If you’re looking for a new WordPress theme for your educational website, this list is where your search ends.
An educational WordPress website needs a specific structure. Such as to ensure the content is easily readable and visitors can navigate throughout the website.
Apart from looking good, it should load fast, SEO friendly, customizable, and should integrate with LMS, membership plugins, and checkout software.
Unlike other niches, education is one of the most important ones. You need to make sure your website looks good, loads fast, and is responsive.
Otherwise, your visitors might find it hard to get the knowledge they came for.
In this list, there are 11 WordPress themes, that are highly effective and suitable for course creators, schools, and institutional websites.
I’ve picked the themes that are SEO friendly, load fast, and are highly customizable. So you can make these themes look exactly the way you want, without coding.
Academy Pro
Academy Pro is one of the best and most popular WordPress themes for educational sites and online course creators.
It is developed by StudioPress. Academy Pro is a child theme of the Genesis Framework.
If you’re looking for a clean and Morden-looking educational theme, this is the right choice.
Academy Pro is exclusively built for selling e-courses and membership subscriptions. It has a unique front page, that is hight customizable and contains every element you need to showcase your course content and talent as an instructor.
All StudioPress Themes are:
- Gutenberg Ready
- Accessibility Ready
- HubSpot Integration
- Multiple sidebar and width options
- Custom header, menu, and background
- Very few plugins conflict with Genesis Framework and StudioPress Themes
To use Academy Pro you’ll also need the Genesis Framework, you can purchase both from the StudioPress website.
Being a Genesis child theme it integrates with hundreds of email marketing services using eNews extended. Since it is built to integrate with membership WordPress plugins, Learndash courses look amazing on Academy Pro. It also integrates with WooCommerce, so it’s eCommerce ready and it still loads super fast.
Also note, there are very few WordPress themes that can match the quality of Genesis Framework and StudioPress themes.
Themify Ultra
Themify is one of the most popular WordPress theme shops.
Their collection has some of the best minimal themes with extreme customization capabilities.
Ultra is a premium WordPress theme, offered by Themify. Ultra is minimal, lightweight, and has a block-based page builder.
With Ultra, you can create an educational website that looks minimal and loads super fast. And when you need to add something custom to your landing pages, you can quickly do so without using any extra page builder plugins.
It has hundreds of demos, including an online course website demo. You can install the education demo and tweak the settings easily to match your brand.
Learn More about Themify Ultra
Thrive Themes
Thrive Themes have a reputation for developing high-converting WordPress themes and plugins.
They have an extensive library of WordPress themes. All Thrive Themes products are of high quality, they have some of the best plugins for generating leads and building landing pages.
Thrive Themes recently launched “The Theme Builder”, a powerful WordPress plugin to create a custom theme.
And by custom, I mean you can create a brand you theme, a completely unique site structure from scratch. All you need is imagination.
If you’re looking for a theme that works out of the box for your educational website, Focus by Thrive Themes is a good option. They have another amazing plugin called Thrive Architect that allows you to customize a single page/post.
Using Thrive Architect you can add content boxes, custom icons, progress bars, custom menu, lead forms, tables, and more to your web pages.
Thrive Themes also gives you access to hundreds of conversion-focused landing page tempters. Using these templates you can quickly create custom landing pages for your online courses and membership website. If you’re purchasing a Thrive Theme membership, you’ll also get access to numerous other plugins including lead generation and quiz builder.
Learn More about Thrive Themes
Divi
Elegant Themes changed the WordPress page building experience with the launch of Divi. At the same time, they also own the Divi theme.
Divi is by far, the MOST customizable WordPress theme on the planet, that requires zero codings. You can easily change every element on your theme and individual page by using Divi’s real-time visual page builder and theme editor.
Combine both Divi themes and page builder, and you get an ultimate solution to build a website, create landing pages, customize each page/post to look unique, just to name a few.
Since Divi comes as a part of Elegant Themes membership, you’’ also get access to the Bloom plugin. Bloom is a lead generation WordPress plugin. It will help you create optin forms of different formats to collect emails from your visitors and students. Bloom has tons of templates to choose from, and each template is optimized for generating more leads.
If you’re looking for the easiest page builder p and customizable theme to make your educational website one of a kind, Divi is the best there is.
Maker Pro
Another one of the genesis child themes is Maker Pro. Maker Pro is also developed by StuioPress, and just like all other StudioPress themes, it is fast and clean.
Maker Pro is an ideal WordPress theme if you and your students prefer minimalism.
It looks beautiful and elegant. Maker Pro is completely customizable and comes with a great home page. The homepage of Maker Pro is specifically designed for creators to showcase their products, services, and courses.
Maker Pro is completely mobile responsive, SEO friendly, and has amazingly clean coding. Which makes it one of the fastest StudioPress themes.
Pro Tip: If you’re looking for better WordPress hosting, try WPEngine. When you purchase WPEngine Hosting, you also get all the StudioPress themes, as well as Genesis Framework for free. All of that is worth over $350/year. You’ll get a 20% discount on all plans as a BforBloggers reader.
Masterstudy
MasterStudy is the most feature-rich education theme listed on ThemeForest Marketplace.
