Have you been trying to build your own online community? If you have been around for a long time, you may have heard about the explosion of online communities. Online tribes are everywhere now.
You know: finding a tribe, creating a tribe, nurturing a tribe, and so on… But it all really begins with engagement. The better engaged your community, the better your chances of making the most of it.
And building a social community site especially for your audience could be your first great step in this direction. Think of it as a private Facebook for your readers, customers, or subscribers. Of course, most social networks have features like pages for this, but then your social business goes there instead of happening right on your site.
If you’re more ahead than most and are already using BuddyPress, here are 18 great BuddyPress themes you could install on your site to offer a refreshing social experience to your audience.
So here goes…
1. BuddyBoss Theme
The BuddyBoss Theme is the most advanced solution for building online communities,
and membership sites on WordPress. The theme works out-of-the-box with BuddyPress and integrates with 100+ third-party plugins.
BuddyBoss Theme is designed with flexibility to allow you the freedom to fully customize it for your project’s requirements. It provides a powerful, yet simple and elegant user interface for your community members, that is centred around your content.
Price: $228
2. Kleo
Kleo is a multipurpose WordPress theme that works seamlessly with BuddyPress. You can use it to create community sites, build eCommerce stores, host online portfolios, or simply run a blog.
It comes bundled with 2 premium plugins including a Drag & Drop page builder and a pricing table builder.
Price: $59
3. Klein
Klein is a slick BuddyPress theme that lets you create community, eCommerce, educational, and portfolio sites. It comes with 6 pre-built layout options and Visual Composer, the top Drag & Drop page builder WordPress plugin.
Klein is translation-ready, supports many BuddyPress plugins, and allows users to sign in using their Google and Facebook accounts.
Price: $39
4. Salutation
Salutation is a responsive BuddyPress theme that comes packed with the Slider Revolution plugin. It lets you add stunning slideshows to your community site while on the go.
It also comes with easy-to-use page and contact form builders to help you create custom layouts and forms. Also, Salutation is translation-ready, so you can create your community site in your native language.
Price: $79
5. Xphoria
Xphoria is a fairly simple BuddyPress theme that focuses on building social sites. Not too many bells and whistles here but an easy-to-deploy theme for a quick setup.
Price: $59
6. SweetDate
SweetDate is a BuddyPress theme that lets you create sites within the dating niche (although they like to call it more than a dating theme). Since it supports WooCommerce, you can add a store to your site.
Also, as it’s tailor-made for dating or match-making sites, you will find a lot of custom fields in the user profile. And there’s a great profile matching function to show you profiles based upon your preferences.
SweetDate lets you allow your users to register and sign-in with their Facebook accounts.
Price: $69
7. Social Chef
Social Chef is a specialized BuddyPress theme for creating food social communities. And as you’d expect from a great food theme, Social Chef has a tempting design.
Social Chef supports WooCommerce that lets you sell on your site. Also, you can allow users to submit recipes from the frontend.
It also supports Schema markup language, so you can expect your recipes and its ratings to show up directly in the search results.
Price: $59
8. Mingle
Mingle is a multipurpose WordPress theme that works great with BuddyPress. It comes with a Drag & Drop Layout manager to let you create custom pages for your site. Also, there’s a custom form builder too in case you’d like to include custom fields in your forms.
Mingle is responsive and looks great across all mobile and tablet devices.
Price: $79
9. Cardinal
Cardinal is a powerful BuddyPress theme that lets you create social sites, online stores, and portfolios. It comes across as a well-rounded theme and seems to do a couple of things really well. It has about 30 demos on showcase, each of which can be installed on your site with a single click using Cardinal’s content importer plugin.
Cardinal is responsive, supports multiple languages and works well in a multisite environment too.
Price: $59
10. Buddy
Buddy is a simple BuddyPress theme that sports a simple design. It’s a multisite theme that can be used to create different kinds of websites.
It’s responsive and can be made to work in lots of languages.
Price: $199
11. Wild Community
Wild Community is a responsive BuddyPress theme with awesome looks. It supports WooCommerce, so you extend it to open an online store. Wild Community is compatible with a ton of BuddyPress plugins letting you offer additional functionality through your site.
Wild Community is translation-ready and uses popups to show live update notifications.
Price: $49
12. OneCommunity
OneCommunity is a really pep BuddyPress theme. It’s responsive and offers nine color schemes along with 4 homepage layouts. And it’s translation ready, allowing you to create social sites in your niche.
