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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
What makes a theme work well for AdSense?
First, it needs plenty of widget areas for inserting ads. The more widget areas the better!
Next, it needs to load quickly. The faster your site loads, the more people will stay, browse your content, and click on an ad.
Lastly, the theme needs a clean design that will help make your ads pop. You don’t want a cluttered template full of distraction details.
Now that we’re on the same page, continue reading to find the top picks.
Want to see some paid options too? Visit our premium AdSense themes collection for additional templates.
Free AdSense themes
Only responsive and highly-rated WordPress themes are featured here. They’re sure to present your content and ads beautifully across all browsers and devices.
Here are my top picks for best free AdSense WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Mission News by Compete Themes
Theme Description
When implementing ads throughout your site, the most important factor is the availability of widget areas. There are tons of excellent AdSense widgets available for free, and they’re the best way to include ads throughout your site. All you need then is a theme with plenty of widget areas implemented to display your ads.
Mission News comes with an impressive eight widget areas and is compatible with all the most popular AdSense widgets. Of course, you can always use a plain HTML widget to include the code AdSense gives you.
Mission News has a classic newspaper design that makes it perfect for online news organizations. Don’t be fooled by the old school look; Mission News adapts perfectly to mobile devices and small screen sizes. Plus, it has loads of customization options like social media icons, custom logos, and many layout settings.
2. SociallyViral by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
Want to get more traffic to your site? Try building your social networks while you post content to your site and build up a library of articles.
SociallyViral is a high-engaging WordPress theme with fast load times and built-in social sharing buttons. It works great with AdSense and will help you to get more traffic from social websites thanks to the shareable design and button integrations.
The free version of SociallyViral has some limitations, but you can upgrade to the advanced PRO version for just $35. You can make that back in a pretty short time frame with a well-monetized AdSense blog. The upgrade includes dozens of awesome new theme options like custom widgets, unlimited color schemes, additional share button designs, 630+ fonts from Google Fonts, and more.
3. Page Speed by Satish Gandham
Theme Description
Page Speed is a modern WordPress theme made for fast-loading content websites. If you’re a blogger or magazine editor, you’ll love this template for your site.
While Page Speed can be used with native AdSense implementations, the developers recommend you use the Easy AdSense Ads plugin. This plugin is made by the same developer which means you can trust the integration will be seamless.
It’s important that your website (and the ads) load fast. There are tons of ways to speed up WordPress, and picking the right theme is a great first step. Page Speed has been carefully developed to load fast and rank well in the search engines. Add the Elementor, Beaver Builder, or SiteOrigins Page Builder plugins to your site and create entirely custom page designs if you want more flexibility. Page Speed has six different color schemes included, a full-width page template, sticky navigation, and five different layouts amongst other theme options.
4. Journalistic by Lighthouse
Theme Description
Journalistic has a beautiful header image that instantly sets the theme for your site. Use it to create a beautiful blog or magazine website monetized with AdSense ads.
Thanks to the clean and simple design of Journalistic, you can use it for a variety of niches. Launch a blog about nutrition, sports, marketing, travel, or education. It’s been optimized for search engines like Bing and Google to help you rank well and get organic search traffic.
The header image is entirely customizable and you can easily replace the site title with a custom logo. Add widgets to the many widget areas to implement advertisements throughout your site. If you’re using affiliate marketing to build your revenue, you’ll likewise appreciate the widget areas for including your affiliate product promotions.
Journalistic is currently active on more than 2,000 websites and has four user ratings – all 5-stars.
5. First Mag by Themes4WP
Theme Description
First Mag is a responsive WordPress theme made for blogs and digital magazines. As a magazine theme, the homepage is fully widgetized making it easy to feature whichever posts you want. Additionally, magazine themes work great for highlighting large quantities of content. This is excellent for an AdSense website because, in general, the more content you publish the more pages you get indexed in Google leading to greater quantities of visitors and ad clicks.
First Mag includes left and right sidebar layouts, three custom homepage blocks, custom backgrounds, and more. All features are readily available in the Live Customizer where your changes will take place as you make them.
If you’re a developer you’ll appreciate that First Mag was built is a Twitter Bootstrap theme. Any web developers familiar with the framework will find it extremely easy to customize.
Which AdSense theme is best?
Mission News is my first recommendation because of the responsive design and the
If the classic newspaper design isn’t your style and you want something more modern and colorful, try out SociallyViral.
Since the themes featured here are free, you can try them all out on your site with no committment before deciding on your favorite.
Please post below if you have any questions about the free AdSense WordPress themes featured in this collection.
