UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …
WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.
An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.
Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.
Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.
Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.
No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.
Music fan sites are a great way to bring together people who have a common interest in a specific musician, a music genre, bands, etc. If you are thinking of putting up a website for that type of audience, here are some of the latest music themes you can check out:
Dubstep is a WordPress theme for bands, musicians, DJs, clubs and everyone involved in the music or entertainment business. This theme supports every post type that a music & entertainment theme would need such as: intuitive Events Management (ability to set date, time, venue, location, and map coordinates; provision for normal and recurring events, tickets support); Discography Management (ability to share your music with fans using either self hosted audio files using the powerful soundManager2 or embedded sounds from SoundCloud); Artists Management (display an infinite number of favorite artists, colleagues, or band members (their albums, tracks, or playlists) and categorize them easily; Media Management (share videos either self-hosted or from services like Youtube, Vimeo etc. and create endless interactive custom photo galleries from your events using templates or sliders).
Sound Blast Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready theme especially designed for bands and music websites. This easy to modify theme features include: Album + Track Management (options include Now Playing, Download, Play Only, and Buy Now), Slider Management, Event Management, Gallery Management, Sidebar Management, Powerful Theme Options + Page Builder, 2 pre-made color variations.
MUSICVENT Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, responsive, and a well-thought out HTML5 WordPress Theme for Music & Event related Personalities/Studios. The theme’s clean Lines & minimal design approach truly highlights the artist(s) and the work(s) showcased. Its unique design and streamlined navigation makes it easy for fans, music aficionados, potential producers, talent scouts, etc., to go through the website get the information needed and take the necessary action after. The 6 built-in page templates (Albums, Artists, Events, Gallery, Bloglist, Contact) are organized and give you or users everything that is needed. Transition and animation effects like black and white photos display their full colors when hovered over. It also includes 2 homepage layout options (fullscreen image slider and fullscreen video background) to choose from according to the audience you are targeting.
RockOn! Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready multipurpose music theme for singers, artists, music bands or musical events created using Twitter Bootstrap, with a responsive design which makes it a perfect fit for all devices. This theme includes features such as: Event Management using one of the best event management plugins – WP Event Manager, 100% responsive 3D Layer Slider, Sidebar Managerusing CrunchPress “CP” framework, WooCommerce Shop Catalog Grid OR Full Layout also Masonry (Filterable), and so many other features.
NOISE Premium WordPress Theme is a cool, creative and modern theme perfect for musicians, DJs, bands and other music related professionals or businesses. Built with smooth and sleek CSS3 and AJAX animations including a unique spectrum analyzer to help you visualize music automatically on every single track. You can easily manage and display your artists, albums, audios, images, videos, events dates and sell your items (tickets etc.), allow users to rate music, and share instantly on their social networks. It also comes with 2 different players (SimplePlayer widget and Extended Player) to give users control over every single track played.
Music Club Premium WordPress Theme is the best WordPress theme for music, club, party, radio station, bands or even entertainment magazine. It comes with great features for music such as: a floating music player at the bottom of the page, a traditional boxed player for those who prefer something familiar, an Event post type that come with a ticket button with 5 tickets status, a Music Album feature which when clicked, automatically fetches all songs in an album to the floating player. Other outstanding features include a Page Builder, Revolution Slider, GoodLayers Importer, and other great music tools, to help you build a power music website users will truly enjoy.
One Page WordPress themes are quite popular nowadays. Some like it for its low maintenance qualities, others like it for the speed, the fast-loading time and SEO benefits, while others enjoy it for the ease of use and the simplified navigation for both website owner and users as well.
Here are some of the latest One-Page WordPress themes in the market that might match the features and functions you need to create your own One-Page wonder website.
Candy Queen Responsive One Page Theme is a beautiful and clean responsive one page design theme for your candy boutique, florist design studio, or beauty salon. This premium theme is suitable for showcasing your product portfolio in a unique, feminine and playful way. This theme includes 3 ready color schemes (blue, lavender, and pink) that can be easily modified, SASS files, and layered PSD files including PSD files of sprites for easy theme modification.
