16 Best Free Masonry Grid WordPress Themes 2024
If you search for the most sophisticated and easy-to-use free grid WordPress themes, this comprehensive collection covers you.
A website can be built in a hundred different ways. But most websites look almost the same aesthetically because of design patterns. How confusing would it be if everyone suddenly started to go crazy with design ideas on the web? Every website would be so different that we would have difficulty balancing the design and content. As a result, concepts like “masonry,” “standard,” and “grid” have been born.
Most of all, these concepts are, in particular, very popular amongst WordPress bloggers. Because WordPress uses elements/components to display most of its content, having a choice of display types is helpful for unique purposes and situations. A listings type of website will want to use a grid layout to make navigation easier. But a blogger who writes about food might prefer the standard layout because it feels familiar to the reader.
If you’re in the market for grid themes or templates, make sure to check out some of our other lists of grid-related content:
Grid themes are particularly famous amongst photographers, portfolio owners, and creative design artists. These creative people use the web to promote and publish their work. Their need for simplicity and minimal design comes from the distinct emphasis on creative work. As a result of this need, many grid themes rely on minimal design principles that strip away clutter or other annoying web elements. In the following roundup, designers have a unique understanding and ideas about the “grid layout” and portray it in numerous unique and genuine ways.
Best Free WordPress Themes With Masonry Grid
1. Shapely (Most Popular)
Shapely is one of the free grid WordPress themes currently available. While the tool costs nothing, its features are very many in store. It is ideal for single-page websites, but you can expand beyond that. Also, you need to know that Shapely supports all the most popular plugins, like WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Google Analytics, and more. Of course, Shapely is also mobile-ready and retina-friendly, ensuring your content appears stunningly on all screens.
Additional Shapely features include footer editing, hero image, Font Awesome icons, unlimited color options, and many more. You can also translate Shapely to any language you want and localize your website. Make things work out for you and your project with Shapely and see the difference.
2. Astra
Astra is a free WordPress theme that creates elegant masonry grid-style websites, perfect for portfolios, photography showcases, and dynamic blogs. Its clean and modern design highlights visual content in an attractive, cascading grid layout that automatically adjusts to fit your images and posts, creating a seamless and engaging user experience.
With Astra, you can customize the masonry grid to match your creative vision. Adjust column counts, spacing, and choose between various grid styles to display your work or content in a way that captures your audience’s attention. The theme is optimized for all devices, ensuring your grid-style website looks impeccable on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Astra’s compatibility with major page builders, like Elementor and Beaver Builder, allows for intuitive drag-and-drop editing, giving you complete control over the design of your masonry grid without needing to write a single line of code. Astra’s focus on performance means your grid-loaded pages will load quickly, keeping visitors engaged and reducing bounce rates.
Key features that make Astra stand out for Masonry grid websites:
- Customizable masonry layouts: Tailor the grid to fit your unique content and design preferences.
- Responsive design: Ensures a beautiful grid display on all screen sizes and resolutions.
- Page builder compatibility: Offers easy customization with popular drag-and-drop page builders.
- Performance optimization: Delivers fast loading times for a smooth browsing experience.
- Seamless WooCommerce integration: Allows you to transform your grid website into a fully functional online store.
3. Portum Material
Portum Material is a simple, stylish, and modern free grid WordPress theme you can play immediately. Instead of starting from the ground up, you have a tool that will get you going in no time. With Portum Material, you can hammer out a fully functional and active page quickly. And if you dig the layout out of the box, you can even shorten the time. Of course, you can customize and adjust the default web design and make it yours at free will.
Some of the goodies of Portum Material are a full-width slider, call-to-action buttons, multi-level drop-down menu, animated statistics, and a lot more. Portum Material also includes a newsletter subscription form to capture visitors’ emails. Use the latter for future email campaigns and turn them into loyal customers.
4. Portum Clean
I bet you already know what you are getting with Portum Clean. This free WordPress theme delivers a clean, elegant and sophisticated web design that you can take to your full advantage. Before we continue, let me mention that Portum Clean rocks a one-page website layout that works great with various purposes. Whether you would like to build an agency, freelancer, or portfolio website, Portum Clean is versatile enough to work with all flawlessly.
Do not feel limited when establishing a page with Portum Clean. Sure, it might be free, but the features and functions are ready to take your online space to new heights.
