Small business owners are busy. Their task list seems never-ending, so it stands to reason that they could use as many tools as possible to make their daily lives easier. One such tool comes in the form of a WordPress plugin that many web designers or business owners themselves would overlook as non-essential. But the truth is, this one plugin could save you hours of time each week, and even allow you to build a community around your website.
The plugin in question is BuddyPress. In a nutshell, BuddyPress allows you to build your own social network—and it’s quite flexible to work with for building a variety of community sites.
You can use it to build a small business website, leveraging BuddyPress to develop a collaborative space between you and your coworkers. Having a dedicated company network allows you and your team to have an immediate overview of who is doing what and make sure every project is on track.
And, if you’re a solopreneur, or want to provide an easy way for your clients to get in touch with you, you can use all the features BuddyPress has to offer to facilitate collaboration and offer immediate support. By giving them an easy means of communication, you can greatly improve visitor engagement and grow your website’s audience.
Overall the BuddyPress plugin will make your life a lot easier, and you won't find any shortage in the number of BuddyPress themes out there.
18 Best BuddyPress WordPress Themes
Here are the best-selling professional BuddyPress themes on Envato Market (ThemeForest), with full-featured designs, that people are using to build social and community sites with:
Now let’s take a closer look at some of these themes in this curated selection. Here we showcase the best BuddyPress WordPress themes to make social and community websites with—those that encourage visitor engagement. Learn more about each of these themes to find just the right one for your site’s needs:
1. Cera - Intranet & Community Theme
Cera is an Intranet & Extranet BuddyPress community theme, that offers an amazing number of features that you're more than likely going to need.
The theme also comes with a beautiful design and a highly customizable interface, and if this doesn't convince you yet, it also comes with a highly optimized mobile version.
2. Xphoria - BuddyPress Theme
If you're looking for a theme that would allow users to register on your site, create profiles, post messages, and create and interact in groups and much more, then this BuddyPress theme is definitely for you.
3. WildCommunity - BuddyPress Community Theme
The WildCommunity theme is integrated with a BuddyPress plugin that would allow you to create a Social network.
This theme comes with a very minimal and simplistic design, that would keep all the visitors focused on the content, and wanting more.
4. CommunityJunction - BuddyPress Membership Theme
This is CommunityJunction's 2.0 version. An outstanding social network in a box theme, that delivers in functionality and design. This theme contains every page and detail in an excellent, polished state, not to mention typography, usability and mobile optimization.
5. Kleo - Professional Community BuddyPress Theme
Kleo is a responsive and retina-ready theme that offers seamless integration with BuddyPress and 10+ impressive demo layouts to get you started on the right foot.
This theme has a responsive design and can adapt to multiple niches with ease. Aside from giving you the option to build a community, display activity on your website, and provide live notifications, you can use Kleo to showcase your portfolio, build an online store, and position yourself as an expert with a beautifully designed blog.
It’s exceptionally easy to customize this community theme and style through the native WP Customizer. Also included is an intuitive admin panel, which makes tweaking and creating custom layouts a breeze.
6. Sweet Date - WordPress BuddyPress Social Theme
Sweet Date was originally designed to build a dating website but after many updates and design improvements, it can now be used to build a powerful community-oriented business website as well.
BuddyPress integration gives you the option to connect all your members and display every detail of their profile. Registration and login options are facilitated thanks to a Facebook login option. Notifications are immediately visible on individual profiles and online status is shown in real-time. Sweet Date includes tons of options for styling which makes this theme a joy to use.
7. Woffice - Intranet/Extranet WordPress Theme
If you want to build your very own company network, look no further than Woffice. It’s a feature-rich, multi-purpose WP theme with an attractive design that looks good on any device.
This WP BuddyPress theme includes features like project management, calendar integration, wiki-like articles, a custom login page, a notification center, paid memberships, and much more.
All of this is paired with a powerful page builder and an easy to use theme options panel, giving you everything you need to create a completely custom business and networking website.
8. Socialize - Social Network BuddyPress Theme
Socialize was built with one goal in mind: to take full advantage of everything BuddyPress has to offer. The theme has every feature you would need to build a powerful community or social networking website: from detailed profiles and member directories to live activity feeds and notifications.
Socialize makes it easy to navigate from page to page thanks to the power of AJAX filtering and provides an easy way to register and login do to its integration with the WP Social Login plugin. What’s more, each BuddyPress widget has been integrated with the page builder so you can easily create your own layouts and place widgets anywhere you want on your website.
9. Thrive - Intranet & Community WordPress Theme
The Thrive BuddyPress theme offers a complete solution to build not only a community website but a powerful company network as well. This innovative theme can be tailored to your needs so that your members can easily share messages, files, events, tickets, and forms; edit and collaborate on documents, and manage files and projects. Thrive also offers a private site option, with a secure login for members. It’s easy to set up Thrive and it’s even easier to customize thanks to the integration with Visual Composer Builder.
10. Salutation - Responsive WordPress + BuddyPress Theme
Salutation has a clean and responsive design focused on high-level content organization. Thanks to the well-thought-out menu organization and page structures, this BuddyPress community theme is extremely easy to navigate and your users can quickly find what they are looking for.
On top of that, you can easily build custom layouts, add custom headers and backgrounds, change the color scheme, and more. The theme includes plenty of administration features that give you complete control of your website’s layout and design.
11. Aardvark - Community, Membership, BuddyPress Theme
Brought to you by BuddyPress specialists, Aardvark is a comprehensive community focussed WordPress theme. It’s especially perfect for anyone wanting to charge for membership access and sell online courses. The drag and drop page builder makes it easy to create a unique layout, and the theme options panel gives you complete control over the visual styles of your website.
