13 Best Free WordPress Themes with Demo Content Easy Layouts
WordPress, the Content Management System(CMS), contributes to 40% of the websites in WWW. This indicates the popularity of this easily usable CMS.
I want to stress the easily usable CMS as we will understand in this article how easy it is to set up a theme and install the demo content. Though this is not something we will be discussing in this article, you can create these stunning modern homepage slider designs just out of the box in WordPress.
If you want to know what CMS is please read this article, I have explained it in brief at the beginning of the article about CMS and WordPress.
Once you are familiar with it let us understand a little bit in detail about the themes, that help us in the overall appearance of the website.
Let me tell you one thing, in my experience of about 13 years as a WordPress developer, I have not seen a free theme that is even close to what Kadence offers.
With that liking of mine, let us move ahead taking Kadence as an example. Let us install the theme and continue appreciating it.
How to install a Theme (considering Kadence as an example)?
Initially, Kadence was not available in the WordPress theme repository. But now it is available easily. All you have to do is to go to the Appearance menu from the left sidebar and select themes.
On the top, you will find a button “Add New”, to add a new theme, in our case Kadence theme.
Once you do that you will be redirected to this page where you can either upload a theme or search for the theme from the search bar.
Type Kadence in the search bar and you will get the list of themes related to that. Ignore the rest and hover over the theme that says Kadence and Install.
We are not yet ready to activate it as it is always advisable to install a child theme and activate that instead of the main theme.
So, let us install the child theme by first downloading from this link the child theme. Once you download, upload the theme from the top left button that says upload the theme.
You can drag and drop the theme to the big rectangle block and install the child theme.
You will see that the child theme is uploaded. Hover over the theme, install and activate it.
The above steps can be followed to install any theme of your liking. But make sure you install its child theme and activate it.
Are there any truly free WordPress themes?
There are more than 5000 genuinely free WordPress themes out there in the WordPress repository. All you have to do is go to “Appearance > Theme > Add Theme” and search for the required theme in the provided search bar.
Now that you have understood how to install a theme, we should know that not many themes will have the Demo Content out of the box.
What is Demo Content in WordPress?
Once you have installed a theme, what if you had an option to select from a set of layouts that are pre-created just for you?
Just by clicking on the import button of the layout, a set of new pages will be created with the layout that you just imported.
This is what is called demo content. The demo content can be edited to suit your needs.
Where can I find demo content for free WordPress themes?
Not all the free themes out there in the WordPress repository comes with the demo content. In fact, from the initial days of WordPress to my notice, only the premium themes will have this feature.
But off-late, I have listed out the free WordPress themes that provide you with the demo content out of the box. So, essentially you will only have to invest in the domain name and the hosting provider.
The rest of the things are taken care of by WordPress and its free theme.
How do I get demo content from a WordPress theme?
Let us again consider by favorite WordPress theme, Kadence, and see how we can make use of the Demo Content. This will make you realize, how easy it is to use these free themes and form your own layout with just a click of a button.
From our previous sections, you have installed the Kadence theme. To check out the different types of demo content that Kadence offers, you should have a few plugins installed.
Installing plugins is out of the scope of this article. Let us see the plugins we have to install to get the Kadence demo content working.
- Kadence Blocks
- Kadence Starter Templates
The first one is the Gutenberg blocks that Kadence offers. You can check out the below video on what Gutenberg blocks are.
The demo content is built on these Kadence blocks. After you install Kadence blocks, you can start installing the Kadence Starter Templates that have the layouts of different pages that automatically get imported to each of the pages.
Once you install the plugins, you can go to “Appearance > Starter Templates”.
A list of all the layouts is listed and you can start importing the demo by clicking on the layout.
From there you will be given an option to either import just the single page or a complete set of the layouts that the particular demo offers.
The pages that you will be importing will automatically get set as new pages seamlessly.
What is the most popular free WordPress theme?
The most popular WordPress Theme is Astra, Though it is popular among the WordPress community, there are not as many options as some other themes that we have been using for free.
Let us see for ourselves the free themes that offer to us with the demo content. We will list them in alphabetical order.