Nivan – One Page Multi Page WordPress Theme is a fresh and refreshing portfolio theme for Agencies & Corporate websites, Artists, Creative Agencies, Collectors, or anyone who needs to showcase their work in a beautiful and elegant way. Its dynamic design, eye catching effects and animations, and flexible settings let you to make the most out of your theme and present a different and unique result for yourself or your client. Key features include: SPNOY exclusive gallery, Revolution Slider, Video Background (animation off), Multi-page option.
Simpleflex is an ultra-responsive, creative, and retina-ready flat-designed WordPress theme, that offers you one page and multi-page layouts with the latest and most powerful features. Its uniquely flat design, beautiful parallax effect and dynamically smooth animations provide you a simple and modern look on all devices. Built on the ThemeLuxe framework, SimpleFlex gives you the cleanest code with an advanced admin panel and an easy-to-use shortcode generator. also Simpleflex includes 2 versions of possible setups (Simple and Modern) no to mention even the PSD files to provide you with all the flexibility of customization you need to create the look that you want for your website.
Bubbles Parallax One Page WordPress Theme is a delightful, clean and modern one page parallax theme that can be used for companies, agencies, portfolios, product presentations, landing pages, and so much more. You have a choice of using a video background, a full screen slider background, or the popular Slider Revolution (in full screen or in custom size). This minimalist premium theme features amazing parallax features for that dynamic and animated look without being distracting.
Alpine is a modern, professional, and flexible one page parallax multi-purpose WordPress theme, developed in Bootstrap framework. This responsive theme built with great attention to details can be used for any type of website: business, corporate, portfolio, products, marketing, etc. Modification and customization for: layout, styling, colors, etc., can be done directly and easily from within the admin backend. You have the opportunity to change layout settings for the whole site, for a particular section, or even both. You can also combine any of available elements to build beautiful Main Page, add more pages if needed, or create your own color scheme. Key features include: parallax sections, 4 home section versions, isotope portfolio, ajax project expander, font awesome integration, etc.
BuddyPress ready themes enable you to create your own special social network centered around your website and content. This means that visitors can register as members and connect and network with other members who are part of your specific niche community. This is especially useful in creating and growing a social network where members share common interests. Here’s a rundown of the top 5 themes that have BuddyPress integrated into them.
WPLMS Premium WordPress Theme is a learning management solution for WordPress. It is designed to deliver and manage educational content for an online audience. WPLMS enables you to create and sell courses as single items, as subscriptions or as a combination of both. You can embed videos and other multimedia content into your courses, create your own question bank with multiple choice, single answer or essay type questions including quiz timers, timelines and auto submit with WPMLS’s built-in quiz and test capabilities. WPLMS includes an instructor dashboard allowing you to check submissions of students as well as your own course content. The theme also has a progress page for users to track progress and l badges and certificates earned and attained. This theme uses BuddyPress for collaboration and discussion with other learners.
Kleo Premium WordPress Theme is a multipurpose theme designed to meet various requirements of most websites.This BuddyPress and bbPress ready theme gives you great flexibility to create a membership site with complete ease. Powered by the popular visual composer plugin, Kleo enables you to simply drag and drop elements into a single page. Kleo enables managing content according to membership level. The theme gives you the ability to restrict content according the type of membership one has. Kleo comes with key features such as an awesome option panel, shortcodes and templates for easy customization, 700+ Fontello icons, WPML ready, and so much more.
Xphoria Premium WordPress Theme showcases what BuddyPress and bbPress plugins are capable of doing. Xphoria gives you the ability to create display forums turning your site into a big social network exchange. Visitors can join groups, post messages, make connections and the like. Conversations are displayed in a neat tiled fashion showing the number of posts under each thumbnail. Groups are displayed on the homepage and may be viewed according to popularity, alphabetical order, activity or date created while each group has a separate page displaying member info and conversations. Essentially, a social network in a box, Xphoria can hel you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.
Plexus Premium WordPress Theme is a multisite theme created especially for enabling your site to host a blog network within WordPress. This theme is fully integrated with BuddyPress and bbPress giving the social networking power fitting for a blog network. It comes with specific network settings that give you control over what blog admins can do with it. Aside from BuddyPress and bbPress full integration, the theme also includes: Visual Composer plugin for that drag and drop convenience in customization, Layer Slider plugin to create a responsive slider with hundreds of transitions, site wide widgets that display content across the blog networks, and so much more.
