20+ Best Blog Designs Of 2021 + Tips For Starting Your Own Blog

Having a blog not only gives you a way to share your message and attract audiences but also gives you a solid space on the Internet that you can call your own.

Social networks come and go, their algorithms change, you lose followers. But, with your own blog, you’ll always be in control. This is why everyone from big brands to solo-entrepreneurs still actively develops their blogs to maintain their authority online.

These blogs are also starting to look incredibly beautiful as well. The blog designs are now part of the brand’s identity and we’ve been seeing some great designs all over the Internet.

We’ve rounded up some of the best blog designs from the bunch and neatly categorized them for you to explore. So if you’re planning on starting a new blog or updating your existing blog design, these example websites will help you find inspiration.

And, by the way, all these blogs get powered by WordPress.

Best Business Blog Designs

Businesses maintain blogs for two reasons—to generate traffic by ranking higher on Google. And for building an audience while generating leads. Of course, you can also look good while doing it too.

Canva’s official blog has one of the most serene and user-friendly designs we’ve ever seen. It uses white space quite well to showcase blog posts with wider layouts and with big image thumbnails.

In addition to its great design, Canva also uses its blog to educate the audience with very informative guides and tutorials as well.

Slack also uses WordPress to power up its blog and uses a very minimal and modern design. The boxed layout of the homepage allows users to easily discover content on the blog.

The single article layouts are also designed to offer a great reading experience without any distractions.

Facebook’s blog for official news updates also gets powered by WordPress. The site features a very clean and creative design that effectively promote its content as well as showcase the best features of the social network at the same time.

The official blog for the UK’s The National Archives is also quite inspirational. Usually, when we think about government-run blogs, we imagine terrible and outdated designs. But this site uses a very modern design with interesting font choices.

The blog is actually designed to reflect the branding behind The National Archives and also to attract audiences of all ages.

Mozilla has a clean blog design that boosts user experience by giving its full attention to the blog content. Instead of taking up space with large images or descriptions, it shows the maximum amount of blog posts without cluttering the design. Mozilla also uses colors quite well throughout the design.

Sony’s official PlayStation blog also runs on WordPress. This blog design is quite attractive as it uses a dual-color theme with the ability to switch between dark and light colors. The arrangement of the blog feed on the homepage is also interesting.

The single post layout is designed very effectively as well. It enhanced the reading experience with a wider body content area.

Microsoft’s Windows Blog has a very unique design. The homepage of the blog uses a minimal design split into two sections. On one side it shows the latest posts with larger image thumbnails and descriptions. While on the other side the blog posts are shown as a list.

It’s unusual but seems effective since the blog is updated daily with new content.

Best Magazine Blog Designs

WordPress is the perfect choice for building a magazine-style blog. The ability to easily publish content-rich articles as well as the tools for managing multiple authors makes it the perfect CMS for bigger blogs.

The now Adobe-owned design-themed blog, 99U is one of the popular magazines among creative professionals. The blog design also appropriately matches its content as it breaks the rules of conventional layouts. However, the homepage blog feed is clean and clutter-free.

Good On You is a brand new fashion magazine from Australia. It uses a modern and attractive design that we couldn’t resist. Featuring large headlines as well as big image thumbnails, the blog effectively captures the audience with its smooth design.

Trax is a popular magazine from France that’s been around since 1997. It covers music and culture. The magazine’s new website design is quite mesmerizing as it uses a bright and vivid color palette. As well as a single post layout that makes reading blog articles fun again.

TechCrunch is a popular tech magazine that’s been around for many years. The blog is updated daily and is maintained by dozens of authors. The site design was recently updated to a fresh and fullscreen layout. Now its content takes up your entire screen to offer a better reading experience.

The Next Web seems to have the classic homepage design of everything tech-magazine website. It’s the design that we normally see on WordPress theme demo sites. And for a good reason as well. It just works!

Rolling Stone is a reputable magazine that covers all kinds of topics related to the entertainment industry. It gets fully powered by WordPress and features a very modern and elegant design as well.

