WordPress has the distinct honor of being a highly configurable Content Management System (CMS), which was originally designed to address the needs of bloggers but eventually evolved into a platform that accommodates plugins and design widgets – adding not only aesthetic value, but also functionality. There are numerous Premium WP Themes available on the Web designers’ market, including the themes ThemeForest offers, and it can be difficult to pinpoint the optimum one – especially when people’s needs and business demands are constantly evolving. In addition, technology continues to develop, creating additional themes which better respond to changing user needs.
When it comes to content, it’s no longer sufficient to use random, non-thematic images or to have a wall of text populating a website. To attract traffic, additional multimedia such as video and audio, links and quotes are often made a part of the site’s content. Text has also been given a fresh treatment and the more concise the text is, the better it engages the site’s users. Finally, design elements are sharper – reflecting the fast development of design technology.
Here are some of the best premium WordPress themes for 2016, categorized according to their specific and relative fields and yours for grabs! This latest collection of the best WordPress themes has recently been updated and includes some exciting new additions.
UPDATE – March 5th 2016:
We’ve updated this collection of the best recent WordPress themes, adding popular templates and removing some outdated ones.
Category: eCommerce, Business, Portfolio, Gallery
It’s called the X Theme and they’re dubbing it as the theme of 2016 – combining elements of premium design and functionality, enabling you to create unlimited websites using the same core theme. Introduced in early 2014, the theme became an instant success in the Themeforest marketplace receiving positive reviews by many high profile internet marketers. The X Theme really has it all! Check out the 30 demos they’ve created by visiting the preview below.
Category: Multi-purpose (special events, portfolio, business, special interests, eCommerce, IM)
Although Divi could be regarded as a multi-purpose premium WP theme, it’s especially recommended for use for life marker events such as weddings, or special interest sites such as those created for parenting advice and tips. It’s also excellent for promoting products and services through its custom post types. This theme has two homepage layouts available, together with multi-page templates.
Category: Photography, Portfolio, Gallery
Photocrati is a leading theme platform specialising in the photography niche. It provides a platform of themes & templates which include a built-in gallery system, a photography options panel and much more. Ideal for photographers and highly customizable, Photocrati has a great record! Check out the multiple demos by clicking below.
Boundless is a modern layout with parallax effects. Utilising the power of HTML5 and CSS3, it brings you a beautiful design with an extremely lightweight code, which enables fast loading times. The Revolution slider will astonish your visitors, and you’ll be amazed by its numerous features: animations, custom icons, pricing tables, and much more.
Bridge is a leading WP layout currently leading the top 5 templates on ThemeForest. The unique twist of multi purpose features with a creative touch is surely refreshing! Add to this the ability to choose from 100 pre made demos, having 24 design concepts, 84 professionally made shortcodes and all the necessities – great support & documentation, responsiveness and much more.
Category: Portfolio, One page, Corporate
Inception is the perfect one-page portfolio theme, with beautiful CSS3 animations, smooth section transitions, a customizable footer, and Google Maps integration. All of this means that you can easily showcase yourself and your business, regardless of whether it’s online or offline. And with its beautiful design, Inception is a theme that will leave a fantastic and lasting first impression on your visitors.
Category: Design, Minimal, Photography
Beyond its pretty cool name, Skylab certainly has the features to back up its functionality. The demo neatly portrays a fashion photographer’s work; but there’s really no reason why any type of photographer couldn’t enjoy the benefits. The images can be customized, the design simply oozes style, the layout is both mobile responsive and search engine optimize-able, and there’s a great range of demo content included within the package to get the ball rolling.
Category: Business, Minimal
As its name might suggest, the uDesing template is all about you and your preferences. Every single element can be customized; from the typefaces used on any particular page, all the way to uniquely colored header bars or sectioned areas. It fully supports dozens of international languages, it comes with its very own visual composition tool for effects, and it’s entirely e-commerce ready. Overall, this theme allows a business to showcase what it does best and gets its message across perfectly; all while allowing you to sit back as the audience rolls in – thanks to the built-in SEO tool.
Category: Business, Ecommerce, Portfolio, Multipurpose
An extremely popular theme, and for a reason. This is one of the most sold WordPress templates ever, number 1 seller on ThemeForest for years, thanks to its multi-purpose design. You can create anything from it – from blogs to online stores and beautiful creative portfolios. The theme is WooCommerce ready, has lots of gallery and slider options, as well as many other features that will leave you satisfied.
