Think of how many memberships you currently have. From gyms to Netflix, memberships are the modern way of paying for products and services. Heck, even Amazon lets customers sign up for recurring memberships to get products on a regular basis.
So, what if you’d like to make your own membership community? It’s essential to find the right WordPress membership theme for your situation.
That’s why we searched the web and put together this curated list of the best WordPress membership themes you can find.
Let’s start by setting the scene here: you’re not necessarily looking for a WordPress theme that’s intentionally built for making a membership site. The reason for this is because you typically have to utilize a WordPress membership plugin in order to give your website the functionality it needs.
Therefore, we’ll cover themes that are actually made with some membership features. But overall, the goal is to find the themes that have awesome interfaces, provide beautiful user profiles, and integrate nicely with the plugins you’ll need to build and grow a membership website. If you come across a site with a WordPress membership theme that you like, find out what theme it uses with our theme detector tool.
As for what to look for in a WordPress membership theme, here are the essentials:
Your theme needs to be fast. There’s nothing that’ll turn your new members off than a slow loading website. People want to get on your site, interact with others, and avoid spending time just because of faulty technology. Not only that, but speedier websites are key for SEO.
For membership site managers this guide is a must-read: The Do’s and Don’ts for Hosting WordPress Membership Sites.
Many membership sites have ecommerce tools and paid content. For instance, you may want to sell educational materials about gardening. It’s important to secure that content it isn’t pulled from your site and given away for free. In addition, you want to make sure that all customer payment information is kept safe.
Updates keep your security strong and add additional features. It’s not a good look if your community sees that the entire website got hacked or crashes because of a lack of updates.
Managing a community takes lots of time and effort. Even experienced developers need help along the way. That’s why we highly recommend premium themes with reputable customer support teams. You don’t want to be waiting around for a response when hundreds, or thousands, or millions of members are trying to access your site.
Atakdomain provides managed hosting for membership sites. This way, it’s another area that you don’t have to worry about when running your membership site.
Not only does Atakdomain provide an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee., but the servers are fast and secure, ensuring that all of your information and transactions are kept safe.
Finally, Atakdomain offers automated backups and updates with all plans. This way, you don’t have to do any of the work, and you know that you’re not going to have severe problems in the future. If you’re considering moving to a new host with your membership site, you should take advantage of our ability to migrate membership sites without any problems.
And now… it’s time for some themes!
Aardvark delivers the ultimate membership interface, combining the versatility of a blogging system with that of a clean membership and community configuration. You can include a shop, elearning page, and a full membership page without having to mess with any complicated coding or settings adjustments. Paid membership sites are possible, and the blog is great for delivering content that you may drip to members.
This is a magazine-style website, with tools to restrict certain content depending on the type of user logged into the site. You can also turn your site into a ratings and review hub, making it even more appealing for the customers who are members.
Aardvark
$65 on ThemeForest, with the option to upgrade for extended customer support.
Ultra is one of the most powerful themes from Themify. It provides an interface for rapidly designing your membership site on WordPress, with responsive elements, full control of your footer and header, and must-have coding and design items for beginners and developers.
Several premade skins come with the Ultra theme, so you can choose from different categories like restaurant, wedding, and fitness. For instance, you may want to develop a membership website for your gym. In that case, the Fitness skin would work well. There are also many builder addons for constructing your site with ease.
Overall, this is a high-quality theme with smart layout options that work rather well for online communities. In fact, you’ll most likely never use all of the features packed into Ultra, but it’s nice to know that you have them, just in case.
Ultra
Three plans are available for Ultra:
Each upgrade includes several extras like addons and plugins.
Divi is one of the most popular themes on the market, and for good reason. First of all, the Divi theme has a drag and drop builder that anyone can get used to. Not only that, but the subscription for Divi provides some of the best support you can ask for when buying a theme.
The websites built with Divi are fast, lightweight, and modern, which is exactly what you want if lots of members will be accessing your site. The Divi builder has seemingly endless design elements, such as counters, images, and more.
