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9 Best WordPress Themes For Artists In 2020 (Free & Premium)

Are you a creative professional looking to attract more clients through your website? Searching for the best WordPress themes for artists can seem overwhelming, but we’ve got you covered.

There are several amazing WordPress themes for artists that are explicitly designed to highlight the work you’re most proud of and help you generate more leads.

You can use most WordPress themes for a multitude of purposes. For example, the same theme can be used by professional painters, musicians, fashion designers, and even niche artists such as food photographers/bloggers and travel enthusiasts.

Plus, modern WordPress themes are highly customizable which means you can add or remove any sections from your site’s design and tailor it exactly to your needs.

So if you’ve been thinking about giving your website a makeover (or start one from scratch), I’ve hand-picked some of the best free and premium WordPress themes that’ll allow you to showcase your creative talents to the world.

Keep reading.

How To Choose A WordPress Theme? 5 Important Things To Consider

Your site’s design theme will have a direct impact on its performance, user experience, and sales numbers. So, before we move forward, I want you to understand the things that you need to evaluate when choosing a WordPress theme.

  • Simplicity Of Design

The human mind can only focus on one thing at a time. This is why the best artistic WordPress themes have a simple and clean look with lots of white spaces so that your visitors remain focused on your work.

  • Design Responsiveness

More than 50% of all internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. 

Source

This is why your website theme has to be responsive so that the user experience remains the same no matter what device your visitors are using.

You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to determine if a theme is responsive or not.

  • Page Load Speed

Some themes look beautiful but kill your site’s load speed. And a slow website load speed results in loss of traffic and revenue.

Source

You can measure a theme’s load speed by using Google Page Speed Insights on any site that’s currently using the theme.

  • Page Builder Support

Make sure your theme supports the popular page builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, etc. because these tools allow you to customize your site’s design easily.

  • User Reviews

Finally, don’t ever use a WordPress theme without reading user reviews. Simply search a theme’s name + reviews on Google to find what people are saying about it.

The Best Premium WordPress Themes For Artists

Now that you know what to look for in a WordPress theme, let’s jump right into our list of the best premium WordPress themes for artists.

1. Envy Blog Pro

Best WordPress Themes For Artists

Envy Blog Pro is a modern, minimal, fast, and fully responsive WordPress theme that’s ideal for creative professionals and bloggers.

It has a simple and clean look that makes sure your content takes the center stage while the theme gives your visitors a smooth and pleasant user-experience.

Envy Blog Pro is a multipurpose theme that creative professionals and agencies can use alike. It comes with 6 different header layouts and 7 different Hero Section layouts to make sure your site’s design matches your brand persona.

Envy Blog Pro - Best WordPress Themes For Artists

It also comes with custom widgets and gallery post types to help you showcase your best work in a visual and eye-catching format.

Plus, it offers complete WooCommerce support to help you add a minimal and clean online store to your site.

Overall, Envy Blog Pro covers most bases when it comes to artistic website design which is why it is among our best selling WordPress themes.

More Info/Download

2. Ohio 

Ohio is an amazingly versatile, responsive, and feature-rich premium WordPress theme that can be used for a lot of different objectives.

It comes with a complete set of portfolio templates using which you can showcase your work in any way you want.

It also comes with more than two dozen ready-to-use demo websites for every major industry. You can edit and customize the demo sites using Elementor which is the theme’s default page builder tool.

Ohio also comes with hundreds of free and premium fronts from Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit so that you can tailor your site exactly to your needs.

More Info/Download

3. Arlo

Arlo is a great example of a simple, clean, and minimal but visually attractive WordPress theme that’s perfect for creative professionals, agencies, and businesses alike.

It’s a fast and 100% responsive WordPress theme that looks equally impressive on a desktop, iPhone, Android, or tablet screen.

I particularly like the modern portfolio layouts available with Arlo that different creative professionals and artists can use depending on their website style.

Arlo comes with several beautiful demo sites with Elementor as its default page builder. This means you can make any changes to the templates you want using simple drag & drop elements without needing to write a single line of code.

Other key features include custom widgets, full width & standard layouts, HTML5 video headers, multilingual versions, and a lot more.

In short, it’s a pretty impressive WordPress theme for artists and creative professionals.

More Info/Download

4. Yugen Pro

Yugen Pro - One Of The Best WordPress Themes For Artists

If you’re a writer, travel blogger, or photographer, you’ll love the minimal and stylish look of Yugen Pro which is among our most popular WordPress themes.

Yugen Pro intelligently makes use of white spaces to ensure that your visitors remain focused on your content while the responsive design silently complements it in the background.