OneCommunity supports a lot of BuddyPress plugins and offers an inbuilt live chat feature where your community members can chat with each other.
Its support for WooCommerce lets you add a store to your site. You can also use OneCommunity in a multisite environment.
Price: $59
13. Cinematix
Cinematix is a sleek-looking BuddyPress theme that comes with 10 color schemes. It supports WooCommerce letting you add a shop to your site. And it comes shipped with the OneByOne responsive slider plugin.
It’s responsive and adapts to different screen sizes. It also has a cool live chat feature that adds a chat room to your community site. To customize how your site looks, this theme offers lots of layout options. Cinematix is multisite and translation-ready.
Price: $59
14. WPLMS
WPLMS is the most popular BuddyPress eLearning theme. It can be used to create a full-blown learning management system right inside your site. You can use it to create a site like Udemy where instructors can upload their courses and certification programs.
WP LMS comes with separate dashboards for online instructors and students and shows all the important metrics at a glance. The course pages are also designed with care — missing no important information. It’s easy to create courses and browse the course directory. WP LMS also offers a Udemy-style course timeline.
Its autoresponder-like feature lets you create and schedule custom emails when a course is about to expire or new content/chapters are made available.
All in all, a thorough and well-thought out theme that does a great job.
Price: $69
15. Social Learner
Social Learner is an incredible social learning solution that’s built on LearnDash adds advanced social features and gamification to learning management systems. It helps boost both the engagement and performance of students.
Now you won’t bill Social Learner as a premium BuddyPress theme, but it adds a lot of value to eLearning sites. If you’re really serious about your online teaching programs, you should consider getting it. In case you use LearnDash to deliver your program, do add Social Learner to the mix.
Price: $179
Read More| View Demo (For LearnDash)
16. Kudos
Kudos places the online community into high gear with its beautiful responsive design. The theme is crafted for BuddyPress and bbPress and has cross browser support. It has custom page templates, built-in SEO, localization and translation ready. The contains layouts for Corporate Portfolio, Services, WooCommerce, Client Testimonials, and Call to Action.
The theme also includes features such as Integrated LayerSlider, Retina & HDPI Ready, Multiple Post Formats, Social Widgets and many more. The theme integrates with third-party solutions such as Google Analytics, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
Price: $59
17. Socialize
Being a multi-purpose BuddyPress theme, Socialize is the perfect choice if you want to create a community or social network. Socialize has been designed specifically to make the most out of BuddyPress and has also totally redesigned bbPress so it now looks like a traditional forum.
The features of the theme include multiple layouts for homepage, posts, pages and categories, AJAX filtering, bundled with WPBakery Page Builder (worth $46), one-click install, front-end and social login, WooCommerce integration, profile link/notifications counter, multiple page headers, multiple advertisement areas. The theme is retina ready, SEO friendly, translation ready, Contact Form 7 ready, JavaScript fallback, compatible in all major browsers.
Price: $199
18. Aardvark
Aardvark is a complete community-focussed WordPress theme. The theme is the perfect option for paid membership sites, online courses, online stores, blogging, magazine/news sites, intranet/extranet.
The theme can be integrated with Paid Membership Pro, Sensei, WooCommerce, Elementor, Event Manager, bbPress, BuddyPress, WPML, rtMedia, Yoast SEO. It contains multiple header layouts, custom pricing tables, 15 custom page builder elements/shortcodes, 200+ theme options for customizations, social login support and social share options.
Price: $65
Wrapping up
So that’s about it for the top premium BuddyPress themes. If you’ve stumbled upon any other interesting options, we would love to know. Do share in the comments!
Need an advanced, feature-packed and smart alternative for BuddyPress? Download the BuddyBoss Platform – an innovative and smart solution for building online communities. BuddyBoss Platform is a fork and forge of the BuddyPress plugin and bbPress plugin. Any plugin developed for the BuddyPress and bbPress plugin is supported by the BuddyBoss Platform. All the themes listed in this article are 100% compatible with the BuddyBoss Platform and BuddyPress.
Our CEO created an in-depth video explaining the advantages of choosing the BuddyBoss Platform over BuddyPress. Watch it today and choose the most innovative online community solution for your website just like the industry experts – Adam Preiser (WPCrafter) Vito Peleg (WP FeedBack) and Michael Short (WaaS.PRO).
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- Building Your Online Community
It is great to see so many great theme prepacked with Visual Composer.
I am using Boss Theme.. This is really awesome!
Thanks Nick for your feedback 🙂