We also like the advanced code editing, WooCommerce integration, and user profile building for constructing the ideal infrastructure for your future members.
Divi
Divi is sold as a membership itself. This means you receive all Elegant Themes plugins and themes, along with full support. Here are the plans:
Astra is a wonderful option for making a WordPress membership site, seeing as how it features pre-built websites and customizations without any code. Astra is made to work with the best page builders and it has super-fast performance to ensure that members stick around to interact with each other.
Some of the customizations to take advantage of include colors, the blog area, and the header. The seamless integrations with WooCommerce and Elementor make sure that you’re able to design rapidly and sell memberships when needed.
With pre-built designs, quality support, and a large community to bounce ideas off of, the Astra theme does the trick for most membership sites.
Astra
The theme is sold in three packages:
The Astra Pro package has the majority of the required features. Upgrades offer things like more starter sites and page builder addons.
The OceanWP WordPress theme has free and paid versions, with design items that work well for developers and hobbyists. It all starts with one of the many demos provided through OceanWP, with options for gyms, shoe stores, chocolate retailers, and more.
All of these demos can be installed within minutes, and you can even take advantage of several extensions that allow you to make your membership site as advanced or as simple as possible.
Some of the top reasons to consider OceanWP for your membership site is because it is fully responsive, fast, and ecommerce ready. We also like that it has translation tools for expanding your reach to other parts of the world.
As for the WooCommerce integration, this is one of our favorites for memberships, since you can customize everything from a floating cart bar to a native cart popup.
OceanWP
OceanWP has three pricing plans:
PointFinder is only sold on ThemeForest. It’s actually designed to function out of the box as a directory and listing membership website. You can ask the user to pay per post or collect fees based on different levels of membership.
It works nicely with WooCommerce, with integrations for payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe. You also get support for language tools that expand your reach to other countries. The powerful and flexible theme is primarily for directories and review systems, but most of these types of websites focus on membership at some point.
Therefore, we recommend it to those companies and individuals looking to build a site like this.
PointFinder
PointFinder sells on ThemeForest for $69. Extended support can be purchased.
Hestia Pro is a theme from ThemeIsle that delivers a one-page layout for a more minimalist membership website. The high-performance theme provides an good combination of speedy loading, slick design elements, and compatibility with other page builders.
All design is completed in the WordPress customizer , but you do have the option to connect your site with a page builder of your choice. In addition, the WooCommerce plugin works well with the Hestia Pro theme.
What’s more is that a collection of starter sites, or demos, are provided for categories like business, ecommerce, one-page, and minimal themes.
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Hestia Pro
Choose from the following pricing plans for Hestia Pro:
Binder PRO is a publishing theme with the potential for creating stunning articles and building a solid following through membership. The template introduces a sleek design for beginners and developers alike, presenting your articles in a grid-like format with a wide variety of other widgets for organizing your magazine the way you want.
Banners, comments, and social media buttons are all incorporated into the design, along with the latest post recommendations and author information.
As for features that help with membership sites, we like that you can choose from several demo formats, all of which primarily focus on making a beautiful blogging interface. Essentially, this theme is best for publishers who may eventually want to charge for membership.
Binder Pro
Three plans are offered for the Binder PRO theme:
Sold on ThemeForest, the Gwangi theme is meant for small and large membership sites. You can also create communities and social networks with the large feature collections and page builder support. Communities can range from Yelp-like directories to full social networks or dating sites.
Regardless of your aspirations, Gwangi provides member geolocation services and profile creation. Members can interact with each other and pay you subscription fees. You may also want to offer free features, with the intent to eventually sell people on paid features. Advertisements are also possible through Gwangi, and you can generate a complete e-learning community with shops, forums, and events.
Gwangi
The main price for Gwangi is $59 on ThemeForest. Extra support is available for an extra charge.
CBKit serves as a learning management system and a membership dashboard, offering up an easy to use interface for selling memberships to your own online school. The theme is a replacement for many LMS plugins, using integrations with WooCommerce and several payment processors.