It has all the necessary features that artists and creative professionals need in a website to highlight their work and generate leads. 

For example, it comes with a ready to use pop-up widget to help you convert your traffic into subscribers, a contact page with Contact Form 7, and a modern blog layout to help you get started with content marketing.

It’s a translation ready theme that’s optimized for search engines and comes with a number of other useful features like a “Coming Soon” page template, sticky headers, Instagram feeds, custom widgets, image gallery, and a lot more.

If you like minimal design themes, Yugen Pro won’t disappoint you.

More Info/Download

5. Uncode

With 70+ demo sites (one-click installation), stylish visual elements, and extensive branding options, Uncode is among the most impressive WordPress themes for artists.

The fully responsive theme comes with 6 different menu styles, customizable headers, and Revolution Slide to help you showcase your best work wherever you want.

It has the WPBakery page builder plugin by default which means you can modify your site’s look and feel even if you’ve never written a line of code before.

Uncode also comes with Google Fonts, TypeKit, Fontdeck, and animated headers along with Instagram, Spotify, and Soundcloud integrations to give you a complete branding package for your site.

More Info/Download

6. Ashade

Ashade is a modern and minimal WordPress theme designed primarily for professional photographers, travel bloggers, and painters to showcase their best work and generate leads.

However, three different homepage layouts and Elementor Page Builder support means the theme can be used by freelance writers, musicians, and other creative artists as well.

The theme comes with Parallax, Simple, and Fade sliders and various Gallery layouts that you can use to show your work on a dedicated page or as a segment of a bigger page.

WooCommerce support and ready-to-use eCommerce templates make Ashade a complete package for artists looking to sell their work online.

More Info/Download 

7. Illustrator

Illustrator is a stunning WordPress theme that’s designed specifically for storytellrers, freelancers, painters, animators, and other creative professionals.

It is full of versatile design elements and layouts that you can alter depedning on your business needs It also offers 15 beautiful purpose-built homepage templates for different creative niches.

You also get to choose from 10 different portfolio templates that include animated portfolio, video portfolio, static, and classic portfolio pages among many others.

The theme’s code is optimized for fast load speeds and has the necessary SEO elements to give your content that best chance to rank for your target keywords in search results.

Overall, it’s one of the most feature-rich and visually pleasing creative WordPress themes I’ve seen in a while.

More Info/Download

The Best Free WordPress Themes For Artists

If you’re not ready to buy a premium WordPress theme for now, here are a couple of brilliant free WordPress themes for artists that you should try.

8. Astra

With more than 1 million downloads and thousands of 5 star reviews, Astra is among the most popular free WordPress themes of all time.

It offers dozens of highly-optimized, responsive, and stylish design templates for every major niche including themes for creative artists, professional designers, painters, and freelancers.

You can download any template with a single click and customize it using Elementor which comes as a part of Astra.

The backend functions of the theme are so detailed that it’s comparable to any premium theme in the market. 

More Info/Download

9. Atento

Atento is a powerful and minimal free WordPress theme that makes intelligent use of white spaces and gives centerstage to your content.

It’s a fully responsive theme that comes with multiple homepage, header, and blog layouts, and gives you everything that you need to showcase your work and generate leads from your site.

If you’re looking for a clean and clutter-free theme that’s built like a premium WordPress theme, Atento is certainly worth trying.

More Info/Download

Have You Chosen A WordPress Theme For Your Site?

I could’ve extended this article to include a dozen more themes but I intentionally limited myself to the most versatile, feature-rich, and stylish WordPress themes for artists and creative professionals.

These responsive, high-performance, and minimal WordPress themes give you all the options and features to set up a modern looking website that strengthens your brand image and helps you generate more clients for your business.

Let me know if you have any specific questions about any of these themes or any other artistic themes that you think I should’ve included in this post.

12 Essential WordPress Tools Every Site Needs

When starting up a new WordPress site there are just certain things that you NEED.  Notice I didn’t say “want” like it’d be a thing that’s nice to have. Because if you take your site’s performance, and potential, seriously you can’t stand to do without these 10 plugins, themes, and tools for your site.

This goes for existing sites too. If you’ve had a WordPress site for some time but want to spruce things up a bit and get your site firing on all cylinders then make sure you’ve got all of these tools running on your site ASAP.

Fair warning, this list is opinionated. We’re not giving you multiple options for every category of plugin or tool you might need, but giving you The Best options out there, from our experience helping build hundreds of sites over 5+ years. So let’s dive in.

Good, Fast, and Reliable Hosting

This seems obvious, but so many of new site owners miss the mark here. There are tons of options out there when it comes to WordPress hosting, and many providers make strong promises, but in our experience just a few deliver really excellent service and value.

