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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Want to showcase your work?
A portfolio is the best way to show potential clients what you’re capable of. You can display gorgeous images of prior work and link to full case studies about each project. However, there’s a catch.
Displaying your beautiful work will only impress visitors if packaged in a beautiful theme. Nothing will crash your attempts to land new clients faster than a buggy and ugly theme.
Below are 21 of the best WordPress themes for creating an online portfolio. These premium themes are well-designed and packed with features.
WordPress portfolio themes
Each of the themes below has many layouts available, so if you see an aesthetic you like, make sure to check out the demo for more.
Here are my top picks for best portfolio WordPress themes for 2024.
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1. Oshine by Brand Exponents (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Oshine is a beautiful multi-purpose theme loved by more than 28,500 customers. You can use it to create any kind of website you’d like from an online graphic design portfolio to an architecture firm website.
The Oshine theme is capable of creating virtually any design because of its integrated use of a page builder plugin. All you have to do is drag-and-drop the page sections into place, and then fill them out with your content. You’ll craft your website how you want it – down to the pixel.
Beyond the page building tools, Oshine also includes custom colors, typography controls, video backgrounds, parallax effect sections, and a huge variety of header styles. Switching up the header is one of the best ways to instantly transform the look & feel of your website.
Overall, Oshine is one of the most customizable WordPress themes around and creates consistently gorgeous websites.
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2. TheGem by Codex Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
TheGem is a gorgeous, high-performance WordPress theme. While it’s perfectly suited for portfolios, it can be used for many other types of sites too, such as online shops, blogs, and digital agencies. This is because of the huge quantity of layout options available.
Overall, TheGem is a really slick and modern theme for hosting an online portfolio.
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3. Heli by ThemeMove (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The gallery portfolio in Heli is quite stunning. This classy display would be great for art, fashion, or even Etsy shops.
As a multipurpose theme, you can create all kinds of sites with Heli. That makes it an excellent option if you plan on launching more than one website. Heli also comes bundled with a few premium plugins like Visual Composer and Slider Revolution which make it even more of a value.
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4. Fevr by luvthemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Fevr is a theme you can use for any number of creative projects. Like TheGem, it has many different layouts making it great for tons of sites.
You can find standard looking layouts with this theme, but there are also quite a few unusual ones.The clean and spacious “metro” layout, in particular, is worth considering for your portfolio. If you have a tagline or positioning statement to get across, this design will work great.
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5. Assemble by Edge Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Assemble is a contemporary portfolio theme. Once again, there are many layouts available, but I thought this two-column design was especially interesting. The title overlay when hovering over a portfolio item is unique and modern.
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6. Stag by DeliciousThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Stag is a modern and minimalist portfolio theme. It has a filterable gallery layout for portfolios and over a dozen variations to choose from.
Many galleries place the images edge-to-edge against each other, but portfolio layouts in Stag keep a thin margin which creates a very elegant look. The Stag theme has six demos sites, so make sure to check out each one to see what the theme is capable of.
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7. Werkstatt by Fuel Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Werkstatt is an expressive and beautiful portfolio theme. Unlike some of the multi-purpose themes, Werkstatt focuses entirely on portfolios providing different designs to serve various types of portfolios.
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8. Grafik by Select Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Grafik is a sharp and modern portfolio theme. It’s tailored towards architecture and design but could work well for many types of portfolio sites. Notes of the super-saturated blue add a lot of energy to the design and overall, it’s extremely contemporary.
The filterable gallery is also a great way to let visitors browse a lot of your work easily. There are quite a few other layouts available, and Grafik can also be used to launch an eCommerce store.
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9. Dazzle by DeliciousThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Dazzle is a beautiful theme, and I really like the layout featured above. It’s unique and very elegant, a great fit for photography sites.
In addition, there are also layouts that include a very small header so a ton of images show up right away on the page. Dazzle can also be used for a one-page site for anyone looking to setup a very simple website quickly.
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10. Clean Folio by Dessign
Theme Description
Clean Folio emphasizes your images with a full-width masonry gallery. It balances graphics well with text and news from the blog making it very functional for a portfolio site.
This portfolio theme also has a standard multi-column gallery layout reusable on any page. Another nice touch is the presence of contact details in the header of every page. Visitors will find it easy to get in touch whether you’re a freelancer or run a design agency.