This WordPress membership theme lets you customize everything from colors to the formatting of your courses. Running ads is a possibility, along with social network elements such as profiles, messaging, and public posting. We enjoy the drag and drop editor for those who don’t want to build a website with code.
You can also generate a completely unique design for your school and have your users enroll in classes for free or for a fee. Everything you would expect from a standard LMS is available in this membership theme, from course announcements to advanced quizzes. This means you don’t have to pay monthly fees for a third-party LMS.
CBKit
The theme only sells on ThemeForest, for $64.
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Buddy is a multipurpose theme with tools for integrating and working nicely with the BuddyPress plugin. This means that you can create a social network with messaging, profile creation, and groups.
This is a lightweight theme that loads pages quickly and includes a beautiful responsive layout for members to interact with each other on mobile devices. The theme also integrates with bbPress, which is more for making forums, instead of social networks.
Regardless, this is a WordPress membership theme made for members-focused site-building. It’s a pricey solution, but most third-party plugins require recurring payments, while Buddy only needs a one-time payment.
Buddy
This is one of the more expensive themes on ThemeForest, but it’s mainly because it packs quite a few features into the purchase. The price is $199.
Olympus stands out as an excellent social networking theme with support for the BuddyPress WordPress plugin. You’re able to build your community with the help of the Youzer integration, which is a WordPress plugin for making membership sites and social communities.
Many demos are provided for you to play around with and you can generate a full Facebook-like experience with options like friendships, private messaging, and notifications. Groups and member directories are also possible, making the Olympus theme an essential solution for those interested in making a site with constant user interaction.
Olympus
At $59, the Olympus theme is a solid option As always, with the ThemeForest marketplace, additional customer support is available as an upgrade.
Not all of the best WordPress membership theme options are meant to provide long lists of features. In fact, many times it makes the most sense to minimize distractions and focus on the content and simple user experience. Exhale completes this task with a basic design and three blogging demos that stand out for cafes, agencies, and app sales.
So, if you’d like to manage a community around your app or you want to nurture a community of coffee lovers, the Exhale theme is an excellent place to start.
Exhale
Two reasonable pricing plans are offered for the Exhale theme:
Food blogs often have communities centered around sharing recipes, talking about new food shows, and locating the best restaurants in certain areas. Yumblog, as you may have assumed, is a food blogging theme with features for posting recipes, collecting email addresses, and formatting your blog posts without any coding knowledge.
It works wonders as a WordPress membership theme as well, seeing as how you can integrate with BuddyPress or bbPress for making more of a social or forum environment. It’s not the cheapest theme you’ll find online, but we know that the customer support is solid and the features improve on a regular basis.
Yumblog
A purchase of one domain license costs $125.
REAL serves as a minimalist blogging theme that has the capabilities to extend into a membership platform. The features are kept to a minimum, and that’s exactly what some membership site owners are looking for.
We like this as a community theme because of its support for advertisements, WooCommerce, and membership plugins like bbPress and BuddyPress. Paid Memberships Pro also integrates well.
REAL
The ThemeForest pricing is listed at $44. As always, extended customer support is available as an upgrade.
A list of WordPress membership themes wouldn’t be complete without at least one dating option. LoveStory is the perfect fit if you plan on making a membership site for people seeking out love. It’s a beautiful design, with features for collecting membership fees, sending private messages, and allowing for Facebook logins. The virtual gifts are unique, and the built-in live-chat is sure to get your members talking.
What’s great about the LoveStory theme is that the profiles are clean and easy to control. Users have options for uploading photos, changing around their interests, and instantly connecting with people who have similar interests. It’s obviously not an easy space to get into, but there are plenty of niches that are still available for dating sites!
LoveStory
The theme is listed at $49 on ThemeForest. Additional customer support can also be paid for.
As mentioned before, pretty much any WordPress theme could be used for a membership site. All you have to do is install a membership plugin to make it work.
However, it’s not the best idea to grab a theme without researching. Therefore, we recommend taking the following steps:
After all of that, you should be able to narrow down the list and find the perfect WordPress membership theme!
Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!
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