Here there are two clear winners in our book.  One that is a bit less expensive and is great for those just getting started, and one for power users who have significant traffic to their site.

If you’re just getting started or don’t have a lot of traffic going to your site we love Siteground hosting.  In fact that’s what this site is hosted on. They have plans starting from $5/month, which also makes them one of the most affordable options in the managed WordPress hosting business.

One of the things we love about Siteground is the value you get.  There are loads of bells and whistles included in even their cheapest hosting plans, making this the clear choice for those just getting started.

If you’re running a site that has significant traffic, or you want just that bit extra power behind your site then the next move up in the managed WordPress hosting realm is Kinsta.  A relatively new player on the market Kinsta has the benefit of having built a fantastic platform using all the most modern web technologies.

Powered by Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta offers enterprise level WordPress hosting at an affordable price. They have plans for single sites starting at $30/month, which include automatic backups, done-for-you site migrations, managed site setup to optimize speed, and incredible customer service that are available 24/7.

Caching Plugin

As your site gets more pages, images, and other resources it is a good idea to put some of those more static resources (i.e. things that don’t change very often) in a cache layer so that your site loads faster.  Caching is just a way of storing some of your website files and assets in a place that makes them available more quickly to visitors, and search engines.

In fact speaking of search engines even as recently as 2020 Google has said that site speed plays a significant role in the ranking of sites.  So, if you’re writing content and want your site to rank for key terms it’s best to get a caching plugin on your site to speed it up.

The clear winner in this category is WP-Rocket. WP-Rocket is a one-click, set it and forget it kind of tool. Upload, activate and turn on their caching plugin and you’re all set.

SEO Plugin

We mentioned search engines like Google ranking your site higher if your site is fast. There are also things you can do to the actual structure of your site and the content on it to make your WordPress site more likely to get ranked highly by Google.

And when it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress there’s a clear winner: Yoast SEO – this tool has both free and paid options (the free is good enough for most all sites in our opinion) and this gives you all the tools you need to more clearly describe what your site and its content is about to search engines like Google.

Content marketing, or just organic rankings of your site in general, is still one of (if not THE) best way to grow a brand online. If you’re not paying attention to SEO today’s the day to start.

Security Plugin

One of the downsides of WordPress, and the fact that they run nearly 1/3 of the entire internet, is that it’s a popular target for hackers and those who wish to exploit weaknesses in websites.  Add on top of that the fact that with the 3rd party theme and plugin ecosystem around WordPress there are just a lot of opportunities for hackers to affect our sites.

But because of that a few very powerful tools have been developed to monitor your site and keep it clean from malicious code, attacks, and minimize the chances of your site being affected by those who wish to do it harm.

And here again there is a clear winner: Sucuri. Sucuri has free and paid options, and even the free option is extremely powerful both in monitoring your site, and keeping unwanted people from exploiting your WordPress site.

We use Sucuri on this site, and absolutely love it. In fact it’s saved our site more than a few times…so it’s well worth the small yearly cost we pay for it.

Backup Service

Even if you’re on a higher end managed WordPress hosting service, like Kinsta, having a backup service that keeps a recent copy of your site is a great idea.

If you ever want to work on your site locally on your computer, or, heaven forbid, you need to restore a previous version of your site because of an attack, you’ll be very thankful you set up an automated backup service for your WordPress site.

And UpdraftPlus makes this almost too easy. They have a free version that is excellent, and a paid version if you want a few more features like automatic Dropbox or Google Drive integration to store your backup files in a separate place from the rest of your WordPress site resources.

That one dark day when your site goes down and you need to restore it from a backup you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you took these next few minutes to set up automated backups.  They’re like a get out of jail free card for your site.

Their backup WordPress plugin has a free version and a premium, paid version.

Email Optin Provider

No matter what kind of site you’re running there is one single best way to communicate with your site visitors, fans, audience, and customers: email.

I know, I know, you say “It’s 2020, shouldn’t I be on TikTok or even Instagram?”.  Maybe…but that’s not all.  Social media is a great way to start a relationship with your audience and customers, but talk to any savvy marketer and they say that hands down the best way to connect deeply with your site visitors and they go straight to email.

This brings up the need to have an easy, and effective, way of gathering website visitors’ email addresses.  An email optin service, like OptinMonster, is a fantastic tool in your website quiver.  With this you’ll be able to present a variety of offers for your website visitors that allow them to enter their email address in return for something from you. This could be a coupon code, a free course, a downloadable template, or anything else that is of value to your specific target audience.

