Best Premium WordPress Themes

Of course, it’s possible to install a free theme for your new website, but the premium option might be a better fit for your needs. The WordPress developer community is sophisticated and produces some amazing stuff. Premium themes are favorable because they tend to focus on adding to the features given away for free. These extras are a challenge for developers and warrant paying extra.

In most cases, paying for a theme gives you more than just a template. Programmers provide detailed documentation with premium versions. They explain the possible settings in detail, making it easier to set up and customize a theme to your liking. They also put you in contact with developers and support for ongoing development advice.

Premium themes tend to differ from their free counterparts in the following ways:

Settings

The options available to users of premium themes generally greatly outweigh those available with free ones. In most free themes, you can play around with the color scheme, but that’s about it. Choose premium themes for different menu forms to change the appearance of your site and make many other important settings changes affecting SEO for example.

Usability

In most cases, premium themes are created by top designers who consider more than good-looking design when creating a theme. They keep SEO and responsive web design in mind. Remember: bad code can’t be read properly by search engines, so your site can’t rely on their users.

Design and functionality

Free themes can limit the room for customization. Your site might come close, but it might never appear exactly how you imagined. Premium themes include endless design features and functions. Insert a logo, high-resolution images and play around with text size and type. Without plugins, you have more access to social media accounts, authors, and comments in the article overview. Premium themes allow you to make something truly unique. They allow search functions in the menu and alternative arrangements of widgets in the sidebars and footer, amongst other things.

Security and updates

Using a recent version of a theme, or something recently developed is extremely important. Your theme must be adaptable to new technologies, operating systems and WordPress updates. The development of new programming languages and versions of WordPress bring related vulnerabilities. Premium themes commonly update with the latest version of WordPress and new programming languages, so your website is up to date and protected.

Developer support

An important advantage of premium themes is the extra support offered, including the opportunity to further develop a template. Most premium themes put you in direct contact with the developer. This contact is extremely helpful if you come across a problem and the documentation doesn't help.

Value

Premium themes cost money, yes but you don’t just get a theme. They come with plugins. These plugins are free to use and are purposely integrated into the theme. Free and integrated plugins save you money and the time taken to search for the plugins compatible with a free theme.

Free themes can include many of the mentioned perks of paid versions. You’ll be hard pushed to find one with as many options available with a premium theme or the amount of support. Tapping into a premium themes and using the complimentary plugins included will balance out costs while the security and updates guaranteed with premium themes will future-proof your site.

Navigating the premium market doesn’t have to be difficult. There are two main avenues you can go down to buy a theme; theme vendors, and theme marketplaces

Theme Vendors

You can buy a theme from small groups or individuals. WordPress provides a directory of commercial themes; this is their curated list of quality themes from theme vendors. There are some notable omissions from the list which is why many people turn to theme marketplaces.

Theme Marketplaces

There are plenty of online market stores (theme marketplaces) you may buy a theme. In exchange for exposure in the marketplace, developers pay a commission per sale. Unlike the WordPress commercial themes directory, these aren't strictly tested against WordPress standards. Even so, the marketplace does a good job of keeping the high-quality themes at the top through user ratings and a download counter.

• Themeforest includes a huge collection of WordPress themes and website templates from the largest global community of creatives.

• Elegant Themes is the home of Divi, the most popular premium WordPress theme in the world. Great features, fair pricing and a money back guarantee explains why Elegant Themes customers have built over 400,000 sites and counting.

• Premiumwp.com has a great system of organizing themes into precise categories for all businesses and blog types.

There are many great themes designed with specific industries in mind, as well as multi-purpose themes which are useful for any type of website. In the following paragraphs, read about the most popular Premium WordPress templates for websites.

• Divi is a much-hyped theme from Elegant Themes. It’s extremely customizable with all types of features and options to give you complete creative control to build a website exactly the way you want.

  Key features and benefits: 20+ premade layouts, create your own layouts, lots of header and Navi options, stunning portfolio, and product page layouts, WooCommerce ready, solid security, drag and drop page builder, video background options, unlimited color options, 300+ icons, and fully translated.