Fortune magazine needs no introduction. Their online magazine also uses WordPress with a combination of minimal layout design. An interesting feature of this homepage design is it doesn’t feature descriptions for blog posts. Only the titles. Somehow it seems to improve the readability of the website.

Best Personal Blog Designs

When talking about personal blogs the first thing that comes to your mind is a journal or a small private website. That’s what it used to be about. Today, entrepreneurs use personal blogs to build their personal brands.

Noah Kagan’s personal blog, OKDork is quite a funny one. The theme of the blog is tacos and you can see them everywhere. Noah uses tacos for the blog header images, thumbnails, and even bullet points.

Gary Vee’s personal blog is also his branding page where he promotes his public speaking gigs and podcasts. It’s a great example of using a personal brand to build and grow your business.

Rand Fishkin is well-known as a founder of Moz. Now he’s running a company called Sparktoro using his own personal branding. The blog for Sparktoro is known as Rand’s blog. It’s where Rand shares his guides and rants. It has a very cool design as well.

Best News Blog Designs

Some of the biggest news and newspaper websites on the web get powered by WordPress as well. Here are a few examples.

The design for The New Yorker is simple. Much like the newspaper itself, the news website also uses a minimal design to give more attention to the news stories. And you’ll also notice that it uses a serif font for both titles and body text to be consistent with the brand identity.

Vogue news website has a very interactive design with fixed-on-scroll elements that promote its featured stories. The design also uses large image thumbnails to attract attention as well.

Time website uses a classic news design with a mix of modern elements to highlight some of its top stories and categories. When scrolling down, you’ll notice some usual widgets on sidebar and in-between content for email opt-ins as well.

The website for the Canadian Global News website uses a very official design featuring elegant colors. The site uses widgets quite well to showcase weather, trending topics, and more.

How to Start Your Own Blog

After browsing those amazing blog designs, now you probably want to build your own blog, right? It’s simple. Follow these tips to get started.

1. Install and Setup WordPress

The first step to building a blog is getting web hosting and installing WordPress.

Thanks to managed hosting sites like Kinsta, this process is quite simple as they provide hosting packages that come with WordPress pre-installed.

You’ll have access to a secure and fully-managed WordPress site in no time. Or you can set it up by yourself by buying a domain name, web hosting, and then installing WordPress manually.

Read this guide to learn how it works.

2. Choose the Best WordPress Blog Theme & Template

The next step is finding the right theme and design for your blog.

If you want your blog to look just as cool as the designs featured in this collection, you’ll have to invest in a high-quality premium WordPress theme. Like this one.

You can check out our best WordPress blog themes collection for more inspiration.

3. Publish Incredible Content

Once you have your website up and running with a great host and a beautiful theme, you can start publishing content.

One of the key things that separate great blogs from the rest is quality. It doesn’t matter if you can only publish one blog post per month, just make sure it’s an incredible article.

That’s the only way to make an impactful blog in this fast-growing industry.

4. Optimize for SEO

Of course, your blog posts will not get the attention it deserves if you don’t optimize them to rank well on Google.

Improving your blog posts for SEO is easy when using WordPress. You can start by installing a good SEO plugin on your website, like Yoast SEO.

Also, research for good keywords and write content around those keywords to get more organic traffic to your blog and grow your business.

5. Grow an Email List

Make sure to grow an email list as well. It’s one of the best ways to convert your visitors into leads. As well as to generate sales and traffic.

Have a look at our list of best popup plugins and install one on your blog to start capturing emails of your blog visitors.

Conclusion

Starting a blog is actually easy. Updating, maintaining, and optimizing it is the hard part. Be sure to explore our blog to learn more about how to make a successful blog.

If you’re in the market for a theme, you can grab our premium themes bundle of 60+ themes for just a one-time price.

Looking for WordPress hosting? We use Kinsta. They offer world-class WordPress hosting, built to keep your website fast, secure, and always online.