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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Dark themes can be hard to find!
Most websites have light designs. Following suit, most WordPress themes have light designs with dark text and white backgrounds.
I’ve scoured the web for some of the best WP themes with dark designs made for niches, from gaming sites to luxury eCommerce stores. If you want a beautiful, modern, and highly customizable theme with a dark aesthetic, you’ll love the top themes listed below.
Dark WordPress themes
Every theme listed here has been updated recently and is mobile-friendly, so they look great on every device. There are quite a few industries covered below, so keep scrolling until you find the one that will serve your niche effectively.
Here are my top picks for best dark WordPress themes for 2024.
1. North by Veented (Themeforest)
Theme Description
North is a highly customizable and full-featured theme for one-page websites. Its large array of content blocks, crisp white text, and subdued black background make it a comfortable fit for any niche or website type.
The North theme comes with Visual Composer, which lets you build completely custom pages out of content blocks. There are tons of different block types, including customer testimonials, filterable galleries, sliders, feature/benefit descriptions. You can use this theme to build a business selling products or services or even use it for a personal resume site.
While North does have a dark design, it does not display white text on a black background like you may be looking for. If that’s not an issue, you’re sure to enjoy the otherwise dark background used in this theme. North comes with multiple sliders and gallery layout plugins, plus it has a comprehensive theme options panel. You’ll be able to create any layout to support your business objectives.
2. Kolumn by Edge Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Kolumn is a dark and minimalist blog theme with portfolio capabilities. If you want to start a popular blog and or show creative work, this dark theme is a great pick.
The Kolumn theme has all the essential layout options you need for a blog, including left- and right-sidebar templates. Given the cool homepage design and post format capabilities, you could even use Kolumn for more of a magazine-style website. It would work well for handling larger quantities of content, both text, and image-based.
This sleek, dark WordPress theme uses AJAX to instantly load pages on the site without reloading the entire page and includes simple controls to customize the theme’s colors. The homepage has a gallery, masonry, and classic layouts available, which make it quite versatile. When you factor in the custom-built widgets, shortcodes, and bundled Visual Composer plugin, Kolumn is a great theme for any blogger who desires a dark aesthetic for their site.
3. Divi by Elegant Themes
Theme Description
Divi is an awesome theme because it’s capable of creating any design you want. This example is for a cryptocurrency website, but you can use Divi for any niche.
With Divi, you’ll build your site using an entirely visual editor. Drag-and-drop modules into place and rearrange them to create your page structure. There are dozens of modules available, including sliders, video embeds, and galleries. Each module has a ton of customization options so that you can edit things like the spacing, color, font, and more.
Divi also has layout packs, which include 7 pre-made pages available for import. This makes it easier than ever to get a beautiful website online.
4. Astra by Brainstorm Force
Theme Description
Astra is one of the coolest themes on the market. It comes with a great variety of customization tools, but its main draw is its page builder compatibility.
To use Astra, you’ll install a popular page builder like Elementor to build your site. Astra provides hundreds of pre-designed page templates and blocks, which you can drag-and-drop into place to build your site. No matter what type of site you’re creating, Astra will have plenty of gorgeous elements available to match your aesthetic.
Astra also has some convenient features like its own header and footer builder and simple ways to include widgets and shortcodes throughout your template. It’s a powerful theme for individual site owners and an even more lucrative choice for professional site builders.
5. Refrakt by Imaginem (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Refrakt is a simple and beautiful dark photography theme. The developers, Imaginem, have been making WP themes for quite a long time now and have reached Power Elite status on Themeforest. Refrakt is one of their newest themes and already boasts a full 5-star rating from customers.
The Refrakt theme comes with a large number of slideshow and gallery layouts for featuring your work. Many of these layouts fill the visitor’s screen without scrolling, which creates a uniquely simple and user-friendly experience. The design puts the complete focus on your photographs.
The photo galleries in Refrakt are instantly filterable, and it includes some nice features in the back-end of the site for quickly tagging images to improve filtering. There are event client management aspects added to the theme for sharing and updating photographs for your clientele. Of course, Refrakt has loads of other essential photograph theme features like responsive lightboxes, gallery hover effects, and much more.
6. Woodstock by Temash Design (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you want a dark eCommerce theme, look no further. Woodstock is dark, cool, and luxurious, with a completely responsive design for visitors on all devices.
The black background highlights product images and graphics effectively. This dark theme comes with a slider featured on the homepage, and since it’s bundled with Slider Revolution and Master Slider, you can create and embed highly customizable sliders on any page on your site.
Woodstock is integrated with WooCommerce and is fully compatible with version 3.0. The product pages and category galleries are excellent too. They have huge images and effectively promote the image with few distracting elements. Overall, it’s a well-designed theme and quite beautiful. Woodstock is a top contender for anyone looking for a dark eCommerce theme with many premium bundled plugins.
7. Brave by Bonfire Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Brave is a mobile-friendly blogging theme with a special emphasis on mobile devices. It looks good, albeit a little simple on desktop devices and laptops. If you anticipate a high degree of mobile visitors on your site, Brave will work wonderfully for you.
The Brave theme has a nice minimalist aesthetic. Dark themes can be minimalist too! The typography is sharp and bold. All of the text is very readable on the dark background. For a simple blogging theme, Brave is extremely streamlined and efficient. It uses red as the primary accent color, but this customizable like many features in the theme.
Brave has a unique comment form design and touch-enabled image galleries built-in. One awesome feature in this WP theme is that you can use it for mobile devices only and use an entirely different theme for desktop visitors. This will require selecting and configuring another theme, but it’s a great solution if you want to pare down the options available for small screens. Brave also comes with a handful of shortcodes for special content inclusion and 6 different color schemes.
8. Thefe by ForeverPineTree (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you’re looking for a WordPress theme for a portfolio, Thefe has a unique and stunning style. This dark theme has creative layouts, smooth animations and looks amazing with black and white images.
As a relatively new theme, Thefe has a modern look that will last many years into the future. It has options for image and video backgrounds in addition to plain color backgrounds. With AJAX loading, Thefe is lightning-fast and provides a sophisticated browsing experience.
Regarding features, Thefe has six portfolio layouts and a shortcode generator for building layouts within pages. There’s also a host of standard customization settings like custom colors, typography controls, and background images.
9. Blackfyre by Skywarrior (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The Blackfyre theme has a design well-suited to the gaming industry. It’s an obvious choice for anyone looking to start a gaming forum, league, or clan site.
While Blackfyre is a theme made for video game websites, there’s no reason it can’t be repurposed for any content site. The dark design and modern aesthetic would serve tech blogs and music sites particularly well. Based on the layout, you could easily support frequent publishing with this theme and use it for an online magazine or news site too.
Blackfyre has many features for customizing the design, such as custom colors, fonts, and a complete drag-and-drop page builder. However, it has a few special features for building a community too. There are user profiles and front-end content submissions for user-created news. If you want to generate more engagement on your site, Blackfyre might be the theme you’re looking for.
Which dark theme is best for your site?
Here are some final thoughts to help you make the best choice for your site.
Divi has a unique visual builder that you may love. It’s a good theme to pick if you’re interested in the email form and social media button plugins that come bundled with it as well.
Astra is an extremely flexible template and the best choice for any freelancers looking to make sites for clients.
Lastly, North has a nice, dark design and is a great choice for creating a single-page website.
Thanks for reading! I hope this collection of the best dark WordPress themes helped you find the perfect template for your site.