Category: Corporate, Minimal, Business
If you’re looking for a sophisticated design for your business website then the Lavish theme with it’s minimalist and responsive scheme provides it! With multiple available shortcodes, using Lavish, you can easily create as many buttons, tabs, and as much toggle content as needed. Show where you’re located with Google Maps Integration, and create multiple pages with the easy page builder.
Category: eCommerce, WooCommerce
Another great theme made by UXthemes, Flatsome is a Woocommerce template with raving reviews and fan base, and for a good reason. Being retina ready and appealing exclusively for store owners, the features of this item is great for the sole purpose of an online shop. Although you will not find any premade templates, using the xml import features give you the ability to start quickly with the demo design, which is fabulous and will allow you to create your online shop in no time.
Category: Business, eCommerce, Multipurpose
The Retailer is a stunning multipurpose theme with amazing support for WooCommerce and eCommerce sites. It has a modern design with a good layout and a powerful admin panel which allows you to customize how your theme looks without any hassle. Whether you want to build a corporate website, an online store or just a portfolio, The Retailer is a great theme to look at.
Category: eCommerce, Multipurpose, Responsive
Shopkeeper is a truly awesome multipurpose layout made with passion, which you can use for plenty different purposes. Some of the most popular ones are: online stores, portfolio, business and blog. The theme comes with Visual Composer and Revolution Slider. Apart from that, Shopkeeper also has a great admin panel which promotes customization via easy to use settings. The eCommerce features of the theme are strong and the theme is clean, fast and responsive.
Category: Creative, Photography, Fullscreen
ePix is a stunning fullscreen photography theme. It has over a dozen predefined skins and the tools to help you create thousands more. With AJAX lazy load, you will have the best loading times. Visual Composer will make sure that your pages are with the perfect layout and that they suit your work. In other words, ePix is one of the few photography themes that you will have success using. It is robust, responsive, and it’s regularly updated. Certainly a WordPress jewel.
Category: Gallery, Blogging
Moment is a theme for bloggers who want to create something which is both unique and attractive at the same time. It has a really nice grid-based layout which displays the thumbnail images of the post – you’ll be amazed when you see the demo bring this to life! There are 4 layouts for your blog posts, and a very powerful admin panel which allows you to easily customize the outlook of your theme.
Category: Corporate, Responsive, Photography
Cake is an amazing multipurpose theme for WordPress. Though the name might be playful and funny, Cake is a theme which means business! It comes with a very powerful admin panel with options for all of the aspects of the theme – and we all know that a diversified admin panel is the building block of every excellent theme! On top of this, there’s a drag and drop builder which allows you to quickly and easily create custom pages. For greater usability, there are also lots of custom shortcodes making it easy for you to import content.
Category: Creative, Business
As a fully responsive parallax enabled premium WP theme, Karma is rightly rated among the best because of its special theme features which include an Isotope Gallery with Fancybox – ideal for video and image sharing sites such as YouTube and Instagram, and a vertical timeline layout that comes with its own set of media queries and icons. This theme truly lives up to its name, probably the best of the many Word Press themes currently out there, and vouched for by over 21,000 buyers on Themeforest!
Category: Business, Portfolio, Photography
This is a new premium theme with ultra modern design. The theme is multi-purpose and you can use it for anything from a regular blog, to a full-scale online store. An extremely flexible theme, which will be of great use for any and every project.
Category: Magazine, News
If you want a sleek and fully responsive theme built solidly on HTML5 and CSS3 architecture, look no further than Wiksi. This theme’s designed sites can be seen using desktops, smartphones, and tablets. With a shortcode generator, it provides opportunities for endless customization, has a Revolution Slider and offers cross-browser support.
Category: Environmental, Multipurpose
If you want to make a contribution to Mother Earth, it helps if you have a fresh looking website to support your goals. The Natural theme from Organic Themes is designed to suit the purpose of environmental blogs, organizations, or even nature-based businesses. The theme includes custom page templates, a portfolio template, a large slider, and an options panel that allows you to change every aspect of the layout if you wish.
It’s retina-ready and mobile responsive so that the message can be received by everyone no matter what computing device they’re using.
