Hopefully you’ve now got a better idea about what you want out of a theme and what you want from plugins for your church site. Now it’s time to find a good theme to build off of. Of course, everyone’s answer will be different to this question based on the purpose of their site and the appearance they want to give off.
For example, a more traditional church who is looking to serve its current congregation may answer this very differently to a more contemporary church who are looking to inform and attract potential visitors of the church.
However, there are a few popular providers of church specific themes and WordPress themes that you might want to check out.
StudioPress
I am personally a very big fan of StudioPress themes and use them myself. They follow good coding guidelines, have a wide selection of child themes which can be customized further and they have a great community behind the scenes building more great themes, plugins and more tools too. The themes have a wide range of hooks which is great news for quick and easy customization and they even have a church orientated theme called “Outreach”.
However, they don’t include any commonly desired church based functions in their themes such as an event calendar, sermon manger or map. If you are in favor of keeping theme functions and design more separate, then this will be a good thing. But if not, look else where.
ChurchThemes.com
Before I start talking about church themes I should disclose we have run a giveaway with them in the past. Unlike StudioPress, Church themes are specifically targeted at churches. This means they strongly support the common functionality you’d normally see in a church site including sermons, events, staff, locations and more.
If you check out their headline product of Marantha, you can see that it has a slick modern look which can be quickly customized with different color themes without doing any coding.
Check out Churchthemes.com
ChurchThemes.net
Yup. There’s another church themes developer (surprise) however, as far as I know they are not connected or related with the .com version. What they do have in common is good looking modern styled themes with built in functionality for sermons, events, locations and more.
Elegant Themes and Divi
Elegant themes offer a wide range of options, but their most popular has to be Divi. Divi has a “page builder” engine built into it which makes it easier for non coders to tinker, pull it apart and set up completely customized pages and designs rather than settling for one single look. Again, this doesn’t include the functions you might want in a church site, but it will help you set up a complete customers looking site even if your HTML knowledge extends to b = bold and I = italics (and yes web guys, that’s deliberate. )
Boxy Studio
The last theme my church was using was from Justin Scheetz Of Boxy Studio. Since then, he has continued his development of WordPress themes including several targeted towards churches. His themes feature modern designs and build in functionality as well.
Only A Small Sample
This is not a complete list, there are a many mega list posts out there showing off hundreds of different themes [some of which look remarkably similar to others] but that is not what I wanted to do here. This is just a small list of solid themes which I have worked with or know people who have worked with and praised.
Joe Gallant says
Camyno by Themefyre is an excellent Divi alternative, with a page builder that’s easier to use, in my opinion. It’s what my site is built on 🙂 With that said I haven’t used Divi extensively and all of the options above look good.
As with anything, educate yourself. Not just on theme choice, but on how you’ll use your theme, what you’re trying to achieve with your website. A great-looking design is useless on its own if you don’t know who you’re trying to communicate with.
Eric Dye says
I think it’s also important to think ahead to some degree. Some of the “page builder” themes leave a long trail of shortcodes, making it impossible to reskin your site without having to completely rework all your content.
Steven Gliebe says
Thanks for sharing churchthemes.com.
You’re right, we don’t have any connection to ChurchThemes.net. The story there is that it was acquired a few years ago by the guys who formerly ran UpThemes. They discontinued the older themes and released a new one called Uplifted, which uses our Church Theme Content plugin (so you can switch between our themes and their theme pretty easily). They’re hard at work on http://faithmade.com now.
Boxy Studio makes great themes. They use our Church Theme Content too (for Eden and Forgiven) which is nice for churches switching between providers.
Some other shops on my radar:
http://themebright.com – uses our plugin too (one of the themes is free)
http://www.wpforchurch.com
http://www.wpsunday.com – just found this (Genesis child themes)
http://www.organizedthemes.com/church-themes/
Lots of options out there.
Katie Allred says
I wrote a post with examples of churches using Divi: http://katieallred.com/examples-churches-using-divi/