Sticky navbar, animated stats and skillbars, testimonials, contact form, and back-to-top button are just a few of the amenities of Portum Clean. Incorporate your signature touch to quickly distinguish yourself from the crowd.
5. Gridbox
Gridbox is a popular three-column grid-based theme from ThemeZee. With 5,000+ active users and a stellar 4.5 out of 5 ratings, this theme is perfect for bloggers and magazines. The simple grid layout works incredibly well for blogs with a direct focus on publishing content—also, Gridbox ships with multiple grid alignment options, perfect for magazines and editorial sites. Furthermore, the simplicity of Gridbox lies in its minimal UI.
The massive footer consists of six widgetized areas, within which you can input widgets for tags, categories, archives, and relevant content. As a ThemeZee production, the Gridbox theme is naturally responsive and includes a theme customizer. All ThemeZee themes are compatible with localization (translation) and use a clean codebase with modern front-end syntax. Finally, it works with all major browsers and includes an SEO-based structure.
6. GridView
GridView is a catchy WordPress theme with a grid layout that costs you nothing. Even though it comes with no hidden fees, the outcome will still be very professional and sophisticated. Also, you do not need any experience building pages and blogs; GridView is a tool that suits beginners and professionals. After all, you have the complete how-to-install-the-theme guide to ensure a quick start. But you can easily learn on the fly, as it’s that straightforward.
Some features come with the free version of GridView (but you can upgrade to the pro plan anytime you want). Some highlights include two menus, background image, sticky header/menu, footer widgets, and a lifetime’s worth of updates. Additionally, feel free to perform customization tweaks to make GridView your own.
7. Gridzone
A masonry grid layout with a minimal touch to it, that’s what’s going on with Gridzone. This impressive free WordPress theme can be all yours in just a click. Download it, install it and put it to work right away. All the content you plan to publish to your new website will come into view stunningly.
Gridzone uses only the latest technologies to ensure a spectacular outcome. This also makes Gridzone operate on all modern devices, web browsers, and retina screens without a hitch. Additional features include social media buttons, a multi-level drop-down menu, a back-to-top button, etc.
8. Cream Blog Lite
All it takes is one click, and you can already start using Cream Blog Lite. A free grid WordPress theme is perfect for crafting blogs and online magazines. Cream Blog Lite works fluently with all news-focused pages you want to establish. For instance, Cream Blog Lite works very well with fashion, beauty, lifestyle, travel, food, DIY, gadgets, and numerous other topics. In addition to that, you can create a niche or a general news page without hassle.
It is a very easy-to-use theme, perfect for beginners and those who want to skip opening their wallet. On the other hand, even if Cream Blog Lite is free of charge, the outcome will still be a magnificent blog or alternative publishing web platform.
9. Savana Lite
Savana Lite is a versatile and highly adaptive free grid WordPress theme that easily adapts to your objective. Although it does not cost a dime, Savana Lite is still amazing and will benefit you greatly. You can employ Savana Lite for blogs, online portfolios, travel pages, and lifestyle websites, the options are numerous. Let your imagination decide what you want to use Savana Lite and start on the web with a bang.
It is no secret that Savana Lite also ensures a mobile-ready experience. In other words, all your works, contents, and details will look impressive on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Lastly, Savana Lite also works in harmony with page builders, like Elementor and Gutenberg, to name a couple. With this in mind, you know that no coding knowledge is necessary to work with Savana Lite.
10. Minimal Grid
As the name suggests, Minimal Grid is a free grid WordPress theme with a clean, elegant, and minimalistic look. It is ideal for blogs, news pages, online magazines, and other entertainment projects. If you are all about delivering outstanding content, let Minimal Grid present it on the web in the best possible light. By the way, you can use the free version for as long as you want. However, if you ever feel like you need more features, upgrade to a pro whenever you want.
Modify Minimal Grid with live customizer and make corrections on the fly. Some other amenities of Minimal Grid include responsiveness, author bio, related posts, footer widgets, Google AdSense support, and preloader. Little do you know, once you import Minimal Grid, it only takes minutes to restyle it and make it practice your signature feel.