Category: eCommerce, Multipurpose
If you’re looking for free ecommerce WordPress themes, then you may be excited to hear that the developers of the Kallyas theme actually provided a free version of the template – albeit on a trial basis. If you didn’t get a chance to try the free version, then we’d definitely recommend that you consider purchasing this theme anyway! We love the inclusion of the sliders that could help to showcase your latest products or services – and when considering that the theme comes fully loaded with dummy data; all that you’ll need to do is update the text and images, and you’re good to go. We can safely say this is one of the more notable WordPress premium themes out there.
Category: Multipurpose, Minimal, One page
Solo is ideal for seamless jQuery effects that help you come up with a flawless style for your portfolio site. Visual expansion and automatic scrolling combine effortlessly for the best designer’s showcase.
Category: Music
For designers who are creating websites for those in the music industry, or who are themselves musically inclined, it’s very hard to resist the appeal of the I Love Rockband theme. Although it’s specifically situated for dealing with rock-oriented musicality, it’s also highly open to being used to design any kind of site that’s meant for showcasing artists ranging from solo performers to complete bands or orchestral symphonies, and promotional musical events, irrespective of the musical genre. This music theme is one of the best wordpress themes for the year 2013 and will probably lead 2016 as well.
This theme is fully responsive, and comes with a multi-level dropdown menu. It’s also cross compatible with most new browsers.
Category: Travel, Blogging
If you are a traveling blogger, you will probably want to share your stories with the world and inspire people from all over the globe to embrace your lifestyle. Adventure is a perfect starting point for that mission. It has a very clean design which is focused entirely on readability and presenting your content. Sharing photographs is done very elegantly within the posts. Adventure is fully responsive and people will be able to follow you around the world from their mobile devices.
Category: Photography, Fullscreen
Here you can showcase your images and videos in full screen glory. It’s fully responsive too. The options panel allows you to customize a lot of the elements, and nifty effects are possible as well. It’s so easy to use it’s virtually unbeatable.
Category: Parallax, Portfolio, One Page
Maximize the use of the single page Themify theme and its parallax effects by using fly-in elements in relation to your images. Among other things, this theme has portfolio custom post type with Ajax expander and an option for lightbox or photoswipe gallery.
Category: eCommerce
You can sell just about anything under the sun with this theme that uses the JigoShop and the WooCommerce plugins. Customization is a breeze even for non-developers, starting with the more than 50 custom backgrounds and 8 different sliders.
Category: Lifestyle and Food Blogging
There’s nothing that can waste an elegantly cooked meal or spoil even the freshest images of ingredients than a site that does not do much by way of visual appeal. The TastyFood theme is the ideal solution to the quest of foodies and those involved in the food and beverage industries for a stylish site that incorporates a strong sense of visual engagement.
Your recipes, food and beverage items, food presentations, and/or catering events can all be qualified and quantified with the theme’s Rating & Review feature. You can also quickly build an enticing and mouthwatering Gallery, with six advertisement placement options to help you earn on the side.
Category: Blog, Portfolio, Gallery
A beautiful theme that can double as both a blog and a portfolio is what Roua is all about. This is a new and modern theme which incorporates all of the web trends. Based on the very powerful Bootstrap framework, you can be sure that this is a theme that will allow you to customize every little bit about it. Responsiveness is very important nowadays, so the developers have made sure that the theme displays perfectly on all kinds of devices.
Category: Entertainment, Business
City Guide is one of the most modern WP themes of its kind. It presents you with the possibility to create a website which can be used for many reasons, but mainly concerning tourism and sightseeing. The theme has Google Maps integration and has made it very easy for you to manage.
Category: eCommerce, Business, Store
Bazar Shop is a Woo Commerce powered theme which is highly creative yet super neat. Creating unlimited styles and using powerful options for your online shop with a custom builder, you can focus on your content and product list instead of back-end non sense. This theme rocked the Themeforest marketplace in 2013 and will surely be a leader in 2016, so be sure to check out the demo below.
Category: eCommerce, Business, Flat design
Parasponsive is SEO optimized, making it ideal for businesses who want to get a good SERP position. The theme is compatible with smartphones and tablets, additionally to 640+ Google Fonts included. WooCommerce enabled and beautifully designed, Paraspnosive is a great theme to choose for business purposes.
Category: Music, Events
Event is a beautiful theme by Themify, with an amazing design and cool scroll down effects. The Themify builder will allow you to create endless layouts and page styles without having to put in any effort at all. Managing a website has never been easier before!