12. Seeko - Community Site Builder with BuddyPress SuperPowers
If you’re looking to build a modern WordPress theme for a community that needs to handle search queries, Seeko is the right WordPress for you. This BuddyPress theme - built with the latest technologies - offers you a fast, innovative and easy to use WordPress website. It’s a perfect theme for dating sites or membership sites.
Seeko makes creating and editing your pages simple with the Elementor page builder, Gutenberg editor and LIVE Front-end Header builder.
13. Gwangi - Dating & Matchmaking Community Theme
Gwangi is another BuddyPress WordPress theme that’s perfect for a dating website - or any matchmaking site for that matter. This WordPress theme has a clean, modern and flat look that’s highly customizable to your liking or branding needs. Moreover, thanks to their Visual Composer integration, editing and creating pages is seamless and easy.
This WordPress community theme offers a community store integration with WooCommerce, an events calendar with seven layouts for events pages, and five child themes for a quick start.
14. OneCommunity WordPress BuddyPress Theme
OneCommunity is a bright and bold, responsive community WordPress theme. This theme includes all the standard BuddyPress features such as member profiles, user registration, activity feed, and then tops it off by adding the ability to upload media, documents, and much more.
It has four homepage options and nine color schemes included, along with over 40 unique page templates for your inner pages. OneCommunity is truly a powerful social theme that is sure to please even those with the most demanding taste.
15. Buddy - Multipurpose WordPress/BuddyPress Theme
Buddy features a clean and simple site design that adapts beautifully to all screen sizes. The BuddyPress theme works best as a community website: be it for your business, school, or organization. However, it can be used without the social networking features as well.
Special features include shortcodes for various BuddyPress related widgets, icons, and an SEO optimized structure. The social networking community theme gives you the ability to change the options on each individual post, page, or you can do it globally to change them all at once.
16. Olympus - Responsive Community & Social Network WordPress Theme
Olympus is a clean, modern, and fully responsive WordPress and BuddyPress theme that allows you to make the most of your online social networks and communities. This theme features private messaging, forums, mentions, matchmaking and various types of directories. Standard community pages and options are also included with Olympus such as user registration and login forms. The design is fully responsive as well as retina-ready, which means your community website will look good on any device.
17. Lynk - Social Networking and Community WordPress Theme
Lynk is a clean and modern WordPress community theme with amazing BuddyPress features including directories, magazines, communities, events calendars, and social connections lists. Every page on this BuddyPress website is easy to edit with the theme’s layout builder. Lynk can adapt to your brand seamlessly thanks to unlimited color choices and several other customization options. It’s a wonderful theme with many robust features to make your community site an incredible one.
18. Besocial - BuddyPress Social Network & Community WordPress Theme
Besocial is a responsive, multi-purpose BuddyPress theme with an impressive feature set that includes the ability to create profiles, post comments, create groups, add connections and even use the like and dislike rating system. You can also discuss ideas through forums and sell products to your community members thanks to the WooCommerce integration. All in all, Besocial is an excellent and powerful BuddyPress WordPress theme for online communities.
What Features Should a BuddyPress Theme Have?
It goes without saying that a quality BuddyPress theme will have an attractive and responsive design to ensure maximum compatibility with mobile devices. It should also be optimized to load fast as website speed is an ever-increasing factor in visitor interaction and search engine ranking. A few other specific features include:
- Custom page templates for user registration, login, and password reset
- User profile pages and the ability to easily edit your profile
- Live notifications
- Search option
- Creating and Interacting with groups
- The ability to add friends
- Activity feeds
- Private messaging
Community Website Best Practices + Tips
Selecting the perfect theme for your community website is just the beginning. Once you’ve set up your Buddypress website, you need to promote it to encourage visitors to become members of your community and make sure proper security measures are in place to keep your community safe and free from spammers.
1. Make Sure Everything Works
Before the official launch, make sure every feature works. The last thing you want is to promote a website that doesn’t work as you intended. Go through the registration and login options yourself and consider inviting a couple of beta testers to go through the same process. Post a few status updates, upload a document, try sending a private message. In short, test everything.
2. Add Social Login and Registration Options
Nowadays, more and more websites take advantage of social login options. Since most of us already have numerous logins for various purposes and websites, adding an option to register or log in with Facebook or Twitter makes it easier for your users. They’re sure to appreciate this little touch.
3. Protect Your Registration Pages
Unfortunately, a community website of any kind seems to be a magnet for spammers. Consider adding a plugin that stops the spammers at the door by asking anyone who wants to register a simple math question. You can also give CAPTCHA a try, but bear in mind that many people are turned off by it.
4. Promote Your Community
Use your existing network and promote your website through your blog and social media accounts. Consider adding bonus content exclusively for members of your community. Aside from online promotion, use offline promotion methods such as adding your website link to your business cards or creating custom magnets or mugs to generate interest and encourage users to sign up.
5. Encourage User Interaction
As the leader of your community, it’s your job to encourage users to participate. Therefore, it’s crucial to be active yourself and participate in your community on a daily basis. For the first few weeks, consider posting questions or daily polls and invite your members to participate.
You can also create a contest that requires user submission in order to win a small prize. Later on, as your users get familiar with your community, they will become more active and start conversations on their own.
BuddyPress Makes Starting a Community Site With WordPress Easy
Community sites are great for collaborating with others and networking socially within an active community. It can also help you drive your brand recognition through user engagement.
Creating your own community website with BuddyPress can save you a lot of time and give your WordPress site the social features it needs. To make sure building your community website is as easy as possible, choose any one of the best BuddyPress themes from ThemeForest. You won’t regret it!
Editorial Note: Our staff updates this post regularly—adding (new) BuddyPress themes with the best, trending new designs.
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