Email Marketing Service

Now that we’ve established that email marketing is The Best Way to deeply connect with your audience and share updates with them, and that a tool like Optinmonster is a great way to gather those email addresses, it’s time to send some emails.

Here again the choice is easy: Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is one of the original players in the email marketing industry, and they’ve done nothing but get better over time. Today Mailchimp is recognized as a powerhouse both for those just getting started with email, and those power users who want a LOT out of a tool.  Mailchimp has a generous free plan, and as you get more subscribers their plans scale very fairly with the amount of subscribers you have on the platform.

Page Builder

Even using a beautiful and flexible theme like those here at Precise Themes, you often times want a way to customize some pages on the site. The ability to quickly add beautiful looking elements to your site, without learning how to code or decipher what a theme is doing is a huge advantage.  And here is where Elementor shines.

Elementor is a page builder, which means it works alongside your WordPress them to give you additional flexibility and customization to any post or page on your site.  Whether you heavily design your site (almost entirely) with Elementor or just add a bit of splash to certain pages, this tool gives you the tools you need to add great looking, and high converting assets to your WordPress site.

SEO Research Tool

We almost didn’t include this in our list of essential tools that every WordPress site needs, but we’ve seen such enormous success in the growth of this site and others like it that we had to include it.

Furthering the discussion of content marketing and SEO you need a tool to help you create a plan for crafting interesting, in demand, and easy to rank for pieces of content on your site.  This is typically referred to as “keyword research”, or just generally creating a “content calendar”.

Using a keyword research tool to map out what articles you can write blog posts about that get traffic, have high “intent” (meaning that people that are searching for those terms are actually looking to take some kind of action on your site like buy your product), and aren’t super difficult to rank for is one of the most overlooked aspects of a high performing blog.

And there is absolutely no better tool at this than Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO research, tracking, and data tool for your website. It is where we do all of the research about our competitors, areas we can write about that you as our readers are interested in, and track our organic keyword rankings.

If you’re doing any kind of blogging or content marketing then this tool is a MUST in your marketing arsenal.

Mail Sending

How often do you check your Spam folder? And even then how likely are you to pull emails out of there and actually read/reply/engage with them?  Not very often if you’re anything like me.

Having emails from your WordPress site (like comment notifications, password resets, user invites, etc.) is paramount if you’re using the built in functionality inside WordPress. And I have to say this is one place where almost all shared hosting falls short. They just aren’t “made for” sending email, and as a result email tools like Gmail often flag their sending IP address as Spam.

The workaround for this is using a tool like WP Mail SMTP allows you to easily set up the emails that are sent directly from your WordPress site to go through a dedicated email service, like your own Gmail account.  This is a huge win for deliverability and your audience being able to interact with your site via email notifications

Tracking and Analytics

There is perhaps no better free tool out there for site owners than Google Analytics. The ability to easily track how many visitors your site gets, which are your best performing pages, and loads of other data just wouldn’t be popular without an analytics tool like Google Analytics. And the best part is it’s entirely FREE.

In order to install Google Analytics on your site, you can use a tool like Monster Insights, or if you have other tracking and analytics scripts you’ll want to use on your site it’s worth using a general purpose tool like Insert Headers and Footers.

Forms Plugin

If you have a site then you need a way for people to send you questions, feedback, or share something with you in an organized way. The solution for this is sometimes just an email address, but often times you want to structure things a little more and place a form on your site for visitors to fill out.

The most common use of a form for many of us is a Contact Form. Here you’ll have fields like Name, Email Address, and a Message text box for visitors to send you information.

And a fantastic tool for this is Gravity Forms.  We’ve been using Gravity Forms for years now and it’s both extremely simple to use, but also very powerful when you use some of their add-on modules like Zapier, Stripe, and Trello integrations to extend the native functionality of this forms plugin.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve listed 12 of the most popular tools we like (and use on this site) for most all WordPress sites. But there are loads of other great tools out there. What tools do you use on every WordPress site you spin up? Drop a comment in below and tell us all about it.

Disclosure – This post contains some affiliate links which means we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you purchase something after clicking a link here. Thanks for the support!

WordPress 5.5 Theme Update Notice

Stay Tune for updates

Now all our themes are compatible with the latest WordPress Version (5.5).
Please update latest version theme. For pro users please login to our site by using your email which is used to purchased theme. after login, you will get the latest theme in the dashboard. download it and upload the zip folder to your site via FTP or wp panel.

If you have any query please ping us at info@precisethemes.com

Thank you

6. The issue has been solved in Elan Pro and Yugen Pro as well. Please update the latest theme.
5. Fixed issue on Anteno Pro and released new version( atento-pro-1.0.9). Please update latest version

4. Working on Anteno Free and Anteno Pro

3. Fixed issue on Envy Free and Envy Pro and released a new version (envy-blog-pro-1.5.3.zip). Please kindly update the latest version.

