Top Free Ghost Themes & Ghost Skeletons

In the battle for CMS supremacy, Ghost has made waves as a solid ultralight option. Like any other web tool it does need to look good though, that's why we compiled the top free Ghost themes for newbies & pros alike.

Ghost has enjoyed tons of excitement and press in the last year, but it still fits a particular audience. Keeping that in mind we've used specific preferences to define which themes are tops in the field. We're looking for Ghost themes that focus on typography, have a responsive design, are nimble in size, and lean towards a focus on an author (as opposed to a business). Other important features to consider would be built in menus, well structured metadata, minimal styling, font icons, feature images, and helpful tag usage. We've used those basic guidelines to compile the top free Ghost themes and Ghost skeletons available today.

The Best Free Ghost Themes

Ghostium
Ghostium utilizes an off-canvas for the navigation and keeps the primary images to the left (as opposed to the top). It's fully responsive, with rich Microdata, Prism highlighting, Open Graph and Twitter Card meta, AJAX, DNS prefetching, and Disqus comments... All in a very minimal package.
Download Ghostium
Vapor
If you're looking for a theme with a focus on typography, this is a killer option. Minimal design, plenty of white-space, built with all the latest industry bells and whistles, and a very clever vertically collapsing menu. Very solid theme from front to back.
Download Vapor
Portfolio
The bright folks over at Gavick released a couple free Ghost themes and this is my favorite. It features an "image card" layout that finally brings your pictures into the mix. The hover effect adds a nice touch and including post tags below each feature image eases navigation quite a bit. Minimal in style and (as you'd expect) solidly coded across the board.
Ghost Scroll
This theme rides the parallax layout trend, without feeling at all dated. It includes Font Awesome for you UI geeks out there and a unique sticky navigation that will give your scrolling fingers a quick break. If your looking to build a modern one-page scroll website, this will be your best option.
Demo Ghost Scroll
Magnum
Magnum is a simple / responsive theme that hits all the marks and cleans up the default theme in a few noticeable areas. Although I'm not a fan of the color they selected for the demo page, that color is easily customizable, and it adds just the right amount of punch to any design.
Demo Magnum
Triangle Ghost Theme
Triangle Ghost Theme is a sexy, fully responsive Ghost theme built w/ UIKit. Designed with minimalism at it's core, the page loads are ultra fast. Triangle also features Disqus comments, Google Fonts, Font Awesome Icons & detailed schema metadata. We may be partial, but the one word review would be - Solid.
Demo Triangle
Solar
This theme stands out for being the only free Ghost theme I could find with a dark layout. It keeps a small sidebar, which is a nice touch since most Ghost projects are "blog-centric". Solar is fully responsive, uses Prism for syntax highlighting, and offers both light & dark options for those who love customization.
Demo Solar
Readium
Very Medium in style, which is probably where the name came from. Also handles the fixed header image better then any other, which is extra awesome since it pulls corresponding images to each post. Add in the Microdata, tag wrangling, Highlight.js, Open Graph & Twitter Cards, and Font Awesome icons. Score.
Demo Readium

More Incredible Ghost Themes...

While some of these may not be as well rounded as the favorites listed above, they're still very quality options. All of them have their strong points and several of these Ghost themes have unique inclusions that are worth becoming familiar with. Even if you don't love the whole theme, you may want to borrow a piece or two.

Perfetta
This Gavick offering is fully responsive, leans a little "metro" in ux styling, and aims to capture the restaurant blog market (if their demo is any indicator).
Ghost Stories
Not just another clever "ghost" pun, this theme aims to deliver your content in story book format. The concept is rich and would be a clever approach for anyone who wants to run with it.
Demo Ghost Stories
Detox
If you're looking for a clean theme with a focus on strong centered typography, give Detox a look. A striking layout focused on nothing but words. Recommended
Demo Detox
Ice Breaker
Very minimal, but a decent starting point. Wouldn't recommend it for a serious project (hasn't been updated in a while), but the structure is sound and can be a good starter for devs.
Demo Ice Breaker
Sticko
Sticko keeps everything lightweight, but adds some flair. Off-canvas nav, Google Comments, FitVid.js, cover images, icon fonts, and a slick author inclusion are all nice touches that you don't see often. If you want to look at a variety of intuitive code, this is for you.
Demo Sticko

A Few Select Ghost Skeletons

Most web developers like to keep it simple and do the major customizing themselves. For those of you tinkerers out there, we've included a couple amazing Ghost skeletons that'll give a solid kickstart to any one-off project.

Ghost Bootstrap
Ghost and Bootstrap are a solid combo and that's exactly what this starter theme offers. Great time saver and starting point for constructing more advanced projects.
Ghost Bootstrap
Phantom Yeti
If Bootstrap isn't your thing, another solid CSS library is Zurb's Foundation. Phantom Yeti brings brings that addition to the table producing a solid base to work from.
Phantom Yeti
Ghost UIKit Theme
We're huge fans of UIKit and this theme gives you a good starting point to work from. The style is a little boxy for a blog, but that can be ironed out quickly and the structure is rock solid.
Ghost UIKit Theme
The Classy
San Diego hasn't cornered the market on class and this clean cut Ghost theme is proof of that. Simple, but thorough typo styling give you everything you need but the frame.
The Classy
Ghost Blank
In the same vein as Linen, Ghost Blank offers a completely stripped starting point for any custom project. No frills - it's literally "just the basics".
Ghost Blank

Hopefully our top free Ghost themes and Ghost skeletons will get you rolling on customizing your latest install. If you're looking to get a more comprehensive understand of how all those handlebars work, we've included a couple useful links below that are very helpful. If you've found this article useful, please be sure to share it with your fans. If you think we missed a strong contender, drop us a message & as always - Thanks for stopping by.