Explore a collection of Medium inspired modern WordPress themes in this post.
With recent updates to Medium, we lately looked at different ways you can integrate WordPress and Medium.
One of the major problems with such integration, however, is that many of us might not be comfortable publishing our content on both WordPress and Medium. Issues such as how re-posting might affect the SEO of the blogs can be a major concern.
Also, opting for Medium, you don’t want to build your content house on rented land, right?
So, instead of publishing your content to Medium, what if you could make your WordPress blog look like Medium?
Of course, Medium is much more than design, but if you are attracted to Medium just because of its clean design, Medium inspired WordPress themes might be of help to you.
I have researched theme marketplaces and the WordPress theme directory to find the top Medium inspired WordPress themes for you.
You can directly skip to the listings of free medium WordPress themes below but let me introduce you to one of the best handpicked Medium alike WordPress themes that you can try for free.
Readble is the latest and regularly updated Medium like WordPress theme from Proteus Themes. The theme built with the highest possible readability, clean design and a grid view of multiple articles is targeted at Bloggers, Journalists, Magazines and News Agencies.
I highly recommend trying the Readable WordPress theme if you are looking for Medium alike features.
If you decide to use the theme, use our exclusive 10% OFF ProteusThemes coupon code – WPISM that we have negotiated for our WPism visitors.
Moving to our free listings, all these WordPress themes try to bring the Medium look and experience to WordPress.
You can also follow a few other tutorials to tweak your own theme and add some plugins to add the Medium experience to your theme.
Most of these themes listed here are focused on highlighting the authors and publishers of websites. They are clean and modern blogging themes with a specific focus on typography and showcasing your content.
Free Medium WordPress Themes
This is a list of free Medium inspired WordPress themes. Of course, several premium themes can have more extensive features to imitate Medium but these basic themes can do the job.
1. Independent Publisher WordPress Theme
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Independent Publisher is a clean and beautiful WordPress theme focused on content and loosely inspired by Medium’s design.
The theme has several other features including full support for post formats, support for a multi-author blog, and compatibility with schema rich markup.
True to its name, the author recommends the theme for independent publishers of websites and other creators, makers, and believers in the open-source movement.
The theme is rated five out of five stars on the WordPress themes directory and is downloaded by more than 50,000 users. You can also download the theme, report bugs and suggest new features from the Github page of the theme.
Independent Publisher is a really well-maintained theme with frequent updates.
I have also seen the theme used on a few popular blogs. You can also see a few of the websites using this theme listed on their website.
If you are a blogger or publisher and need some help creating content, check out our listing of top AI writing tools in this post.
2. Casper WordPress Theme
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Casper WordPress theme claims to be inspired by Ghost, another blogging platform similar to WordPress, which carries a similar aesthetic as Medium.
The theme is frequently updated and has all the modern features. You will find lots of customization options (configure from WordPress Customizer, of course!). It is also responsive and mobile optimised for faster loading.
The theme is really beautiful, clean and modern. The typography looks appealing.
Along with its beautiful outlook, the theme features Markdown for writing, thus making it easier to write content. While few of such Markdown features are part of the code, you will need to use the Jetpack Markdown plugin for parsing.
Casper also comes with Child Theme that you can use in case you want to make any changes to the theme.
The theme is available to download for free from the WordPress themes repository, and contribution to its development is welcome on Github.
3. Fastr WordPress Theme By Kanishk Kunal
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Fastr By Kanishk Kunal is another highly rated WordPress theme that resembles the Medium design. Fastr’s fonts selection and modern look make it one of the best Medium inspired themes.
The theme has clean and minimal design with its entire focus on the content. It’s a responsive theme with minimal CSS and no Javascript at all. It can be a great theme for those looking for fast loading theme with great performance. And of course the Medium’s simple look!
Fastr is available to download for free from the WordPress themes directory.
4. Bushwick Blogging Theme By Automattic
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Bushwick is a high-quality WordPress theme from Automattic. The theme is fully responsive and is designed to be a blogging theme.
The theme has a fixed sidebar on left with a featured image, and the content is displayed on the right. The theme also has a modern menu that appears on top of the page.
Downloaded by more than 35k users, the theme is rated 5 out of 5 by five users on the official WordPress theme directory.
5. Writr WordPress Theme
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Writr is another high-quality free WordPress theme from Automattic. The theme puts its focus on content and is mainly targeted for personal blogs.
Writr is suitable for long-form content writers. It has beautiful typography and comes with several customization options including 6, different colour schemes – turquoise (default), blue, green, grey, purple, and red.
The theme also has different post format options to suit your different types of posts such as images, quotes, etc. You can further customise the background colour of the page and make the content area wider.
Writr is a really popular theme downloaded by more than 100K+ from the WordPress repository. The theme is also available for WordPress.com users.
6. Highwind WordPress Theme
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Highwind is a popular WordPress theme from James Koster designed to showcase your content. It is a clean, lightweight theme with a strong focus on typography.
Highwind comes with detailed documentation and customization guidelines. The theme has several features to add a unique touch to your website.
The theme boasts other popular users from the WordPress community on its homepage. It is also available for WordPress.com users.