2. Working on Envy Blog Free and Envy Blog Pro

1. blogasm-pro1.0.6 new version is released.  please update the pro theme.

Dear Valuable Customers,

We are getting one major issue in our theme with the latest WordPress Version (5.5)

In the dashboard, the Customizer section is not accessible after updating WordPress 5.5.

Please don’t update to Latest Version for a few times. ee are working on this issue.
If you already uppadte WordPress 5.5, for temporary solution or to overcome this issue please downgrade current WordPress Version (5.5 to 5.4.2)

To downgrade WordPress version from dashboard Please follow few steps.

Login your site wp-admin panel

1. Install and activate a plugin called wp rollback or wp downgrade plugin. 
2. Go to settings  >> click Downgrade option
3. Follow plugin instruction
4. After changing code in core, you can see the customizer section will display in the dashboard.

Since the new version includes several major changes, it is sure that thousands of themes and plugins are not compatible with the new editor and might bring issues to your website. So, we recommend that you do not run the update directly on your production site. Instead, consider setting up a test site to play around with the newest version first. And if everything seems fine for you then you can go to your main site.

The Most Effective And Least Effective Backlinks In SEO

There are many types of backlinks when it comes to search engine optimization. Not all of them are created equal. Below are the most effective types of backlinks in SEO, as well as ones that are not effective and should be avoided.

1. Editorial Backlinks: The Best & The Most Effective

Without a doubt, the most effective and best backlinks for SEO is editorial backlinks. Editorial backlinks come in many forms, such as a high quality and highly regarded site citing your site as source for the information on their site. Another example of an editorial link to your site is when a website cites your website as the creator of a photo or info-graphic.

Precise Themes
Precise Themes

Editorial backlinks can easily improve your website’s rank. All you need is a handful of high quality editorial backlinks to notice a difference very quickly.

2. Forum Links: The Worst & Least Effective

Forum backlinking is thought of as being a spamming technique, when the sole purpose is to post your content over and over again. For example, a lot of people will visit a single forum and go from post to post leaving a link back to their own content. This is considered spam.

A few years ago, website owners would jump from forum to forum leaving comments and a link back to their sites within those comments. A lot of times, the comments were short and provided little to no value. What’s even worse is sometimes the links were left on irrelevant forums. The bottom line is you want to stay far away from forums, unless you plan on actually providing high quality comments and follow the rules of the forum.

3. Guest Post Bio Links: Good & Effective

Guest post blogging links aren’t always allowed. Some blogs don’t let you post to their site and link back to your own site. However, many blogs allow their guest bloggers to include a link back to their own website via their author bio box. Of course a link inside the post’s body would be preferred, but a link in the bio can do wonders in regards to SEO.

Here’s a tip, find 3-4 quality blogs that are looking for guest bloggers and that allow links within author bios. Ask if you can guest blog 2-3 times in a span of a few weeks. If you do this, your own site’s rankings should drastically improve.

4. Directory Links: Not The Best & Not That Effective

There are a ton of article directories out there. A lot of them are low-quality and allow any old links to be submitted. You want to avoid those ones and try your best to stick to the directories that have a solid reputation and that are considered to be authoritative.

Do note there is nothing wrong with submitting your URL to a few article directories. If you do it every now and then, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It’s when you do it all the time, that’s when your site might draw negative attention from Google and other search engines.

5. Newsworthy Press Release Links: Great Backlinks And Can Be Very Effective

Press releases are great for two reasons, with one being you can build up a massive number of backlinks, while spreading the word about the topic you are writing about. Ideally, you want to write a press release when you actually have something newsworthy to share or something very interesting you want people to know about your brand.

After you create your press release, you want to alert media outlets. If they think your press release is newsworthy, then they will distribute it for you. Also, there are third-party companies that can distribute your press release for you and they will contact you when media outlets have picked it up.

6. Paid Links: Horrible And Won’t Work In The Long Run

Paid links are among the worse of the worse backlinks in SEO. These types of links are usually part of link-wheels. These are sites that claim they can get you hundreds of backlinks within a short period of time, all for a low fee. Go ahead and pay for them if your goal is to ruin your site’s rankings because Google has already taken a stance against paid links.

Those are the best and worst backlinks in SEO. You want to choose your backlinking strategy wisely because if you don’t, then your site’s rankings can suffer greatly. If you want to improve your rankings, then stick with a good backlink strategy and try to get links back to your site from some of the above sources.