15 Best and Free Responsive WordPress Themes

As there is a growing necessity for people to interact with the web by using various devices, like mobile phones, tablets and notebooks, a question of responsive design becomes very urgent. From our WordPress Series we present you the Best free and responsive WordPress Themes!

Since Responsive Web Design is slowly taking the marketplace, there are more and more free WordPress Themes that are designed with responsive web design to display well in different screen sizes. There are a number of great WordPress themes with responsive layouts and I’ve collected them in this Article for you.

The quality of these Responsive WordPress Themes is really good and usable to hack into a customized Theme. You can just have a quick look at the designs by clicking the ‘demo’- button. I hope you’ll like my collection of responsive WordPress Themes, .. so please, let’s rock!

 

Twenty Eleven – Responsive WordPress Theme

The 2011 theme for WordPress is sophisticated, lightweight, and responsive. Make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background — then go further with available theme options for light or dark color scheme, custom link colors, and three layout choices. Included are styles for print and for the admin editor, support for featured images (as custom header images on posts and pages and as large images on featured “sticky” posts), and special styles for six different post formats.

Demo | Download

 

Mixfolio – Responsive WordPress Theme

Mixfolio is a free responsive, HTML5 portfolio WordPress Theme by Graph Paper Press. It is a great portfolio theme to showcase your projects or images because of a filterable Portfolio with jQuery integrated with WordPress.  Assign Posts to specific Post Formats, such as Image, Gallery, Video, Standard, Quote and Link. Mixfolio changes post designs based on the Post Format.

Demo | Download

 

Yoko – Responsive WordPress Theme

Yoko is a great looking and flexible WordPress theme. It comes with a responsive layout based on CSS3 media queries, and the theme adjusts to different screen sizes. The design is optimized for big desktop screens, tablets and small smartphone screens. To make your blog post more flexible you can use different kinds of post formats such as gallery, image, video, aside, link or quotes. To customize the theme you can choose your own background, link color, logo and header image.

Demo | Download

 

Respo – Responsive WordPress Theme

Respo is amazing WordPress theme with clean, sleek and customizable design. The theme is suitable for presonal blogs and/or online magazines. This is a responsive theme, able to adapt its layout to the screen size of your visitors. The sliders for this theme is responsive too, which means it works super sleek on mobile device like ipad or iphone.

Demo | Download

 

Orion – Responsive WordPress Theme

This beautiful fully responsive theme is ideal for design agency website, designer portfolio etc. Theme has a light, clear, minimalistic design and complementing typography. The homepage features a jQuery slider for featured posts. Theme supports wordpress 3 features like custom menu, featured thumbnail etc. Theme also comes with a theme option page.

Demo | Download

 

Retouch – Responsive WordPress Theme

Retouch is a responsive one-column WordPress photo theme with polaroid type design, sleek gallery interface, widgets and paper tab drop down menus. The three column gallery thumbnails open up in lightbox style covering the full window and Retouch supports Image and Gallery Post formats in addition to standard post formats. While this is a perfect theme to showcase one image per post, you can aslo add blog posts with embedded galleries and videos in the standard post format.

Demo | Download

 

Blaskan – Responsive WordPress Theme

Blaskan is a responsive theme built for smartphones, tablets as well as laptop and desktop computers. A forever free high quality theme focused on what WordPress does best: blogging.

Demo | Download

 

Codium Extend – Responsive WordPress Theme

Codium Extend is a minimalist and responsive theme for wordpress and ready for all the wordpress 3.+ feature like custom menus, colors or background. Light colors and white is perfect for having a really nice blog!

Demo | Download

 

Origin – Responsive WordPress Theme

Origin is a simple and elegant theme with responsive layout for better viewing on mobile devices – smartphones and tablets. It’s built on the Hybrid Core framework and inherits its professional and well-organized coding practices, making it an excellent starting point for further customization and development.

Demo | Download

 

Skeleton – Responsive WordPress Theme

This WordPress theme is a Responsive Web Design (RWD) based on the popular Skeleton Boilerplate grid framework for fluid columns. This theme works in all modern desktop browsers and uses CSS3 media queries to deliver a fluid browsing experience to tablets and smart phones.

Demo | Download

 

SimpleMarket – Responsive WordPress Theme

SimpleMarket is a theme designed to work for the MarketPress plugin but also to work without it just like any other theme. It comes with responsive design that easily adapts to a variety of screen sizes and devices. The theme comes with many of the WordPress 3.0x features – custom header, custom menus, custom background and post formats to name a few.

Demo | Download

 

Scherzo – Responsive WordPress Theme

A mobile first, responsive theme for WordPress. Scherzo is a clean, readable theme that boasts a mobile first design, which means it displays perfectly on all mobile phones as well as desktop monitors. It requires version 3 or higher of WordPress and makes use of HTML5 structural tags, the hatom microformat and ARIA landmark roles.

In plain language that means search engines will be able to interpret your content easily while screen readers will be able to navigate it with no problems.

Demo | Download

 

Foundation – Responsive WordPress Theme

Foundation, for WordPress (a blank starter theme), features everything ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate have to offer, however, some changes have been made to tailer it to WordPress. All your common WordPress template files are included as well as Orbit for WordPress, ZURB’s image and content slider tailored for WordPress, with the ability to manage your slider through WordPress.

Demo | Download

 

BonPress – Responsive WordPress Theme

BonPress is the perfect personal blog theme. Packed with Post Formats (audio, video) feature and multiple Custom Widgets, like Twitter, Flickr, will offer you a unique experience from blogging. This theme supports “Post Formats” feature, which allows you to create easily different types of posts, like Audio, Video, Image.

Demo | Download

 

Flexible – Responsive WordPress Theme

Flexible is a WordPress theme that helps optimize and present content to fit any screen size. It gives readers a seamless experience regardless device or platform. Flexible includes an essential and very easy to set up Facebook fangate. It is also preloaded with themekit for site wide painless design customization.

Demo | Download

 

Watch Out for Fake Responsive WordPress Themes

There are a lot of WordPress Themes that claim that they are responsive, like Gridly, Photon, etc. But these themes use a masonry jQuery that makes the website somewhat adaptive! If you look at the Gridly WordPress Theme at a single post, you’ll see it’s NOT responsive at all?

For a website to call itself responsive there are 3 features needed, these 3  key technical features are the heart of every responsive Web design:

1. Media queries and media query listeners
2. A flexible grid-based layout that uses relative sizing
3. Flexible images and media, through dynamic resizing or CSS

Actually some of the above showcased themes don’t have a fluid design, e.g. responsive images, media and content .. hmm?