Highwind is also a developer-friendly theme and has a child theme designed mainly for blogging and readability. It also supports WooCommerce if you are looking to sell something from your website.
7. Publish WordPress Theme
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Publish WordPress Theme by Konstantin Kovshenin is another clean and minimal theme available to download for free. The theme puts your content in focus and is mainly ideal for single author blogs.
Publish WordPress Theme supports navigation menus, has a sidebar for your widgets, implements threaded comments, has support for various post formats and the sticky post.
8. Rams WordPress Theme
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One of the recent WordPress themes, Rams is a clean and responsive theme with a minimalist design targeted mainly at bloggers.
The theme has no sidebars or sliders, thus focusing on simplicity. You can, however, choose the accent colour of the content to suit your preference. Rams is a responsive and retina ready theme with support for multiple post formats.
9. Graphy WordPress Theme
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Graphy is another recent WordPress theme with a focus on beautiful typography and the theme makes your content stand out on both desktop and mobile devices.
Graphy is a blog oriented WordPress theme featuring a clean and responsive design. The theme comes with customisation options including Colors, Logo, and Header Image.
10. Landline WordPress Theme
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A theme by Design 311, Landline features a large background image and quality fonts.
The demo doesn’t look that great, but you can make your design look good with a nice background image. You can assign a background image and featured image for each page in your settings.
11. Coffee Time WordPress Theme
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The preview of this theme should convince you of its Medium appeal. Coffee is a responsive WordPress theme featuring an image background to your left.
The theme is mainly suitable for creative personal blogs and bloggers with long-form content.
Coffee WordPress theme, however, has not been updated in the past two years at the time of writing this and so you might want to be aware of that.
12. Readr WordPress Theme
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Readr is another focused content theme with nice typography. This minimal responsive theme has a left-aligned sidebar that is fixed with scrolling content on the right.
Readr WordPress theme has also not been updated for over two years.
13. Wilson WordPress Theme
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Wilson is a clean and simple WordPress theme with a left sidebar and content area on your right. You can add several widgets to your left sidebar. The theme features a responsive design and is retina ready.
Wilson supports custom colours, and custom widgets and comes with custom logo options. The theme is translation ready and comes with a few translations including Swedish/Svenska, German/Deutsch.
14. MediumPress WordPress Theme
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As its name suggests, MediumPress is a WordPress theme inspired by Medium.com. The theme has tried to copy several features of Medium.
The theme is available to download from Github, and it seems there are no updates since December 2013. A better alternative if you like this theme would be SimplyReadable (a theme even the author of MediumPress seems to be inspired from).
15. SimplyReadable WordPress Theme
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SimplyReadable is another Medium inspired WordPress theme that makes it easy to read your content. The theme is responsive to different layouts and is available to download for free from Github.
The theme author has also written a detailed tutorial on the design process to make it look like Medium. The theme, however, isn’t easy to configure and might require you to edit some template files for configuration.
16. Surfagility WordPress Theme
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Surfagility is another Medium inspired WordPress theme with several modern features. The theme is fully responsive and based on Bootstrap (3.0.0) design.
Surfagility also makes use of a few plugins for extended functionality and so, make sure you read their instructions on how to make your design exactly like the author intends to.
You can view the demo of the theme on the author’s website.
17. Big Pix WordPress Theme
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Big Pix WordPress Themes boasts a style popularised by Medium with full-featured size images.
The theme allows you to easily upload your own logo and site icon, and change the default colour scheme of your choice.
I hope the above collection of free Medium inspired WordPress themes helps you find the ideal theme you are looking for!
Just to remind you again, please be extra careful in using the themes that haven’t been updated in the past two years. You should see a notification for such themes in the WordPress themes repository.
Also, as Medium always keeps on changing, most of these themes might also look slightly outdated.
Please note that these are FREE themes and so most of them aren’t regularly updated to keep up with Medium’s constantly changing design. There’re so many premium themes that keep on adapting Medium style changes and I will shortly cover such premium themes in another post.
Check out our recent collection of Google AdSense Optimized WordPress Themes that can help you make the most out of your AdSense ads.
I hope you found our list of WordPress themes like Medium useful for your blogs. Most of the featured themes in this collection are well built and can help you build a Medium alike blog or website on WordPress.
Which theme do you think adds that Medium look and experience to WordPress? I would love to hear your views in the comments below.
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Amazing List…Perfect
Awesome list! I have updated my blog using Independent Publisher long time back. It’s robust.
Thanks, Abinash! Your blog looks clean and easy to read with the Independent Publisher theme!!
Great list! Thank you very much!
You should have stop the list at 5. After, they don’t really look like a Medium’s style. Anyway, thank you for the share !
Great work (Y). Really like the way that they are listed.
Thank you so much for this list. I loved Independent publisher and going to use it on my site. Thanks again.
Hi Rishi,
Thank you for your comment. The theme looks nice and clean on your website 😉
Hey Pradeep all the themes are really outstanding.
I also want to share one more amazing free WordPress themes called Bloggers Lite. It is very clean, elegant and responsive theme suitable for personal bloggers, authors and writers. It has got many stunning features that can help you an eye-catchy website.
Very Awesome Theme, thanks sir