1. Astra
As we have told in one of the previous sections, this is the most popular free theme in WordPress. This comes with some extraordinary features that help us build a website without knowing the code part of WordPress.
Not only that, this theme is extremely fast in the sense that:
- It takes less than about 50k of resources.
- This loads in just about half a second depending on how loaded the WordPress instance is.
- It does not use jQuery, but instead uses Vanilla Javascript, which prevents render-blocking.
- Every piece of Astra’s code is optimized for it to work efficiently.
- Google fonts are self-hosted in the sense that the google fonts are stored locally on the computer.
- The header, footer, and layouts are all easily customizable.
- This supports demo content.
Enable Demo Content for Astra, WordPress Theme
Install the theme, and activate it. Go to “Appearance > Astra options”.
A little below in the top right sidebar, you can find the link to “Install Importer plugin“.
Install the plugin and you will have to follow the instructions from there to get your page layouts. From there you can start importing the page layouts and enjoy!
2. Blocksy
This is a theme that is extremely light for the features it serves. The ranges of features start by helping us with suggesting several plugin installations that are in itself light.
It supports headers, footers, WooCommerce, Newsletters, Trending Posts, a Lot of custom widgets, Google fonts, a Cookies notice module, and a dark mode too.
Since most of the features come with the theme, the loading time is not compromised. You can have a look at the speed here:
| Google PageSpeed | 95% |
| Pingdom Performance Grade | 92% |
| GTmetrix PageSpeed Score | 100% |
| GTmetrix YSlow Score | 88% |
Enable Demo Content for Blocksy, WordPress Theme
To enable the demo, you need to activate the theme and go to the Blocksy menu from the Appearance Menu in the sidebar.
Scroll down a little and you will find in the page Blocksy companion, that has the Demo Content.
After installing, you will be redirected to a page where you can see the following:
You can see the Demo Content from the Starter Sites tab where you can seamlessly import and enjoy it!
3. ColorMag
This is one of the many themes developed by themegrill. As the name itself suggests, this is popularly used among developers who want to develop a magazine or news website.
This has features that suit a newspaper or magazine blog with constantly changing content on the home page.
There are dedicated places for ads making the theme earn some good income using ads.
There are some limited features in the free theme like a 3 header layout, sticky header, Gutenberg compatibility, eCommerce support, Hook for developers, 2 footer area styles, 3 different styles of advertising via widgets, etc.
You can view more details on their website here.
There are 7 built-in demo contents that we can enable.
Enable Demo Content for ColorMag, WordPress Theme
Go to ColorMag options after activating the them from Appearance Menu.
Install the ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin and activate it. This will add extra menus to the appearance menu. You will see the following links.
By clicking on the demo importer you can import the demos and enjoy them!
4. CosmosWP
An extremely fast theme that can load the default WordPress instance in less than half of a second.
Let us first see the speeds and go ahead in importing the content demos.
| Pingdom | 206 ms |
| 100 | |
| YSlow | 99% |
| GTMetrix | 100% |
Like every other free theme out there, even this theme supports WooCommerce out of the box, we can customize the header and footer, and additional typography.
In addition, the theme supports the following page builders.
- Elementor
- Beaver Builder
- Divi
- Visual Composer
- Gutentor and many more
Enable Demo Content for CosmosWP, WordPress Theme
Install and activate CosmosWP Theme. Once you install the theme, you will start seeing this header on all the pages.
All you need to do is to click on Get Started with CosmosWP. You will start to see the Demo Content from across different categories that you can import and enjoy seamlessly.
5. Hello Elementor
As the suffix of the hello theme suggests, this theme is for Elementor. Elementor is a page builder that has tons of options that you can drag and drop while building a page layout.
There is a lot of competition among the themes as to which one is the best when it comes to speed. Let us see the speed details of this theme.
| Load time | 1/4 second |
| Size | 6 KB |
| No. of requests from the server | 2 |
Enable Demo Content for HelloElementor, WordPress Theme
Activate the theme, along with the Elementor plugin. Some new menus will be created in the left sidebar.
Select the Kit Library there, you will find the demo contents from that link.
Import from those demo content and enjoy!