11. Napoli
We were seriously amazed to find out how fast the Napoli theme loads! The process of loading the homepage and blog posts is pretty much instantaneous. ThemeZee knows how to optimize its themes for impressive results. And we are impressed indeed! The design of Napoli feels familiar, perhaps because of the traditional grid display. Napoli’s theme category is “food magazines.” We didn’t see any specific food post types in the demo, but as you know, the WordPress plugin directory is full of plugins that can add those features seamlessly. The red colors strike a chord of balance between technical elements and your blog content.
The Pro version of Napoli adds new features and plugins. For features, you get in-depth customization tools and prioritized email support. The Pro version adds a mega menu, social sharing, related posts, breadcrumbs, custom widgets bundle, and the official ThemeZee Toolkit for plugins. Because it’s free to download anyway, why don’t you take it for a spin for a few weeks or days and see how you feel about Napoli becoming your main theme overall.
12. Palm Beach
It’s quite fascinating how the grid-style themes have taken off. Traditionally the WordPress blogging systems displays posts in a list format, but a list format isn’t viable for websites with a daily schedule of posts. When you publish two, four, or ten posts per day, they can easily get lost behind walls of additional pages. Whereas a grid layout is flexible for displaying multiple columns of posts with minimal UI requirements. The Palm Beach is a free WordPress grid theme for travel websites. But, as you know, it’s never about a single niche with WordPress.
If you like Palm Beach and want to launch a site other than travel, don’t be afraid to try modifying things to your liking. It does have a Theme Customizer. As far as the travel theme goes, we can see that Palm Beach would be most ideal for travel websites with reviews or stories. Blog posts are full-width (no sidebar) with full-width featured images. Both combinations make for a great platform to tell your best travel stories.
13. Maker
Maker is a classical-style WordPress grid theme for Designers and Photographers. The Maker portfolio theme separates your site’s blog by giving it a separate page. As a result, you can spotlight your portfolio on the homepage using several column grid layouts. The Designers demo uses a super lightweight color and font configuration. On the other hand, the Photography demo uses a darker layout/colors. But, once you start using the Customizer you can change everything that doesn’t fit your criteria. The documentation explains how you can upgrade Marker to the Pro version, it also includes suggestions for best plugins to use with Maker theme and covers the basics of template/menu/widget management.
14. Evolve
Theme4Press brings out the Evolve theme as two different versions, the Lite (free) and the Pro version. The free version (Lite) has 30,000+ active installs. The Pro (premium) version extends features and other components into a more creative workflow. The Evolve theme uses two separate header styles, supported by Bootstrap’s beautiful colors. Evolve theme provides a neat Parallax slider that can display multiple images per slide, including posts!
Furthermore, because Evolve uses a grid system for most pages/posts, you can speedily modify their appearance or position on the main website. More in-depth features of Evolve are functions like ‘infinite scrolling’, which allows users to scroll content without ever having to load a new page. Another interesting feature is Animate.css support, a professional CSS3 library of animated/interactive effects. With such effects, your site will not fail to attract attention.
The Evolve theme is flexible enough to support BuddyPress, bbPress, and eCommerce stores through the WooCommerce plugin. So, you can use Evolve for a simple grid website as much as you can for a community platform.
15. Keratin
The motto of ThemeCot is to be as simple as possible with as little effort as necessary. As a result, their themes are popular amongst bloggers, writers, and those who admire simple minimalism. The Keratin theme in this regard couldn’t be any simpler than it already is. The layout of Keratin is primarily understood through three different parts. The first is the header, which includes a logo and your website links. The second and third parts are your post lists (two-column grid) and a sidebar.
The only recommendation for using Keratin theme is to make the post lists number even. Because Keratin uses a two-column grid list, an uneven number would make the UI look crappy. It’s a simple theme, but it can open doors to endless possibilities with the help of useful WordPress plugins.
16. Electa
You probably noted that many of the free grid themes in this roundup are somewhat focused on content, at least in some form. But, Electa is a more eclectic theme. It’s an elegant combination of elements that perfectly fit personal portfolios and commercial projects. Artists, in particular, have used Electa to create their photography sites, personal blogs, entertainment sites, and general sites with a portfolio as the main purpose. Alongside an intuitive blocks layout, the Electa theme supports SiteOrigin’s website builder for a quicker design workflow. Most importantly, Electa caters to the needs of commercial projects/portfolios by allowing you to sell your creative art directly from your site by using WooCommerce.
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