7 Best Dark WordPress Themes (Free & Paid)

Aesthetics and design often determine the first impression of your website, and choosing the right WordPress theme can be a game-changer. Bright colors are good, as they attract people quicker and easier. However, dark designs are getting more popular with site owners, as they bring a sense of luxury, elegance, and mystery. 

However, readability reduces for any text on a black or dark background, and strains the eyes more. So, you must be careful whether you’re choosing a new font or color palette. Not only that, but you should also know about free space usage. 

Knowing all these and finding the perfect theme might seem hectic. But fear not; we’re here to take the burden off your shoulder. Today, we’ve brought 7 Best Dark WordPress Themes (Free & Paid), all chosen by expert web designers. These themes look beautiful and elegant, and offer complete functionality for WordPress sites.

Let’s start!

1. Archi

If you’re in the interior design sector, your website should be functional and reflect creativity and taste. That’s why we’ve chosen Archi as the perfect theme for interior designers. Whether you’re an established architect, an interior design startup, or someone in between, Archi is the solution. With its unique dark theme features, responsive design, and many customization options, this theme is worth consideration.

With over 22 prebuilt homepages and 5 landing pages, Archi offers a wide array of layout options tailored for various interior design concepts. You can choose from different portfolio, blog, and menu styles, making the theme incredibly versatile. The theme also supports Revolution Slider for smooth slider transitions and unlimited slider creation and allows extensive typography options with 800+ Google fonts and 675 Font Awesome icons.

Archi provides a wide range of customization options. You can effortlessly tweak colors, fonts, and other elements without touching a line of code. This theme also includes the Visual Composer, allowing you to drag and drop elements to create your desired webpage. From the header to the footer, every aspect of the website can be tweaked and adjusted to match your site’s style.

Dark mode has been carefully integrated into the theme to provide a unique and dramatic effect highlighting design elements, particularly architectural and interior visuals. Elements like buttons, icons, and sliders have been created to stand out in the dark theme, ensuring user-friendliness. The dark mode is also customizable, offering options for instantly switching to light mode if users want to change the theme’s look. 

Key Features

Tons of prebuilt home pages, landing pages, and coming soon pages. 
Visual Composer, drag-and-drop page builder with 30+ custom elements.
Features unlimited slider creation with Revolution Slider.
WooCommerce integration.
One-click demo content import, with demo data XML file.
Offers animated elements on scroll and parallax background.
 Fully responsive with CSS Framework Bootstrap 3.X. 
Lightweight page loader with a dark and light theme.

Price

Archi starts at $59, for the standard license. 

2. Coral Dark

If you want to open a portfolio gallery site for serious professional work, or need an aesthetic photography blog, Coral Dark will be the best dark WordPress theme for you. While not suited for all kinds of sites, Coral Dark offers a unique blend of style with functionality, ensuring that users both appreciate the visuals and easily navigate.  

Dark themes require special care as the visuals may vary on different types of screens. Keeping that in mind, Coral Dark is fully responsive, ensuring your website’s aesthetic remains consistent and fluid across various devices, whether desktops, tablets, or smartphones. On top of that, there are customizable headers and footers, several page templates, and a customizable color scheme, giving you options to tweak and adjust the style.

Sidebars enhance navigation and user experience. With Coral Dark, you have many sidebar options, including left, right, or no sidebar layouts. Additionally, this theme comes with a set of built-in widgets to make your web design journey smoother. With specialized widgets like recent posts or social media feeds, this theme further expands the customization options at your disposal.

Beyond aesthetics, Coral Dark is designed with search engines in mind. It’s lightweight and optimized for speed, providing a fast-loading experience for your visitors. The theme’s codebase is SEO-friendly, increasing the chances of your website ranking higher in search engine results. This will help you get more organic traffics, and give a significant boost in site views.

Key Features

Built-in slideshow with full-width slider and lightbox options.
Several layouts, including single and multi-column layouts.
Extensive typography options, including Google fonts.
Custom widget support with widget area control.
Offers social icons menu.
SEO-ready and offers a clean, optimized codebase.
WooCommerce compatible.
Huge customizable color schemes, 

Price

Free | Coral Dark Pro is priced at €19, with one year of updates. 

3. Uppercase

If you are a blogger, and want a theme to stand out from the crowd, Uppercase can be the best dark theme for your blog site. With its dark mode feature, broad layout options, diverse demos, and enhanced video functionalities, Uppercase is a well-thought-out tool for bloggers who understand the importance of aesthetics, functionality, and user experience.