Category: Ecommerce, Business
If you are in the need of a responsive online store in just a few hours, then Propulsion can do the job for you. It has a simple and beautiful design and WooCommerce will help you create your online store in just a few minutes. There are great gallery options if you would like to create a catalog-type site.
Category: News, Magazine, Blog
At the core of every site that richly features content is a blog. Weblogs have evolved from being personal outpourings of opinion and stories, to a wide variety of fashionable and vari-functional online forms. Must be one of the best Wordpress news templates you can find today.
In the news/magazine/blog category, there’s the BlogNews theme as a robust contender. It can be considered special because it makes available two layout options for your homepage – blog style and magazine style. You can choose from its 6 color schemes, and font styles based on serif and sans-serif. For your images, this theme allows for the creation of automatic thumbnails. Its panel for theme settings provides designers with 74 different options.
Category: Blog, Photography
Parallax Pro is an amazing parallax theme, allowing you to tell your story in this beautiful design with lots of options and settings for customization. Creating page sections is very easy and it does not require that you have any coding knowledge. You can easily switch between pre-defined skins.
Category: Portfolio, Photograpy
Titan is an astonishing WordPress portfolio theme, which is a must for photographers. There are many gallery effects, slider options and animations, and many other features that are going to make your visitors’ jaws drop. Create your stunning unique portfolio in this easy to manage theme!
Category: Parallax, Multi-purpose, Flat design
Photo studios and agencies that rely heavily on the infusion of creative juices can find online site design fulfillment with Flatty 7. It combines the simplicity of a flat single page template a full screen slider aside from parallax scrolling, to come up with a true winner of template.
Category: Travel blog / agency
If you want your visitors to catch the traveling bug, you need to entice them with captivating images and videos of some amazing travel adventures, and that’s what the Voyage theme can do. It doesn’t matter if they’re seeing the site on a large PC monitor or on their smartphones, the theme’s responsive so it will work regardless of screen size.
Voyage also allows you to feature your tour and hotel packages, along with other functions that a travel agency website needs.
Category: Portfolio, Business
CleanPort is a flat design theme with a very good-looking layout, created especially for businesses and agencies who want to create a reliable and enchanting portfolio without having to spends thousands on developers. Get this theme now and see how your audience will like the amazing slideshows and portfolio pages.
Category: Corporate, Education
Modernize has started a whole new age in WordPress theme creation. It is full of features and is a multi-purpose theme that could serve very different areas just as well. Our tests show that the people are most used to seeing this theme filled with business, or educational content, due to the clean and simple design which sets the focus entirely on the text.
Category: Parallax, Portfolio, One Page
Ego has a fullscreen slider and 200+ design options covering fonts, colors, patterns, slider animations, loaders, and slider transition speeds. Great for fashion-oriented or celebrity publicity websites.
Category: Medical, HTML5, Responsive
MedPark is a premium WP theme that’s a sure bet for creating websites that have a medical, health care, or education focus. A functional and attractive slider allows you to show off medical services, present doctors with their credentials and specializations, and engage site visitors by giving them the ability to make appointments online.
Category: Portfolio, eCommerce, Photography
Chromatic is a minimalist portfolio theme for photographers and all visual creatives. The layout is sleek with a menu on the left and block-based portfolio to the right. Everything about the theme is fully responsive and looks fantastic on mobile devices. Chromatic is eCommerce ready which means you can instantly sell your photographs, or licenses for them, directly on your website. The powerful admin panel, backed by the color picker, is the perfect tool for customizing your website and giving it that personalized touch.
Category: Design, Magazine
If you’re a designer or developer for mobile platforms who wants to show off your creative work, go with Pandora Box. It’s a single page HTML template that makes showcasing your works easy to do.
Category: Law, Business
Setting up a website for your law firm is actually easy with the Lawyer theme for WordPress. The impressive admin options panel enables you to set up and customize each page to conform to your specifications. A few of the key features include the ability to upload your own images, icons, backgrounds, and logo, unlimited color choices with the color picker, helpful shortcodes, and a revolution slider for truly striking multi-layered slides.
Category: Design, One Page
If you’re a web designer, chances are you’ve run across clients who insist on making sites “as colorful as possible!” With Freelancer, a fully-responsive theme, you can give them and yourself all the color variations they want, the choices are limitless.
