promoting yourself and your art, so invest some time to get a sense of your options. The right creative theme will go beyond simply displaying your work — it will help establish your presence on the web with an intuitive layout, cohesive look, and an overall pleasing experience.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
