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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Today.
That’s how soon you can have your site ready for visitors.
All you need is the right theme and one well-written post to promote.
I’ll leave the post up to you, but I can help with the theme!
In this collection, you’ll find five of the best free WordPress themes for video game blogs. These themes are attractive and mobile-friendly, so your blog can take off from your first post.
Keep reading to find the top picks.
If you don’t mind paying for a theme, check out our collection of premium gaming blog themes.
Free video game blog themes
It was tricky to find a variety of blog themes made specifically for gaming, but these five themes match the profile.
Make sure to check out the demo each developer provides rather than the one on WordPress.org, and since they’re all free, you can preview them on your site before even installing them.
Here are my top picks for best free gaming blog WordPress themes for 2023.
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1. Chosen Gamer by Compete Themes
Theme Description
We made the Chosen Gamer theme specifically for video game blogs. It’s got a minimalist style that will place your visitors’ attention on your content.
The Chosen Gamer theme is responsive, so it will adapt to the screen size whether it’s being viewed on an Android device, iPad, or widescreen monitor. Each post includes a prominent “featured image” and links to the post’s category and author so navigating between posts is easy. If you have high-resolution images, this theme will look awesome on your WordPress site.
If you run a multilingual or non-English website, you’ll appreciate that Chosen gamer is translation-ready and includes RTL language support. The codebase is professional and SEO-friendly, so if you follow proper SEO optimization techniques, your site will have no trouble getting organic search traffic.
Every gaming blog has social networks to build, and Chosen Gamer makes it easy to add linked icons to the header of your site. Pick from more than 50+ icons for the most popular social platforms and simply add a URL to include the icon in your header. Chosen Gamer is built off the Chosen theme, so you can also add the Chosen Pro plugin if you want even more customization options.
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2. Astra by Brainstorm Force
Theme Description
Astra is a powerful WordPress theme that can be an excellent option for gamers who want to create a blog or website dedicated to gaming. This theme is designed to be lightweight, fast, and customizable, making it a great choice for those who want to create a unique and engaging gaming blog. The theme is available in both free and paid versions, which means that gamers can choose the option that best fits their needs and budget.
One of the main benefits of using the Astra theme for gaming blogs is its flexibility. The theme comes with a variety of pre-built gaming templates and demos, allowing gamers to easily create a website that matches their needs and preferences. Whether you want a dark, moody design or a bright, colorful layout, Astra has options that will work for you. Additionally, the theme is fully customizable, which means that you can tweak and adjust every element of your website until it’s just right.
The theme is designed to be lightweight and fast-loading, which can be crucial for gamers who want to ensure that their website loads quickly and smoothly. This can be especially important for those who plan to include videos or other media on their blog, as slow-loading pages can be frustrating for readers and can cause them to leave the site.
In summary, Astra is a flexible, customizable, and performance-oriented WordPress theme that can be an excellent option for gaming blogs.
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3. Gaming Mag by CodeVibrant
Theme Description
Want more of a magazine-style design then go with Gaming Mag. It has a classic online magazine style that makes it easy to highlight tons of content. For websites that publish new content frequently, Gaming Mag will be a superb choice.
This gaming blog theme also has a dark background which is pretty popular in the video game industry. Overall, there’s a pretty nice balance of color throughout the design. All of the colors are fully customizable via the Live Customizer where you can watch your updates take place as you make them.
Besides the color customizations, Gaming Mag also allows you to set a custom background, change the page layouts, adjust the site width, and more. It’s surprisingly customizable for a free WordPress theme, and there are even more options available in the premium version if you want to upgrade.
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4. MH Joystick Lite by MH Themes
Theme Description
Take a regular blog and transform it into a gaming news site with the MH Joystick Lite theme. It has a colorful and simple design that visitors will find easy on the eyes.
The primary menu is spacious and supports multi-tier menus. You can also find a secondary menu up top above the header. Add icons linked to your social profiles and include your custom logo to help build your brand.
To showcase your best content, use the homepage image slider and “editor’s choice” section. With the slider and widgets available for the homepage, you have way more control over the content you feature besides just listing your latest posts.
As the name implies, this is the “lite” versoin of MH Joystick. The premium version adds a built-in author box, social sharing buttons, custom widgets, custom templates and more.
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5. 90s Retro by Organic Themes
Theme Description
Organic Themes mainly produces premium themes, but they released a free gaming theme called 90s retro. This template is extremely stylish and while not suitable for most websites, it’s perfect for a retro gaming website. If you are writing about classic arcade games or even more modern pixel art games, this could be the perfect theme for your gaming website.
The layout of this theme is very simple. It has a right sidebar and a single column on the left for your posts. While it may be tough to do some more advanced promotion of your content, the simplicity makes 90s Retro incredibly easy to setup.
One feature you might like in particular is the ability to turn automatic background music on or off. While background music is normally a no-no for websites, it suits this quirky theme.
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6. aReview by aThemes
Theme Description
If you want to publish game reviews, aReview is probably your best bet. You can leave a star rating for every game and include a list of pros and cons. Review sites honestly don’t need much more than that – you want to keep the ratings easy-to-digest for readers.
The flat design aesthetic is a good look and will look modern for years more. aReview also makes good use of color with small accents throughout the design. Make sure to visit the real demo site and not the one you find on WordPress.org.
aReview is really customizable for a free theme too. It includes custom widgets, color options, Google Fonts integration, and a custom logo uploader. This theme is also translation-ready, so you can translate all English text you find into any language you want.
Which free gaming blog theme is best for you?
While I’m obviously biased ? I would recommend trying out Chosen Gamer on your site first. It’s totally free so you can switch it out if you prefer another theme.
And the one other theme I want to highlight before you go is Gaming Mag. You might find you enjoy more of a magazine layout than a single column blog design, so Gaming Mag is worth trying out.
If you’ve got a question about one of these gaming blog themes just post in the comments section below.
Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.