This theme showcases 9 different demo designs, catering to a broad spectrum of tastes and website requirements. It shows how different blog niches can utilize the theme to reflect their brand and style. Whether you’re a travel enthusiast, a food blogger, or a fashion influencer, there’s a style that’s tailor-made for your content. Each demo is meticulously crafted, ensuring professional looks all over.

A unique layout can distinguish a website from its competitors. Uppercase is aware of this, and hence, it offers multiple layout designs. Whether you’re a fan of grid-style arrangements for a magazine layout, or prefer the traditional list view for a personal blog, this theme will offer you both. You can also customize your site’s appearance with multiple sidebar variations by aligning content and widgets differently.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but videos can be even more attractive. Understanding this, Uppercase offers extensive video support, in addition to text and images. This feature allows content creators to incorporate videos seamlessly within their blog posts. Whether it’s a vlog entry, an interview, or an embedded YouTube video, this theme supports it all, providing a richer, multimedia experience for the audience.

Key Features

9 pre-built demos and multiple layouts, with one-click demo importer and demo switcher.
Smart sticky navigation and sidebar.
Multiple author, co-author, and guest author support.
Provides pagination, lazy load, and infinite load.
SEO support by Yoast, and breadcrumbs.
Google structured data support.
Offers opt-in forms via AJAX and the MailChimp API.
Social media integration, including FaceBook and Twitter.

Price

The regular license price of Uppercase is $59. 

4. Astra

Astra should be your choice if you want a theme that can do pretty much everything, while having the elegance and functionalities of the dark theme. In fact, it’s one of the top themes in the market, perfectly blending design, customization, and performance, while being a cheaper option. Its flexibility, efficiency, and extensive feature set make it an ideal choice for users looking to create a standout WordPress site. 

This theme is designed with performance as its core focus. Its lightweight structure takes less than 50KB of resources to load on the front end, which leads to speedy loading times. Thanks to the modular architecture, you only enable the required features, reducing bloat and ensuring optimal performance. This makes Astra highly suitable for SEO purposes and provides a satisfying user experience.

Astra offers various site layout options, including boxed, full-width, padded, and fluid layouts. It also controls layout settings, including headers, blogs, archives, single pages, posts, etc. On top of that, features like multiple header designs, flexible footer styles, and custom layouts allow you to tweak and adjust every aspect of your website with precision.

While the theme is versatile, starting from scratch is unnecessary. Astra offers a library of pre-built website templates designed by experts. These are custom-made for different niches, projects, and sectors, and provide an easy starting point. From usual eCommerce stores to blogs, there are 240+ ready-to-import website templates, including creative, business, social, etc. – all most every type of site you can think of.

Key Features

Lightweight (only 50 KB resources), ensures blazing fast page loading.
Drag-and-drop element builder.
240+ site templates, including dark theme site templates.
Schema integration and SEO optimization.
Several customizable site layouts.
Locally hosted Google Fontes ensures better CWV – CLS score.
WooCommerce and Gutenberg integration.
Extensive global design options.

Price

Free | Astra Pro is priced at $47/year. 

5. GroundWP

Now, go for GroundWP if you want a full-fledged dark theme, which will help you build your site without extra page builders. This is a block-based theme, and integrates perfectly with Gutenberg. So, you won’t need any coding skills for site creation, or customization. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily edit and tweak every site element.

The best thing about GroundWP is its full-site editing. There aren’t many themes with FSE, and fewer do it right. This theme is got it perfectly, and will allow and help you to build all elements of your site with blocks. Whether it’s headers and footers, a homepage, or simple sections- GroundWP has you covered.  

And if you don’t feel like starting from scratch- no problem there, as this theme offers tons of pre-set patterns for use. There are general patterns, patterns for sections, call-to-action (CTA), pricing tables, headers, footers, and more. All of these are fully customizable, and on top of that, the patterns library is regularly updated. So, there’ll always be something new to try on.

Fluid typography and spacing are the must-mention pluses of GroundWP. The first one enables the texts to scale dynamically, according to visitors’ devices. As a result, the content keeps a constant look over various screens, giving a consistent experience. The same goes for fluid spacing, which adjusts the space between site elements. Couple that with GroundWP’s lightning-fast loading, and the visitors will have a fantastic experience.

Key Features

Block-based theme, requires zero coding skill.
Easy to use drag-and-drop editor.
Offers full site editing. 
Minimalist and clean design.
Offers a vast library of patterns.
Lightweight and SEO friendly.
Dark theme with a sleek look.
Fully customizable.