6. Kadence
I have been a fan of this theme for a very long time. But after analyzing some themes for this very article, I realized that there is a very tough competition for this theme as well.
This theme comes with its own Gutenberg kit, enabling modifying the header and footer, fast, smooth, performance-minded, very easy to customize, etc. This works with both Gutenberg and Elementor page builders.
Being a very user-friendly theme, let us see how to import the demo content for this theme shortly.
Enable Demo Content for Kadence, WordPress Theme
Once you enable the theme, you need to install a few plugins to install the demo content to be enabled. You can follow this section of this article about the plugins and how to import the demo content and enjoy!
7. Neve
This theme comes under the most popular themes along with Astra. This is a theme developed by Themeisle, which is targeted more at mobile than desktops.
The first developer to support AMP in mobile. You can check what AMP is, from here. Let us see the speed of this theme from the following table.
| 100% | |
| GTM | 1 second load time |
| Pingdom | 28kb file size |
This theme supports Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, and Divi Builder.
Enable Demo Content for Neve, WordPress Theme
To enable the demo content, after activating the theme, the theme will automatically display the below content at the top.
Once you click the button you will be taken to a different page that suggests you install a new plugin. Once you install and activate the plugin, you will be able to import the demo content and enjoy it!
8. OceanWP
This theme too is very popular among the free WordPress themes. This comes with all of what most of the other themes offer, including the sticky header which is not common for a free version of a theme.
It has 7 customizable header styles, seamlessly including social media icons on the header, multiple logo options, and 3 mobile menu styles.
Enable Demo Content for OceanWp, WordPress Theme
As usual, activate the theme and there you go, you will be shown something like this on the header.
That’s it. You will be redirected to a page that is as follows, from where you can click on install demos to start importing the demo content and enjoy!
9. Phlox
A not so popular theme, but us a worth try. It can create any type of websites like blog, portfolio, business, agency, news & magazine, food & restaurant, travel, and photography including, WooCommerce Storefront.
It has an integration with Elementor, Visual Composer, and SiteOrigin page builders.
Enable Demo Content for Phlox, WordPress Theme
Activate the plugin and you can see the below image, which can install and activate the two plugins.
From the header, select the demo importer and you can now import the demo content to enjoy them!
10. PopularFX
Well, this theme is not as popular as its name. It has a lot of features that make building websites easier and faster.
Pagelayer is something that this theme uses as the drag-and-drop page builder. It comes with 70+ unique designs giving you full control over the design on the pages.
Enable Demo Content for PopularFX, WordPress Theme
Once activating the theme, you will have to go to Appearance > PopularFX Options.
In the next step, you will have to install the plugin by the name “PopularFX Templates Plugin”.
You cannot install directly from WordPress, you will have to download from their website and install by uploading the plugin and activate.
11. QI Theme
Qode Interactive are the developers behind this theme and hence the name QI. You can check the performance of this website on various popular performance portals.
| Pingdom | 95 |
| GT Metrix | 99 |
| Google Dev | 99 |
Enable Demo Content for QI, WordPress Theme
Activate the theme only to see this at the top of the redirected page.
To activate the addons, click the button and you will see this content in the next page.
You will be taken to the page where you can import the demo content.
12. Sydney
Athemes are the creators of this theme. There are some unique features in the plugin that you don’t get in every other plugin, like:
- Slide, Static, and Video Headers
- Menu Layouts
- Scroll to the top feature
- Button styling
- Different blog post styles
Enable Demo Content for Sydney, WordPress Theme
Activate the theme and viola!
Once you click on the starter sites you can import them and enjoy them.
13. Zakra
This theme is a fast, secure, and SEO-friendly theme of WordPress. There are 450 reviews for this plugin and despite those many, it stands out with a 5-start review.
Please check out the performance of this website from the following table.
| Pingdom | 98% |
| 100% | |
| YSlow | 96% |
| GTMetrix | 97% |
Enable Demo Content for Zakra, WordPress Theme
Activate the theme and go to Appearance > Zakra Options.
From there you need to activate a plugin by the name, Themegrill Demo Importer Plugin.
You are now ready to import the demo content and enjoy!
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