14 Adventurous WordPress Travel Blog Themes for 2021
There’s no doubt about it, millennials are the internet generation. And not only that, they also love to travel. Is it any wonder that many are combining the two and starting a travel blog?
And did you know that you can make money from travel blogging? Matthew Karsten is making six figures from his travel blog, The Expert Vagabond. And that’s not even mentioning perks like free flights, meals, and accommodation.
Now you might have heard that travel blogging is a saturated niche and difficult to make an impact in. That’s partly true, there are thousands of travel blogs out there.
What you need is a way to stand out from the crowd. One way Matthew Kepnes, Nomadic Matt, recommends is to approach travel writing as a service. Too many travel blogs read like personal diaries. Readers want to imagine themselves where you are, so talk directly to them using the word ‘you’.
The next thing you’ll need is the perfect WordPress theme for your travel blog to showcase your amazing photos so you can show off your adventures to your family, friends, and fans.
This list contains twenty of the best WordPress themes for travel blogs. Whether you’re a digital nomad by profession or simply someone who wants to record their latest getaway from corporate life, these themes have you covered.
1 The Traveler
The Traveler is a beautiful and modern theme, designed specifically for the travel blogger. The elegant, grid-based layout puts the focus on your featured images. The different post types allow you to choose the best way to display your photos and articles. This theme is perfect for image-heavy blogs.
The Traveler comes with endless customization options including multiple layouts to choose from and the ability to change the appearance of almost any element of the theme. Using the MeridianStyler you can personalize your blog’s colors, typography, background, and more to get the look that’s right for you.
Key Features:
- Hundreds of customization options
- Ideal for image intensive blogs
- Fully responsive design looks great on any device
- Social Sharing Integration for keeping in touch with family, friends, and fans
- Price: $49
2 Penamoo
Penamoo is a beautiful and simple theme designed for travel blogging. The high impact full-width slider header on your homepage brings the focus immediately onto your photos.
With multiple layout options to choose from, it’s a breeze to get Penamoo looking exactly the way you want it to. There are several post types, including gallery post so that your images are given every chance to shine.
A real standout of this theme is the Instagram gallery. The tiled layout is absolutely stunning and is sure to attract more social shares and followers.
Key Features
- Multiple layout options and post types
- Fully responsive design looks great on mobile, tablet or laptop
- Stunning Instagram gallery feature display
- Price: $49
3 WPVoyager
WPVoyager is a powerful theme, perfect for the travel blogger. This theme gives you many different layouts to choose from and parallax options for your header to give your site a modern look.
WPVoyager also integrates with Google Maps so you can display location information in your posts. Bloggers will appreciate the multiple post types and options including the ability to create a series of posts, perfect for multiple entries in the same location.
This theme is great for sharing your trip with loved ones back at home. The location option lets them see exactly where you are in the world, and experience your journey along with you.
Key Features
- Responsive photo grid with options to display your photos in a mosaic or full-width
- Fully responsive design that’s retina ready
- Google Maps integration
- Price: $59
4 Voyager
Voyager is a powerful theme with plenty of visual impact. With a full-width header that’s capable of supporting video, you’ll be able to create a stunning, unique, and modern site.
This theme is highly customizable and comes with a powerful built-in page builder with 16 different building ‘blocks’ available including text, accordion, photo gallery, video, and more.
Voyager is perfectly equipped to chart your journey with Google Maps integration. This theme allows you to create an interactive map of your travels for sharing with your friends, family, and fans.
Key Features
- Powerful, built-in page builder makes designing your site a breeze
- Fully mobile responsive design looks great on any device
- Tons of layout options available including the option for slideshows on every page
- WooCommerce Ready
- Price: $59
5 Travelista
Travelista is a beautiful and simple WordPress theme for travel bloggers. It comes equipped with powerful features that give you incredible amounts of control over the appearance of your site.
Travelista contains multiple sliders, perfect for highlighting your best content and adding visual interest. There’s also plenty of layout options and color customization options to choose from, so you can personalize your site.
This theme also has multiple post types and gives you control over the appearance of each post type. You can customize each one individually to your liking!
Key Features
- Highly customizable design with multiple layout options, post options, colors, and more
- Mobile responsive and retina ready, looks great on any device even in HD
- Comes with ad widgets to display ads seamlessly
- Price: $54
6 The Essence
The Essence is a stylish and sophisticated theme for the modern blogger. This theme is powerful, feature-rich and very customizable, so you can easily build a travel blog that perfectly suits the adventures you want to share with the world.
The Essence has multiple layouts to choose from, a featured slider, and custom widgets. You can also change the appearance of almost any element of the theme with tons of options for colors, typography, background, and more using the MeridianStyler.
Key Features:
- Hundreds of customization options powered by the MeridianStyler
- Custom widgets – About Me, Social, Instagram Widget Plugin
- Fully responsive design
- Price: $59
7 Embark
If you’re planning on creating a modern website for your tour company with an effective online booking and scheduling system, Embark is the perfect theme you can get.