It looks stunning and comes with a host of features for LMS such as:
- Mobile LMS app
- Zoom Integration, Google Classroom Integration
- Quick install demos
- Course builder, quiz builder, and instructor add-on to handle payouts and get insights
- WooCommerce integration
- PayPal & Stripe Integration, checkout pages
MasterStudy has tons of other features built precisely for instructors and students. You won’t need other software such as Zapier and SamCart when you use MaterStudy.
It has an LMS plugin that allows you to publish courses, manage students, and monetize your membership site from one dashboard.
There’s an easy-to-use visual composer that’ll help you build landing pages without any coding. It is translation-ready theme.
If you’re looking for a complete WordPress theme to start a membership website or sell your online course, MasterStudy is a strong recommendation.
LMS WordPress Theme
LMS WordPress theme is another popular theme listed on ThemeForest. It is developed by DesignThemes and has been voted as one of the top themes that come with a learning management system pre-installed.
When you’re using LMS WordPress Theme, you don’t need additional LMS software.
It has all the essential features required by a teacher to create a high-functioning website for students.
Some of the best LMS WordPress Theme features are:
- In-built LMS – eliminating the cost of additional software
- Lesson management, webinar, video hosting, and WooCommerce integration
- Course taking system, ranking, and progress scoring
- Online quiz module
- Easy-to-use instructor dashboard
- Student certificate management
- WooCommerce payment and S2member payment support
Let me tell you, the courses look absolutely beautiful on this theme. In fact, it is identical and somewhat better than Teachable in several design elements.
You will be able to manage your complete membership site and online courses from within the WordPress dashboard.
Learn More about LMS WordPress Theme
Campus
Campus is a flexible WordPress theme for universities, schools, and institutions.
It is built on Super Skeleton Framework by ThemeIsland and is very popular on Themeforest under the educational category.
Campus comes with a host of features:
- Custom layouts
- Animated portfolio
- Spotify playlist integration
- Custom header layout
- SEO schema + semantic elements
- Intelligent documentation + easy on-board with a checklist
- Shortcode support
- WooCommerce integration
- Jackbox – an add-on that allows you to add Lightbox popups
The campus has a drag and drop theme builder to create a homepage. They have 20+ templates you can choose from to create a landing page base on your niche.
The best part is, you get free support for life with the theme.
Academia
Academia is a powerful WordPress theme built for universities, events, and online course creators.
It is also listed on ThemeForest.
This theme comes with pre-built templates for building landing pages by editing elements.
It is built with Redux Framework, which is highly popular for built WordPress themes. You won’t have a hard time finding freelancers on Fiverr to customize the core of Academia to however you may want.
When you purchase Academia, you also get free access to the Visual Composer page builder plugin and Revolution Slider.
You can easily customize the header, footer, and blog layout.
It supports course publication by integrating with WooCommerce.
StarKid
If your blog is about Kindergarten and Preschool, you should definitely try the StarKid WordPress theme.
StartKid is specifically designed for building websites that kids love, and teachers/institutions find it easy to manage.
The theme is eye-catching, has A very playful feel to it. It has several demos for PreSchool, Primary School, and Kindergarten website layouts.
The demo can be imported to use on your website in one click. All these demos look beautiful and match the enthusiasm of a kid’s mind.
The best part about StarKid is it is natively compatible with Elementor. Elementor is the most beginner-friendly page builder WordPress plugin. Even if you haven’t created any website ever before, Elementor literally makes it a Childs play.
It integrates with the LearnPress LMS plugin, using which you can create and publish online courses and manage membership content. LearnPress LMS comes free with StarKid.
It also integrates with WooCommerce. StarKid is fast, SEO friendly, and has quick support.
GeneratePress
GeneratePress is one of the most popular WordPress themes of all time.
It has been downloaded over 3 million times and has been constantly rated as the best multipurpose theme.
GeneratePress can become anything you can imagine. It can go from a minimal blog to a full-featured eCommerce store to an LMS website.
It is developed with clean coding and is fully customizable. It is fast, SEO friendly, easy to customize, lightweight, and is compatible with every popular plugin.
With the add-ons such as WooCommerce and MemberPress, GeneratePress can become a fantastic theme for educational websites as well.
GeneratePress is both free and premium, but if your goal is to sell courses, its premium version is a better option.
The premium module will allow you to import demos, change colors of every element, integrate WooCommerce, add hooks and hero headers, more control over your blog layout, disable individual elements on specific pages and more.
Learn More about GeneratePress
Special Mentions:
Pickwik is a relatively newly developed WordPress theme or university and coaching website.
It is a neat-looking theme, perfect for minimalism lovers. You get drag and drop page builder, one-click demo install, and Kirki theme manager to customize the theme header, footer, and breadcrumbs. It comes with Google Fonts integration as well.
SmallSteps is another good choice for Kindergarten websites. It has multiple layout options, content modules to add different elements to your pages, sliders, pricing tables, and more. It also comes with custom widgets and has 24×7 support. It is currently listed on TemplateMonster.
Educat is an education management-ready theme, that comes with KingComposer page builder, its own add-on widgets, and Shortcode support. It is a dynamic WordPress theme that is built specifically for colleges, schools, and university websites. It integrates with WooCommerce and LMS plugins natively.
Out of all themes, which one will you choose? It all comes down to personal preference.
Each of the WordPress themes listed here is perfect for any type of educational website, and you should pick the one which resonates with you and your ideology.
Leave a Reply