Klein Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful community theme that gives you the utmost power to maximize social networking. At the heart of this theme is the Gears core framework that enables you to integrate other plugins easily. This innovative WordPress theme was built to support BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce. It is ideal for a website that interacts with a lot of users. Members can create profiles, send messages, add connections, or simply share what’s happening. It also allows members to collaborate through forums or sell any products you require. Key features include: Visual Composer plugin for drag and drop layouts, paid membership pro features to manage subscription packages, supports Woocommerce to set up a vibrant private online ecosystem, etc. This theme works well with BuddyPress plugins such as Events Manage and Album Plus, extending the power of your site’s network.
Multipurpose WordPress Themes are great for creating all types of websites but sometimes it’s more convenient and it saves a lot of time to use a ready-made theme that’s specific to your website requirements. Here are a few WordPress themes that are more than just your usual WordPress theme designs. Check them out:
Joglo Premium WordPress Theme is a modern real estate theme especially built for the real estate business. This WooCommerce enabled premium theme makes it easy to run an online realty company that can handle transactions like offering property for sale or home/apartment renting service. It has a sleek and dynamic design packed with features and functions like: Advanced Search where customers can easily browse any property filtered according to price, location, type or some other category or tag; Agents page listing agents names, description, and contact information; Responsive and custom layout; Property page with a contact form; and, Property detail page with map
Advocator Premium WordPress Theme is primarily designed for non-profit, charity, organization, or advocacy related websites that aim to be interactive with their audience. This theme boasts of professional level accessibility and performance having been built using the Foundation 5 framework by Zurb. Key features include: audience can engage with you on mobile devices with ease, you can accept donations seamlessly, you can add Events for your organization, you can collect emails using Mailchimp, and if you’re a developer, you can customize super fast and efficiently.
Frisieur Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive theme designed for hairdressers, hair salons, stylists, makeup artists, and similar professionals you need to set appointments with. This theme includes features and functions like: Working Appointment form, Approximate time with timepicker (compatible with two time types), Opening hours table, Google Map with geolocalization, and Working Contact Form, – elements necessary to booking clients online.
Pump Premium WordPress Theme is a Wedding Event & Multipurpose WordPress Theme all rolled into one. This super simple and yet fully functional responsive theme has endless possibilities not only for Weddings and events but even for business, corporate, or portfolio applications. This theme can grow with its users and convert into something else and adjust as the couple’s needs and interests evolve. It is also WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML ready.
Woocommerce GoMarket Premium WordPress is a complete shopping solution for eCommerce owners. This theme includes 6 pre-designed stores making it easy to set up the store of your dreams. It features a
combination of Vertical Menu and Main Mega Menu to help customers navigate through the site easily.
The drag and drop feature has become one of the most popular features in WordPress themes lately. We remember how everyone clamored for responsive themes and multiple slider options. Now it’s all about drag and drop. Below are some of the available drag and drop plugins in the marketplace today.
Visual Composer for WordPress is a popular drag and drop page builder plugin that will save you tons of time working on the site content. Take full control over your WordPress site. Add columns, rows and choose from 40+ predefined elements divided in logic groups with single click, by using intuitive and handy UI. Then simply use your mouse to drag elements around to re-arrange them. You can also use your creativity and skills to extend Visual Composer with unique elements by using the developer API. Outstanding features include: intuitive drag and drop interface, object oriented code, template system, responsive grid, custom post types, WordPress user access support, 40+ built in content blocks, and so many other features. Create totally unique websites with no programming knowledge required with Visual Composer.
Aqua Page Builder is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create an unlimited number of template variations for use in your WordPress themes. It follows the same user interface used by the Menus & Widgets admin pages – making you feel right at home with the UI. Similar to the Widgets &s Menus, Aqua Page Builder features the drag and drop interaction to build its templates.This free open source plugin blends seamlessly with the WordPress admin interface making it familiar and easy for users to get used to it. Aqua Page Builder was also designed to reside on a completely independent page, instead of cluttering the post editor. The idea was to offer the freedom to build content outside of the editor, and use it anywhere they like at all. The “template” doesn’t have to be a complete page at all, it can be part of a page that can be re-used on a unlimited amount of pages/post they like.