In addition, Embark theme includes 3 pre-made designs and also has a live page builder which will allow you to easily customize the design or even create your own unique layouts for the website.
Key Features
- Integrated schedule/payment system
- 3 Premium homepage designs to choose from
- Create unique designs with Live Page Builder
- Connects with Google Calendar, Apple, and Outlook
- Unlimited sidebars and widget areas
- Price: $59
8 Passenger
Passenger is a stylish and modern travel blogging theme, perfect for recording your adventures across the globe. This theme has multiple layout options and comes equipped with the Soliloquy Slider so you can personalize the appearance of your site and draw attention to your best content. The homepage is fully widgetized for easy, drag and drop page building, making it simple to get the look you want.
Passenger also has multiple post types which gives you even more options for controlling the appearance of your site. Other theme customization options include colors, typography, and more.
Key Features
- Featured sliders available for every page, post or widget powered by the Soliloquy Slider
- Responsive design that looks great on all devices
- Fully widgetized static homepage for easy drag and drop page building
- WooCommerce Ready
- Price: $59
9 Adventure
Adventure is a stunning theme for adventurers, explorers and travellers. It’s visually rich and perfect for an image-intensive blog.
Adventure is highly customizable and comes with many post types and layout options. This theme also comes with full-width featured slider to showcase your best articles. And with Google Maps Widget integration, you’ll be able to involve your family, friends, and fans in your journey by showing them exactly where you are on the map.
Key Features
- Highly customizable, modern design
- Fully mobile responsive design that’s retina ready
- Integrates with Google Maps Widget plugin so you can share the journey with your readers
- Price: $69
10 Continent
The 6th Continent is a fresh, modern theme that’s highly customizable so you can get your blog looking the way you want it. This theme is perfect for travel bloggers and has multiple options for displaying your best travel photos, including sliders, galleries, and header images.
This theme contains custom post types and formats which adds visual interest to your blog and it’s also fully customizable, so you can change the appearance of most elements to your liking.
Key Features
- Designed for the image-heavy blog
- Fully mobile responsive and looks great on all devices
- Built-in Theme Customizer for endless personalization options
- Price: $75
11 Infra
Infra is a powerful magazine theme that works perfectly as a travel blog option. Images are the hero here, and your stunning holiday snaps are showcased to perfection.
Infra is a clean and elegantly designed theme and is easy to use out of the box. It is highly customizable with the Orange Themes builder that makes it easy to build pages to your liking with drag and drop functionality. The theme is also compatible with and comes with Visual Composer.
Key Features
- Drag and drop page building powered by Visual Composer
- Fully mobile responsive
- Multiple image options to choose from for your image display
- Price: $44
12 TripTastic
TripTastic is a bright, modern theme that’s perfect for sharing stories about your travels. This theme is bold and bright, with plenty of white space to allow your photos to shine.
Highly customizable, the theme comes with many widgets to allow you to build your site the way you want it. Another standout feature that ensures your changes turn out the way you want them to is the WordPress Live Customizer. Using the Live Customizer, what you see is what you get and any changes you make are instantly visible.
Key Features
- Widgetized homepage for easy drag and drop page building
- Responsive design means your site looks great on mobile, tablet or laptop
- Highly customizable via the WordPress Live Customizer
- Price: $45
13 Risa
Risa is a lightweight, minimalist theme that can easily be adapted to the needs of travel blogger. This theme is very simple and contains only the essentials – like large featured images to highlight your travel photos.
The highlight of this theme is the unique left sidebar. It holds the menu, recent posts and social sharing icons. No matter what page your readers click to, they’ll always have your recent posts in front of them.
Key Features
- Clean and simple design with large feature images to showcase your photos
- Fully mobile responsive design
- Integrated social sharing options to get your content out on social media
- Price: Free
14 Gnar
A theme with serious impact. Gnar is touted as the theme for extremists, risk-takers and thrill-seeker. It’s perfect for those travel bloggers whose exploits are on the adventurous side.
With epic standout pages and header, Gnar catches the attention of your audience from the moment they arrive. The parallax and video background options are a nice touch that bring your site to the cutting edge of modern aesthetic.
Gnar is extremely customizable, so you can choose your favorite color schemes and it comes with more than 80 layout options. If you’re not sure how you want to set up your site, you can install the demo version and use it as a jumping off point to create the site that’s perfect for you.
Key Features
- Parallax and video background options
- Fully mobile responsive, this theme looks great on any device
- Highly customizable
- Price: $59
Has this list inspired you to travel and start a blog about your adventures? Let us know which theme you’d choose in the comments!
I have a WordPress.com Premium site. which of these will function with that? I am not a coder. Need something simple to manage. Would like to have a map feature so I can “pin” our travel locations.
Thanks.
Hey Karen,
None of these themes will work with WordPress.com, they are only available for WordPress.org (self hosted & different from WordPress.com). You can see the difference between the .com & .org here.
As for map feature, that can probably be achieved via a plugin.