Price

Completely free. 

6. Neve

Now, if you want the all-in-one solution for the best dark theme for WordPress sites, and have money to spend, choose Neve. Its versatility, speed, features, and efficiency make it the perfect solution for website creators of all expertise levels. Especially the dark theme, which is customizable, allowing users to control the brightness and contrast, to adjust the theme according to the site, not the other way around. 

Mobile browsing is now the majority of web surfing, and Neve knows it. That’s why it offers accelerated mobile pages (AMP) support, making your site better rendered on mobile devices. This theme is also optimized for better performance, and has a reduced lightweight of only 28 KB! That results in better SEO, 100% in Google speed grade, and less than 1 second loading time.

Customization is key for those who like their websites to reflect their style or brand. Neve offers a plethora of customization options. With its versatile customization options, you can adjust layouts, colors, and fonts- every corner of your website can be tweaked to perfection. You can dive deeper with header and footer builders, sidebar options, and the ability to introduce unique elements to your pages. 

Neve offers a plethora of ready-to-import starter sites. Whether crafting a portfolio, a blog, a business website, or an online store, a starter design is waiting for you. There are 15+ free site templates, and 100+ templates in the pro version. And as this theme is compatible with both Elementor and Gutenberg, you’ll have plenty of options.

Key Features

Lightweight (only 28 KB), optimized code for better SEO.
Dark mode with adjustable brightness and contrast.
Custom header and footer builder with full customization.
100+ ready-to-import sites.
Compatible with major page builders like Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, visual composer, etc.
Allows seeing updates in real-time with live customizer.
Custom background support, without any extra plugins.
1-click updates and fast support.

Price

Free | The premium plan for Neve starts at $69/year.

7. Ultra

For today’s last pick, we’ve chosen Ultra, a multipurpose theme designed to cater to all kinds of websites, from personal blogs to e-commerce portals. Its flexibility makes it stand out, allowing users to create the perfect site for their needs without a learning curve. Its dark mode is also customizable and can be scheduled for specific time periods.

Ultra offers an impressive catalog of  60+ pre-designed professional-looking layouts, for those who’d rather not start from scratch. Whether you’re establishing an online store, a portfolio, or a corporate site, there’s a template waiting for you. On top of that, this theme will provide 6 different archive post layout styles, including masonry, grids, polaroid, slider, etc, with control over post-element visibility. 

The magic of layout doesn’t stop at pre-built templates. Ultra takes it up a notch with its smart layout feature, offering multiple header and footer design options, typography, and page style combinations. Whether you’re aiming for sidebar content, no sidebar, or even a sticky header, Ultra’s got your back. You can choose from various post layouts, and even get a full-section video background. 

The Themify page builder comes default with this theme, and it’s another magnificent feature of this theme. Unlike many dark themes requiring additional page builders, Ultra is safe and sound with its in-house builder. It’s a front-end builder, that offers live previews so that changes can be seen in real-time. Its drag-and-drop nature eliminates the need for coding, making website customization an absolute breeze. 

Key Features

60+ pre-designed layouts, fully customizable.
17 header/page styles, and 6 header background options.
Has 5 single posts and 6 archive post layouts.
Has full-section scrolling to provide a better user experience.
Users can schedule the dark mode.
1-click demo import.
Offers image filters.
Advanced theme customizer for better control.

Price

Ultra is set at $59 and can be used on unlimited sites.

Conclusion

Selecting a dark theme can offer a unique and visually appealing design, with benefits ranging from eye comfort to focus on specific content elements. However, It’s essential to note that every website has unique needs.

The 7 Best Dark WordPress Themes (Free & Paid) will be very helpful on this, as we highlighted themes catering to various needs and budgets. These themes have been assessed for functionality, design consistency, customization control, and pre-built templates, on which the bests are chosen. 

But if you still need a quick sum-up, we’ve included that too: Archi, Coral Dark, and Uppercase are for architecture, photography, and blog niches. Astra will provide the cheapest premium dark theme, while GroundWP will provide a full-site editing facility. Both Neve and Ultra are top-end premium dark WordPress themes, while the second one will give a comparatively cheaper option. 

That’s it for today. If you’ve liked the write-up, please share. Leave any questions regarding this post in the comment section, and we’ll answer them happily.

Good luck! 

Affiliate Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase using any of these links, we will get a small commission without any extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.