As great and awesome as it is to have your own custom website for your church, not everyone can afford a designer, design agency or have someone with web design chops in the congregation.
That’s when purchasing a premium WordPress theme is a viable option. Other than your regular web hosting costs, you’ll easily spend under $100 for a fully functional theme–usually with some sort of support offered.
Your church will have a rockin’ looking website, without all cost. As for keeping it ‘personal,’ you would be surprised with how personalized your church website will feel after adding your church logo and adding pictures and content that’s specific to your congregation.
These five premium WordPress themes are specifically designed with churches in mind:
Micah Theme
Micah is loaded with:
- Easy-to-post sermons
- News
- Events
- Photos
- More!
The church address is easy to find–complete with Google Map integration, along with built-in podcasting setup and an online donations option, too.
Trinity
This theme is really clean. If you can handle some CSS action, this would make a decent starter theme for building out a church website. Just splash some color here and there and you’re done!
Trinity is available for free, but to dig into the Church-centric elements, you’ll want to pay for the premium version.
Features include:
- Online giving widgets
- Sermon media manager
- Podcast publishing settings
- People manager
- Locations manager
- Twitter feed widget
If you spring fro the fully loaded version, they’ll even give you a PSD file for design.
Ezekiel Theme
This theme is a lot like Micah, but with some nice extras added.
Ezekiel comes with:
- Sermon podcasts
- News
- Photo galleries
- Events
- Social networking integration
- Sermon audio integration
- Mobile friendly without using Flash
- More!
This theme is packed with plenty of punch, but is heavily designed; so unlike the Trinity Theme, making dramatic design changes will take some time.
Malachi Theme
The Malachi theme is great for video-based designs, as adding video and media content to the main slider is easy to do. However, if you’re looking for a robust video-based theme for your church website–like streaming live sermons–I would recommend Live Theme.
Like the Ezekiel and Micah theme (all designed by Mint Themes), this also includes:
- Easy-to-post sermons
- News
- Events
- Photos
- More!
Moses Theme
Like all the other themes I’ve listed (except Trinity), this is another theme by Mint.
In addition to all of the other features included with Mint’s Church-centric themes,
It includes the ability to post sermon MP3 files with Podcast functionality, events, and news articles. Owners can include links to Facebook, Twitter, and more with the click of a button.
In addition to a full PSD file for your designing pleasure, Moses comes with 5 different styles right out-of-the-box.
***BONUS***
Live Theme
The reason I’ve added this as a bonus, is because I wouldn’t consider Live Theme as a Church-centric WordPress theme. These other themes really pack some serious punch when it comes to delivering what most churches are going to want. What Live Theme is good for is for those churches streaming their service. I’ve seen many churches setup a subdomain–such as http://live.example.com–with an independent install of WordPress, aside from the main site. Here is where they stream the live video feed, providing a “virtual church experience” aside from their main website. It also makes it easy to spread the word: i.e. “Join us live at live.example.com!”
What WordPress theme would you recommend for churches?
Paul says
I love that there are developers getting into the niche of wordpress themes specifically fr churches. For a long time I have been modifying themes (woothemes and themeforest mostly) trying to get the functionality I wanted. The problem I run into is flexibility. Some of these are coded in a way that makes it harder to tweak.
Churchthemes specifically warns users not to modify their themes which seems to go against most developers. And there support isn’t up to par.
I hope that as this field of developers grows the professionalism grows as well.
Eric Dye says
Great feedback and insight, Paul. It’s great to hear from someone who really has gotten their elbows dirty doing this!
Perhaps a better solution would be for plugin development. That way, you can run a solid base theme, like Standard, make your design modifications and use plugins to take care of your functionality.
What do you think?
Paul says
I actually use StandardTheme for my blog. It’s rock solid and loves to be tweaked. I’ve never had a support issue with Standard.
Previous to trying churchthemes, I did exactly what you suggest. Plugins are great, but most of the clients I work with like to see it before buying and the church-centric themes are great for them.
I hope mintthemes and churchthemes keep at it. There are plenty of churches who can’t afford someone to do the work and would benefit. Hopefully the support will develop as much as the design.
Eric Dye says
True story. The right WordPress theme is perfect for the church on a budget.
I can’t wait to get ChurchMag upgraded to Standard 3! 😀
Phil Schneider says
I haven’t used in the wild yet, but I love the Simple Church Child Theme for Standard 3.
Eric Dye says
The growth of Standard Theme child themes certainly adds to its awesome–this one included! 😀
Michael Holt says
Another great theme that i’m using for my own church with some customization’s is called ChurchHope. http://themeforest.net/item/churchope-responsive-wordpress-theme/2708562 It’s extremely customizable on it’s own without having to tweak any code. I did some very minimal code changes on ours.
Eric Dye says
Awesome! Thanks for the link, Michael!
Jonathan Ober says
I’m going to second the use of a either standard or even WordPress’ own twenty twelve theme to build off of. I was a designer first and programmer second, but I find great joy in mucking about in the theme code added plugin areas and theme tweaks. I know not every church has the budget for that, but for me, starting at the foundation is fun and exciting. These themes mentioned above, while having some flexibility are somewhat strict in what kinds of function areas they have…that’s where I come in and mess around in the back end code to make the things churches want, happen.
Eric Dye says
I am the same way, however, these are perfect for those that don’t have someone as inclined as us in their church. 🙂
Jack says
I’ve developed 6 themes for churches available here: wpforchurch.com/themes/
The latest, Edwards, was released today: http://www.wpforchurch.com/products/edwards-theme/
Robert says
Awesome! small question: are any of these sites responsive? I am trying to find a good site for my church to migrate to but need it to look good on mutliple devices. Also, any tips on migrating powerpress settings for church podcast to work with new theme? thanks
Jack says
All of my themes are responsive, but I’m not sure there is any automatic way to migrate from powerpress to another solution.
Hal Swift says
I know it’s been a while since this article was posted but I found an fantastic Premium WordPress Theme for churches I thought was excellent. Maybe this will be useful to you:
http://churchthemes.com/themes/resurrect/
Hal Swift says
OH, and this one is responsive too.
Eric Dye says
Yes! That’s a good one. You can read more about it here: https://churchm.ag/church-wordpress-theme-resurrect/