The Themify drag & drop Builder for WordPress helps you build any page layouts with a live, frontend preview. Layouts are completely responsive, and what you see is what you get. Easily create complex grid layouts by dragging and dropping on Builder’s intuitive user interface. Content can include static text, images, videos, sliders, galleries, tabs, maps, etc. or dynamic content, such as posts, menus, and even sidebars + widgets. It works on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The Builder comes with any Themify theme as part of the Themify framework. You can also purchase the Themify Builder plugin to use in a non-Themify WordPress theme.
The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. These tools were previously only available in our Convertible theme, but now they have been added to a new plugin that will work with any theme. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more. This plugin will work with any theme, not just Elegant Themes but is can be purchased if you are an Elegant Themes member.
Page Layout Builder plugin is a Drag and Drop Page Builder – Layout Builder – Content Builder for WordPress. Building custom WordPress page layout using Page Layout Builder is as easy as dragging-and-dropping. No need to learn HTML or find a coder/designer to change a page layout, modify sidebars, etc. You can directly use more than 3000+ widgets from wordpress.org to place anywhere inside your page content. Modules like sliders, galleries, images, drop-down menu, progress bar, timeline, testimonials, message box, warning box, notification box, loop for custom post type, post loop with various templates, sub-pages, heading, regular html etc. are currently under development. This plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository.
Start off the year in style with these miscellaneous WordPress themes to match your online business:
Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme is a premium theme designed for a cafeteria web site, a restaurant web site, or any other types of food service website such as bistros, bars, fast foods, bakeshops, etc. The sweet and deliciously saccharine design appeal of this theme will surely put a smile on your clients’ faces. The template is adaptive and very easy to customize sporting a semi retro style complete with parallax effects to help make your site simply irresistible.
Mercy Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and elegant theme, developed mainly to setup NGOs, non-profit organizations and corporate websites. It is easy to fully customize the layout, colors and style within minutes due to the superb flexibility of its framework. You can also create unique websites for other purposes like magazine, blog, creative or business. Use the color picker to create your own color scheme and make it as elegant or as high impact as you want. This theme is most suitable for small to large NGO organizations’ website. This clean and minimalist PayPal integrated theme allows you to add as many causes as you need, is translation ready with built in RTL support, and is also WooCommerce ready.
Humbleshop Premium WordPress Theme is a Bootstrap based framework theme designed for the Easy Digital Downloads Plugin. This simple and straightforward responsive theme comes with a real-time theme customizer, related product function, and is additional product image ready. It also includes scripts and plugins: Flexslider, Magnific Popup, Fitvids, Equalize, and Selectnav, to give you more customization options.
Partynight Premium WordPress Theme is a sleek and modern club and party WordPress Theme for night clubs, parties, night events etc. Its flat, clean, and tidy graphics create a classy vibe sans the usual garish and screaming designs typical of night club or events themes. Enhanced functionality allows users to easily customize the look of the theme. Main Features include: Revolution Slider, Events booking support, Table reservation support, Advanced Events organizer (tickets, event builder), WPML support, News Management, and Blog Management.
Actority Premium WordPress Theme is a professional responsive casting agencies’ WordPress template especially designed for those in the entertainment or theater industry. If you’re a producer looking for background talent, or a background actor looking for work, create your own online portal with Actority. This premium theme can also be for other kinds of agencies like real estate or a travel/tourist agency. This fully responsive theme includes several pages like: For Actors page, Application List page, Contact page, Portfolio page (filterable), and other additional page templates. Actority fits any screen, from the largest desktop screens, to any tablet size, down to the smallest smartphones and is very intuitive on any device.
What do you think WordPress has in store for the coming year?
Here are some of the ideas shared by key people in the WordPress community:
From Tomas Puig, WordCamp Chicago 2013:
From Collis Ta’eed, CEO (Envato)
Currently powering over 21% of all websites – with 46 million downloads and thousands of WordPress themes built, bought and sold each day, the future of one of the most popular open source CMS’s existing today burns brighter than ever.