Best Minimalist WordPress Themes – Minimal Templates

Awarding the best Minimalist Premium WordPress Theme has been a lot of fun. Opposite to what people may think, creating a minimal website template is harder than it looks, and only a few brave and brilliant premium WordPress developers dare to do it.

The level of these premium WordPress themes is incredibly high and like always, it has been hard to choose a winner, but this is just the way life works and even if this means spending more time on WordPress that with our wives, we do it, for YOU! – a good excuse to avoid our mothers in law…

For the category Best Minimalist WordPress Themes 2014, we have awarded the “Best Online Award”, “Best Value For Money Award”, “Best Innovative Product Award” and “Editor’s Pick Award”.

Have fun!

Best Online Award

Beautiful

This year’s winner of the Best Online Award for the category Best Minimalist WordPress Theme is Beautiful from StudioPress. Beside being built on a solid framework, Beautiful is responsive, clean and sharp. The community forum behind Genesis themes is very helpful and this makes it even better. Easy to customize and SEO optimized, this is the 2014 winner. Congratulation Beautiful!

Best Value For Money Award

Galao

It’s difficult to compete with Elegant Themes when it comes to price, still this time the Best Value For Money Award for the Best Minimalist WordPress Themes goes to Galao, a themejug theme. Not only you can get it for a one-off price of less than 50 bucks, but at the time this article was written you can get one free theme in addition to your purchase. I mean, Galao is worth much more than that: responsive, retina ready and designed to optimize reading experience. Well done, themejug.

Best Innovative Product Award

Hipster

Winner of the Best Innovative Product Award for the category Best Minimalist WordPress Themes is Hipster. This template is just awesome in its simplicity. Post photos, videos, thoughts, words and everything you want and hipster will do the rest showing it to the world in a clean and clear way. Some people reckon Hipster is the “coolest looking blog theme ever”…

Editor’s Pick Award

Artifex Pro

Here it comes the winner of the Editor’s Pick Award for the category Best Minimalist WordPress Themes. Artifex Pro looks original, creative, different and full of character. Portfolio pop-up, great looking blog page are just some of the things that make Artifex special and worth this exclusive award.

Other Nominees

Wintersong

Built on the Genesis Framework, Wintersong has recently become Wintersong PRO after the HTML5 update that is going through all Genesis themes. Wintersong features fixed width, HTML5 markup, sidebar-content layout and an awesome fixed position left sidebar. There’s really no fanciness in this premium WordPress theme, just the essential, crafted with passion.

Weekly

A newspaper in miniature and one of the best minimalist WordPress themes 2014, Weekly features an advanced control panel, custom page templates and looks great on whatever browser (cross-browser compatible).

ThemeMin

Minimal, light-weight and typography focused. ThemeMin sounds like a chinese song but it’s actually a premium WordPress theme built for comfort reading and fast loading time.

SuperGrid

Well, this is different. We always appreciate innovation and creativity and SuperGrid shows off some character. Infinite scrolling, sticky navigation, easy logo integration and a lot of style are some of the features of this WordPress theme.

Stok

Stok is a minimal WordPress theme, ideal for business or portfolio websites. It looks highly professional, clean and authoritative and it makes it look like you know what you talking about, whether you really do or you don’t. It comes at a below average price and with tons of cool features. Definitely worth a try!

Press

Incredibly easy to customize and featuring a clean homepage template, Press comes with 7 color schemes, OCMX framework, menu management and much more. Plus, as for today I’m writing this, you can get up to two extra themes when you buy Press.

Principles

Principles is indeed one of the best minimalist WordPress themes 2014. Principles is adaptive (it looks awesome on mobile devices!), translation ready and includes a portfolio page template to showcase your talent.

Prologue

This responsive premium WordPress theme includes carousel, featured slideshow and of course the Zoom framework. Prologue has a magazine feel to it, but is also a bit “bloggy”. You might want to check it out, to see if it’s just what you are after!

SimplePress

SimplePress looks so clean you will lick your laptop screen when viewing your site. Sliders, multiple colors and cross-browser compatibility are just some of its best features.

Simple Store

Simple Store is one of the best ecommerce WordPress themes that also happen to be a great minimalist template. The principle around this WordPress theme is awesome: make it dead easy for your customers to buy your products or services.

Portfolio

Portfolio is a responsive, bold and full of personality premium WordPress theme. Its massive typography, HTML5 code architecture and cocky frontpage make it stand out from the crowd. Check out the demo!

Personal

Writer? Journalist? Blogger? Check out this minimal WordPress theme. Personal is clean, mobile-friendly and translation ready.

Nautilius

Nautilus really is among the best minimal WordPress themes 2014. It reminds me of some of the first websites that appeared online a few years ago… There is nothing fancy about it, it’s pure essence. Best thing about it? It’s lightweight and loads faster than most.

Modern Business

Beside being a minimalist template, Modern Business is also among the best WordPress business themes for 2014. Its professional design, sharp colors and adaptive layouts give it a very professional feel.

Modern Blog

Among the best WordPress blog themes and minimal templates of this year, Modern Blog works great for magazine/news sites as well. It’s responsive, professional and minimalistic.

Minimal

For sure no other name would have been a better fit for this premium WordPress template. Minimal features sharp colors, clean layout, dozen of shortcodes to make your (online) life easier and multiple page templates.

Dolce

On the minimalistic side, but not too much, this premium WordPress template from CSSigniter features 6 different home pages, responsive layouts and all sort of post formats to make your online experience a lot more fun that already is.

Magazine Pro

We are very open and honest with our readers, so here’s our little secret: Magazine Pro was in our first draft when founding the Best Online Awards, so we do like it. Easy, simple and clear, Magazine Pro is a rock solid minimal WordPress theme.

ImageGrid

Ok, ok ok. Wait a minute because ImageGrid has something different to offer. This masonry style template is totally focused on images. So if you plan to communicate your story with your photographs, take a look at the demo. You might also be interested in the best WordPress photography themes.

CleanSale

We have featured CleanSale in our best eCommerce WordPress themes awards, as it really stands out as a minimalistic eCommerce solution. Stores don’t need to be complicated, they need to sell and CleanSale might just help with that.

Alternate

A lot of themes claim to be minimal, but a few really are. Alternate is a premium WordPress minimalist theme deep inside. Take a look at the demo to see what I’m talking about.

Agency

Clean, minimal and responsive, Agency is one of those WordPress templates that have so many features you just can’t understand why it’s so cheap! Lightbox media support, 7 theme skins and HTML5 code are just some of the best things Agency has to offer.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees for the 2014 edition of the Best Online Awards!