Regarding features, Clean Folio comes with a condensed set of customizations but has everything you’ll need to get the site you want. One advantage of Clean Folio is that it’s entirely free, so you can run it on your site now and see what you think.
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11. FilmMaker by Beauthemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
FilmMaker is a WordPress theme that specializes in video portfolios.
With light and dark backgrounds, video thumbnails, and expansive images, it’s a great design for any site looking to showcase video or images.
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12. Essu by Kotofey (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Modern typography and careful use of white space make Essu a very attractive theme. The absence of gutters between the portfolio items in the gallery creates a clean and minimalist look on the portfolio pages.
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13. Clean Photo by WPThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
While great for showcasing photos, Clean Photo is well-suited for any type of portfolio site. You’ll find it easy to display your work with this clean and responsive portfolio theme.
Some themes go overboard with the decoration and animations leading to an overwhelming experience. It’s nice to have a simple option that cuts away all the fluff and showcases what really matters.
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14. QOON by OrangeIdea (Themeforest)
Theme Description
QOON has a handful of layouts, but you can see the personal portfolio design above. It makes great use of slab-serif font, Josefin Slab, and includes a filterable gallery.
While digital artwork would look fine with this theme, the design suits physical products better. Arts and crafts in particular would fit well in this warm design.
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15. Overlap by Wyde (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Overlap has some really unique and interesting layouts for its portfolios. Like many of the themes, the galleries are filterable which means they update instantly as visitors browse through your collection of work.
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16. Mentas by Azelab (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Mentas is a full-featured premium portfolio theme. With over 1,000 sales and a full 5-star rating on Themeforest, this theme is reliable and well-designed.
When visit the demo, you’ll notice right away that you can do more than publish a simple portfolio with this theme. It integrates with Visual Composer for building custom page layouts. Of course, there are tons of options when it comes to the portfolio pages themselves.
With the Mentas art portfolio theme, you can publish as many “Gallery” pages as you want. These are where you’ll display your work in beautiful, multi-column grids. You can use images, videos, even audio in the portfolio. You’ll have to try it out for yourself to see how smooth and fun it is to use.
You can’t really go wrong with Mentas. It may be more than you need if you want to setup a very simple portfolio site, but for anyone interested in building out a larger site, it’s an excellent choice.
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17. Portfolio by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
If you want to setup a simple portfolio, you can’t beat the Portfolio theme by MyThemeShop.
This theme is minimalist and easy-to-use. The clear design puts the emphasis on your portfolio images. The image gallery is responsive and addition items can be loaded instantly via the Load More button. The gallery is also filterable, so visitors can choose any category and get an updated list of images.
Portfolio also includes a beautiful layout for the blog, hundreds of fonts to choose from via Google Fonts, and multiple color options.
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18. Ratio by Edge Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Ratio has a multitude of designs, but this tile gallery, in particular, is quite striking.
This modern and responsive WordPress theme for architects and engineers is excellent for showcasing a high-end portfolio. Your prospects will love being able to browse through your projects and past work. This could greatly increase the number of visitors that get in touch to hire you for custom work.
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19. MyPortfolio by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
Another portfolio theme by MyThemeShop, MyPortfolio is a crisp and modern theme for artistic portfolios.
While the design of MyPortfolio is quite simple too, it features a dark left sidebar for your logo/site title and menu. This leaves a ton of space for the portfolio images. After all, they are the most important aspect of the site. Clicking a portfolio item can either display a popup, or take visitors to an entire post about the graphic.
MyPortfolio is highly customizable with multiple layouts, sliders, and more. It even has WooCommerce support for users who may want to sell products and services straight from their site.
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20. Core by ThemeGoods (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Core is a really unique photography portfolio theme.
It features a simple, yet beautiful reflective image slider. This theme is better suited to photographs than other types of portfolios because clicking an image reveals a lightbox, rather than an entire page about the portfolio item.
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21. Fluxus by intheme (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Lastly, we have Fluxus.
I like this theme because it gets straight to the gallery. With a small menu and no large titles or taglines, you can show off a lot more of your work from the moment the site loads.
WordPress themes for portfolios
And there you have it. My picks for the best portfolio themes for 2019.
While I’ve tried to capture the best of each theme above, they all have so much more to show. Some of these themes can be used for any kind of site you can imagine. If you’re still looking for more themes, you’ll probably enjoy our list of gallery WordPress themes and our collection of the best WordPress themes for photographers.
Ben Sibley