One of the most popular places where you can find WordPress themes is ThemeForest, currently the biggest theme marketplace. Buying a premium theme from this marketplace can offer you a good level of protection and assurance as you are shopping through a large umbrella brand, despite perhaps choosing a theme from an unknown and unestablished developer.
Choosing an in-house theme for your WordPress membership site can be a bit trickier as it can be harder to find out how reputable the store is or how customizable the theme is. However, a bit of online research should tell you all you need to know regarding the quality of the themes on offer and the service that is provided for any independent stores that catch your eye.
ThemeForest give two extremely insightful snippets of info about their themes– the number of sales and the reviews. They also list a host of other helpful information, such as the date of the most recent update, creation dates, user comments and more. Making it considerably easier to get a relatively comprehensive feel for just how well-received these themes are!
Our Recommendations From ThemeForest:
1. X- The Theme
X- The Theme is a multi-purpose theme for WordPress allowing you to include many modern functionalities for your WordPress site.
The theme has our recommended page builder – Visual Composer and a lot of navigation options, mega menus, and a large arsenal of shortcodes. With over 100k sales, the X has proven itself to be a fantastic option for completely customized one-page WordPress sites. It’s perfect for creating beautiful landing pages that will amaze your audience.
2. Bridge
Bridge is another multi-purpose, completely customizable theme with our favorite page builder – Visual Composer.
Additionally, it comes with over 200 ready-to-use designs, a WooCommerce shop, unlimited colors, unlimited headers, animated transitions, video background options, and tons of shortcodes. Whether you want a simple one-page website or a more robust site with one-page landing pages throughout, this theme has you covered.
3. NewsPaper
NewsPaper is a beautiful and elegant WordPress theme built for content-rich sites.
With trending and latest sort features, media-rich features, and multiple post layouts, NewsPaper is perfect for blogs that post frequently across multiple categories to engage their readers. So if you want to provide a lot of free material for your potential members, NewsPaper can be your perfect choice. Also, the theme is most suitable for AdSense monetization. It also comes prepacked with the Visual Composer plugin.
The Newspaper theme has a lot of demo templates and can be most suitable if you have a membership for: foods and recipes, medicine, baby stuff, travel guides and ideas, health and fitness, cars, wedding ideas, sports, tech, fashion, video games…
4. Enfold
Enfold is one of the most popular WordPress themes on the ThemeFores market, and for a reason.
Enfold has over 98K sales and a lot to like about it: it’s fully responsive, completely compatible with WooCommerce, has a huge array of impressive theme demos — all with particularly easy to install predefined-content, and a nice integration with any membership plugin.
The downside is that the theme didn’t come with Visual Composer page builder, but has integration with the Avia Layout Builder. We are not so happy about it, but if you are comfortable with working with the page builders, it won’t be much trouble for you.
5. Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a one-page WordPress theme with an impressive parallax design.
It comes with 20 pre-made demos that can be installed with one click, responsive design, unlimited pages styles, lots of shortcodes, and much more – perfect for a wide variety of end users, from photographers, creative agencies to non-profits and freelancers.
Brooklyn also comes with Visual Composer, but if you misconfigure the theme it can slow down your website or make your rankings slower. So use this theme only if you are an advanced web designer and you know what you are doing.
Other honorable mentions:
- Jupiter – Multi-Purpose Responsive Theme
- BeTheme – Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme
- Karma – Responsive WordPress Theme
What to avoid from ThemeForest:
- Avada – Avada is the highest selling theme on Theme Forest, and with good reason. It’s attractive, responsive, supports retina displays and is jam packed with many features. But sometimes those features can be TOO many. They can slow down your website and you may be confused all the time while building your membership site.
- Avoid theme with a few sales
- Avoid theme with poor reviews and ratings
- Avoid not regularly updated themes
- Avoid theme developer with poor rank and a few badges
