8 best WordPress themes for BuddyPress community websites

Whether you are blogging, running an online community or managing a social networking website, making your website beautiful is really important. 😍

The look of your website is heavily influenced by the theme you use on your website. 🎨🖌️

When it comes to themes, it can be a free one from the WordPress repository, a premium theme you bought from an online marketplace, or even a custom coded one.

A good theme can make your website look appealing, attract more signups, and influence your search engine ranking. 📈

While a poorly coded one can break your website, cause incompatibilities, and affect the user experience on your site. This can even push your existing members away in search of better alternatives. 📉

Impact of WordPress themes on BuddyPress components

Apart from the above factors, WordPress themes also affect the way your BuddyPress components are styled. So, it is really important that you pick the most suitable theme that complements the ultimate goal of your site.

Now, here are some of the best BuddyPress WordPress themes which you can use for making your community website look good and more functional –

Social Networking 👥

If you are using BuddyPress for creating or managing your social networking website, you are in for a great surprise!

Check out InspireBook.

InspireBook

InspireBook - The Best WordPress Social Networking Theme like Facebook for BuddyPress Communities.

InspireBook is a premium BuddyPress WordPress theme that can make your community website look and feel like Facebook.

It is modern and can attract a lot of people to your website subconsciously. Yes, you read that right. If you don’t believe it, keep reading.

According to the familiarity principle (or the mere-exposure effect), people tend to develop a preference for things they are already familiar with.

Source: Wikipedia References

Since a lot of people are already familiar with Facebook, they might develop a liking for your website without them realizing it when they first set eyes on your site.

Apart from that, InspireBook also adds a dash of other social networking features when used along with rtMedia – the best media management plugin for WordPress.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, InspireBook is also simple, elegant and offers an intuitive user experience on your site.

Klein

Klein - Social Networking and BuddyPress Community Theme

If you are not a big fan of Facebook or you simply need more options, you can check out Klein.

Klein is a feature-rich BuddyPress theme for building social networking websites. Since it is primarily focused on social media, care has been taken to make BuddyPress components look good on your website.

Apart from that, it makes use of the Visual Composer WordPress page builder plugin. It makes it easy for you to add or remove sections from your website and customize it deeply.

Klein also provides support for Google/Facebook login authentication with your BuddyPress site. Using this feature, people can log in to your site using their Google/Facebook account. How cool is that! 😀

For Online Dating ❤️

Online dating is growing in popularity nowadays, thanks to the rising number of smartphone users with an internet connection. To ride on this growth, you don’t need a smartphone application.

All you need is a responsive dating website and a witty marketing strategy. Here’s our favorite pick.

rtDating

rtDating - The Best WordPress Dating Theme for BuddyPress Websites

rtDating can help you create a local or international dating website where people can register themselves and discover potential matches.

rtDating is modern, beautiful and designed with vibrant colors exactly for this purpose. Integrating it with BuddyPress, you can allow people to register themselves and look for potential matches in less than a few minutes. It’s time to share some love!

For Food Community and Forums 🍔

If you are a food and recipe blogger, you can take your food blog to the next level by extending it to include an online community or forum and eCommerce store.

  • A food community can help bring people together to discuss recipes online. The comments section is not always a good place and it can severely impact your page load times.
  • Forums serve the same purpose but without social networking features. There’s no personal touch to it.
  • Setting up an online store can help you sell products from brand partners and affiliate networks.

FoodMania

FoodMania - The Best WordPress Food Blogging Community and Restaurant Review Theme

Foodmania is a premium WordPress theme designed primarily for sharing recipes, reviewing food/hotels, and building restaurant communities. It comes with support for BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce out of the box.

With Foodmania, you needn’t spend hours trying to make your community website look beautiful and work properly with BuddyPress and WooCommerce components.

Just install it, follow the theme documentation, and you’re good to go.

For Intranet 💼

If you are tasked with building your company’s intranet, you can build it on your own using WordPress and BuddyPress Instead of relying on a SaaS solution.

This way, you needn’t worry about data security, privacy, changes to plan features, and increased license cost.

To complement the look and feel of a professional work environment, you can use BuddyPress themes like Thrive or Woffice.

Thrive

Thrive - The Best WordPress Intranet/Extranet BuddyPress Community Theme

Thrive is a BuddyPress theme designed especially for building a company intranet. With Thrive, you can design a modern intranet for your company and enable employees to interact better within and outside their teams.

Thrive can also be used for internal messaging, task management, and file sharing. But if you need advanced business management features, we would recommend you to go with Woffice.

Woffice

Woffice - Ultimate WordPress Intranet/Extranet BuddyPress community theme

Woffice is also a BuddyPress community theme for intranets. What makes it stand out from the crowd is its advanced features.

Currently, Woffice provides the best features you need to improve your employees’ productivity.

Using Woffice, employees can track their time, assign projects, and enable Slack integration.

By the way, if you are using G Suite within your organization, you can enable Google Sign-In to help employees log in to the company intranet without entering passwords.

Multipurpose themes 🧙

If you are a freelance web designer or an agency, you might find multipurpose BuddyPress themes like Kleo and Aardvark handy. They come with many pre-built templates and can save you a lot of time by cutting down development times.

Kleo

Kleo - The Best Multipurpose WordPress BuddyPress theme for communitites

Kleo is truly one of the best multipurpose BuddyPress themes available in the WordPress theme marketplace. It comes with built-in demos for BuddyPress profiles, custom members search, landing pages, and more.

You can also connect it with popular LMS and eCommerce plugins to offer online courses and sell digital goods.

Rather than reading about it, it’s better if you can view the live demo by clicking on the button below.

Aardvark

Aardvark - Best WordPress and BuddyPress theme for Community, Membership, eLearning, and Online Store

Built by the same developer behind other popular BuddyPress themes like Socialize and Buddy,  Aardvark is also an excellent multipurpose BuddyPress theme.

You can use Aardvark to build community-focused websites, sell online courses, set up an online store, and more. It looks good and comes with a lot of pre-built templates which you can easily import to get started with your next project.

As a freelance designer or a web design agency, having these BuddyPress themes in your inventory can save a lot of development time for you.

All New rtMedia Enterprise Plan

Are you a large enterprise looking to leverage BuddyPress for your business?

We are now offering a special rtMedia Enterprise plan for power users who need more than what just BuddyPress offers. It includes customization, onboarding, training, and more.

Get in touch with us today and let’s discuss how we can take your community site to the next level!