Category: Health and Medical
A health clinic obviously needs to be clean as a whistle, and with the responsive Medi theme you can emphasize the cleanliness and professionalism of your clinic or hospital. The Medi theme is laid out efficiently, and you can customize it by choosing one of the color scheme options available. You can then add custom widgets for a custom contact form with a map, along with widgets for scheduling, open hours, and even testimonials.
Category: Free, Portfolio
Had to list this free theme! Workality provides a great platform for portfolio websites with great features, documentation and support. For being free, who wouldn’t like it?
Category: Photography, Portfolio, Blog
Any photographer knows that frames are important when it comes to showcasing photos, and in this case the Uber theme is the perfect frame for an online gallery. It includes smooth filtering animations and touch sideswipe slideshows. Background images can be customized for individual pages, and the full screen background can synchronize with the homepage slider.
Category: Creative
As a fully responsive parallax enabled WP theme, Rustik can be counted among the best because of its special theme features that include an Isotope Gallery with Fancybox which is ideal for video and image sharing sites such as YouTube and Instagram, and a vertical timeline layout that comes with its own set of media queries and icons. Still, Rustik is minimalistic and fast, which makes it stand out than other themes. This is a theme that fully lives up to its name.
Category: Food, Restaurants
Whether you’re a master chef, a food critic, or just someone who likes to share info about their favorite meals, the Foodie WordPress theme is the perfect theme for you. The huge post images can really showcase food to its best lip-smacking advantage, and the video embeds can demonstrate how the magic is done. The custom recipe and ingredients builder automatically creates an attractive recipe in your blog after you simply enter the ingredients on your site dashboard.
Category: Multi-Purpose (eCommerce, Business, Portfolio)
Multi-purpose themes abound in the market, but not all can boast of a host of features that make designing a site a truly appealing endeavor. The Natural WordPress theme is one of the multi-purpose standouts. Designs based on this theme can encompass corporate sites, cause-oriented organizations, online shops, product or services portfolios, and, if you’re in the mood to be super-trendy, even a stylized blog.
This theme has a huge slider featured on the homepage and templates for customizable pages. A desirable characteristic of this theme include flexibility: it’s easy to modify colors, background images, and other visual highlights.
Category: One page, Flat
Let your website be an epitome of trend-setting designs with the Creativity theme. Modify colors, add images, and complement them with the most awesome write-ups and you’re good to go.
Category: eCommerce, Photography
Photo sliders are one of the best friends of online shop owners. Teeshirt has that, and more: 3 homepage banners can be made for promotional deals, announcing events and trends, or featuring certain product pages that you can direct your customers to. Great theme for clothing lines, crafts, and creative blogs.
Category: Video, Blog
Some video themes are only good for video sites, but VideoPro is also great for news and magazine-style websites. Still, with that name you know what it’s really for. It comes with multiple pages templates for various sections and categories, custom widgets, and a convenient way to manage ads. It’s already SEO optimized and W3C standards compliant, so it can be easily found and read perfectly no matter what browser is used.
Category: WooCommerce, Business
Despite the rather bland name, this responsive theme offers numerous styling options to enable you to come up with a very unique business webpage. You can start by choosing one of the 8 skin options, and then you can change the styling and fonts according to your preferences. You can also create any header or background you wish.
Category: Real Estate
Some video themes are only good for video sites, but VideoPro is also great for news and magazine-style websites. Still, with that name you know what it’s really for. It comes with multiple pages templates for various sections and categories, custom widgets, and a convenient way to manage ads. It’s already SEO optimized and W3C standards compliant, so it can be easily found and read perfectly no matter what browser is used.
Category: Creative, Photography
With this responsive theme, building a website becomes child’s play. You get three default templates comprised of specific areas, and you just drag and drop the elements you want included in those areas. It’s that simple.
Category: Events, Conference
For the corporate event planner, there’s Fest. The GK News Show Pro, GK Comments, and GK Speakers widgets make it a cinch to provide data relevant to the event. Speakers can make their own posts, deepening relevancy.
Category: Creative, Wedding
The Wedding theme is not just for weddings, it can be used for numerous kinds of websites. Your own creativity is the only limit, what with the unlimited color schemes, Ajax pagination, a gallery with multiple albums, 20+ shortcodes, 250+ icons using Entypo, and a slider generator.
That wraps up our list of the 55+ best premium WordPress themes. Would you like other premium themes to be featured here? In that case, send us your comments—we’d love to hear from you!