If you’ve got a WordPress.com site, you might be wondering which is the best themes for you to use as an author. How do you sift through all the themes avaibale and choose the right one, without spending hours testing them all out?

In this post I’ll try to help you find your way through the maze. Here are my favorite five themes you can get with a free WordPress.com plan.

Note: Why am I only including free themes? That’s a good question. The reason is because I think that if you’re planning to spend money on your WordPress site, you’ll get much better value if you go for a self-hosted, or WordPress.org site. I’ve also put together a guide to the best WordPress.org themes for authors. And if you want to use one of the themes here with a self-hosted site, you can: they’re all free and available via the Themes screen in your WordPress admin.

Shoreditch

The Shoreditch theme is a free theme with bespoke templates you can use to customize your site. The reason I’ve chosen it is because of its panel page template. You can use this as your home page and the panels will link to the the child pages of your home page. This way, you can use a panel to create a banner linking to your mailing list signup page.

As there are no free themes with clickable header images, this is the best way I’ve found of creating a front page banner that links to your newsletter signup page without paying for a premium theme.

Right now, this is my top one theme – I’m in the process of researching other themes so I can add more! If you’d like to recommend your theme, please do so in the comments and add a link to your author website. If I like the look of your theme and it’s free, I may add it!