• Use Avada to create a multi-purpose WordPress site with a stylish design, easily. Avada has dominated the number one spot on Themeforest for quite some time thanks to advanced and customizable options to build any type of professional website with no hassle.

  Key features and benefits: Lots of customization options, demo layouts, Fusion builder to create a unique layout, great user reviews and ratings, and six months author support.

• Balance is a feature-rich WordPress theme designed with business and e-commerce in mind. Wow visitors to your site with this feature-rich theme, powerful enough for any size inventory. Suitable for emerging businesses and established brands, WPZOOMs balance is a great theme for displaying your products.

  Key features and benefits: Visual customizer, drag and drop page builder, advanced theme options panel to easily personalize the layout, responsive design, shopping cart widget in headers, full-width background sections, multiple blog layouts, and much more.

• Avada is a great all rounder for creating a business or corporate website. It’s practical, flexible and fast performing. This RichWP theme combines the classic design with the latest theme development features creating powerful and attractive websites.

  Key features and benefits: Fully widgetized front page, custom page templates, widget areas, doesn’t slow your site down with too many page builders and options pages, WooCommerce support, responsive, let’s you use your favorite plugins, and more.

• VideoBox is a powerful theme from WPZOOM design to showcase video content on any device. This premium theme is clean, bold and modern, and is also highly customizable to make exactly the site you have in mind. Embed video from 99% of video sharing sites including YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Facebook and more.

  Key features and benefits: Customizable widgetized homepage, customizable layouts including headers, colors, fonts, background and logo, carousel widget, popular video tab, automatic video thumbnails, and more besides.

• Big Video is a fantastic WordPress theme from Press75. Create perfectly fluid, full-screen video pages using a simple single-page design to showcase your content in style. For a product promo, feature film, landing page, or anything else it’s fantastic.

  Key features and benefits: Display play count, 'loves', integrate MailChimp, free support, awesome parallax effects, youtube video homepage, includes many free plugins, perfectly responsive design, updates with WordPress, and more.

• Extra is a stylish theme from the reliable Elegant Themes catalog, designed for bloggers and online magazines. This highly customizable theme lets you build countless custom page and category layouts. Extra users can create story-driven posts easily with their drag and drop interface.

  Key features and benefits: Completely customizable layouts, category builder, post and page builder, eCommerce ready, premium support and perpetual updates to ensure your website will always work with the latest version of WordPress.

• Paperback is a fantastic looking magazine theme from Array themes. Use Paperback to apply a clean, modern design to any blog type. Their stylish templates would be perfect for food blogs, gadget blogs, photography, travel, fashion, and lifestyle or anything else. Display your posts in a unique featured post carousel, use multiple homepage layouts and use many more helpful content features.

  Key features and benefits: Beautiful Typekit for stand out typography and a great reading experience, theme customizer support to facilitate making easy adjustments, category menu with infinite scroll option, multimedia styling for everything from photos to galleries and videos, and much more.

• Olsen is a professional blogging theme from CSSIgniter. Olsen’s templates deliver a beautiful, minimalist designbuilt with fashion and lifestyle bloggers in mind. Nevertheless, it’s a great fit for any blog with an emphasis on stylish content. This theme has lots of customizer settings to create your blog just as you like including infinite style variations and multiple layouts to choose from.

  Key features and benefits: 80+ customizer settings, 11 unique layouts for blog pages, five post formats, SEO optimized, custom widgets, over 20 style variations including color and typography settings, translation ready, and much more.

• Rich Modern brings a fresh and contemporary style to your WordPress blog. This RichWP theme is ideal for any blog wanting a fresh and creative design. Its design is bold, clean and simple with big images for your posts and a massive header logo. Rich Modern has heaps of great features and options.

  Key features and benefits: Fully widgetized, premium support, WooCommerce ready, custom page templates, theme customizer, super easy install and setup, SEO friendly and fully mobile responsive, and much more.

Still undecided? Try Freemium themes

If you’re still on the shelf about investing in a premium theme, Freemium might be a good choice for you. Freemium themes are both free and premium. Use the theme for free and upgrade for advanced features and functionalities when you are ready. This option saves migrating to a new theme when you want extras and lets you test the basic features for free.