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When looking for a theme or plugin, WordPress users are spoilt for choice. With the official repository, dedicated marketplaces and various WordPress shops, there are thousands of options — so many, in fact, that it can all too easily become difficult to make a decision.
Making the right choice is critical to your site’s success, though — so isn’t something to be taken lightly. After all, your site’s theme will determine the design displayed to your visitors, and your plugins will add most of its functionalities.
To help you make an informed decision, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at one of the best places to buy WordPress themes and plugins: MyThemeShop. As well as examining MyThemeShop in general, I’ll also be looking at its main features, reviewing a few of its top products and sharing tips for prospective buyers.
Let’s get started!
What Is MyThemeShop?
With a name like MyThemeShop, you’d think the answer would be clear cut. In reality, MyThemeShop occupies a middle ground somewhere between a WordPress theme shop and a WordPress ‘club’. However, because of its pricing policy, it probably leans more towards being a club.
This is because although all of its products (MyThemeShop develops themes and plugins) are available to buy individually, it also has a membership option that gives users complete access to its entire product range.
Believe it or not, MyThemeShop is one of the largest WordPress clubs around, boasting a whopping 600,000+ satisfied customers and a combined catalog of 100+ themes and plugins. Specifically, 87 free and premium themes and 22 free and premium plugins.
MyThemeShop Pricing
With so many competitors, how do MyThemeShop’s theme and plugin prices stack up? Let’s look at the product prices.
In addition to offering a number of free products, MyThemeShop is quite competitive with its prices for individual products. Most premium themes cost $45, with a few priced at just $29. This is more affordable than many other premium theme shops. For example, the average ThemeForest theme is around ~$60.
Plugins are priced individually, ranging from $29 to $77 depending on the plugin. Again, this is competitive with what you see from other plugin developers, like those at CodeCanyon.
If you want access to all the themes and plugins via the MyThemeShop club, you’ll pay different amounts depending on how many sites you want to use the products on:
- 1 site – $99.47 per year
- 3 sites – $197 per year
- Unlimited sites – $420 per year
If you want to use MyThemeShop’s themes and plugins on unlimited sites, the club is a little pricey, especially when compared to similar clubs. Some comparison points are:
- ElegantThemes — from $89 per year for unlimited sites
- Themify — from $89 per year for unlimited sites
- TeslaThemes — from $99 per year for unlimited sites
- ThemeIsle — from $129 per year for up to 3 sites
- WPMU Dev — from $588 per year for unlimited sites
- StudioPress — from $499 a year for unlimited sites
One nice thing about MyThemeShop’s club is that you can use it on client sites and you’ll get support for client sites. So if you build client sites for a living, that’s a reason to consider the unlimited membership.
You’ll also get access to any new products that MyThemeShop releases while you’re an active member.
MyThemeShop WordPress Themes
Now, on to the important stuff: the quality and selection of its products. We’ll start by looking at MyThemeShop’s core product range: WordPress themes.
The MyThemeShop collection consists of 87 themes to date — 71 premium themes, and 16 free ones.
Theme Features
MyThemeShop themes were designed with usability in mind, and each theme ships with a dedicated theme options panel from which you can control the theme’s settings, customize your design, and import dummy content (to have your website looking like the demo you saw when you bought the theme).
It’s worth taking a moment to discuss the full extent of these customization options, which make the themes very versatile.
For a start, every theme has support for unlimited colors and support for Google Fonts. Perhaps more importantly, all themes offer unlimited background options: including a variety of built-in background patterns, the aforementioned unlimited colors, and the option to upload a custom background image.
The themes are pretty feature-rich too. There’s built-in ad management, stylish and lightweight social-sharing buttons, and contact form functionality included with every theme. All themes also come with support for the entire collection of MyThemeShop shortcodes, allowing you to add eye-catching design elements to your site with ease.
Most importantly, though, is that underneath all of this is a clean, lightweight, and robust code and responsive design.
Choosing Themes
The themes are split across four categories:
- Magazine themes (24 available)
- Blog themes (40 available)
- eCommerce themes (6 available)
- Business themes (21 available)
Searching for a theme is easy, and the MyThemeShop website has lots of features to help you out. For a start, you can search for themes in each of the four categories we’ve just listed, plus there’s a separate category for free and popular themes. Or, if you’d prefer, you can start by searching for a keyword using the search function.
All themes include a preview to help you get an idea of the design. These previews come in rows of three by default, but, if you’d prefer a slightly larger preview, you can select a list view.
Perhaps most helpful of all, though, is that MyThemeShop lets you choose which features you want in your theme. You can choose features from a drop-down list, and any theme that fails to meet your criteria is dropped from the search page. There are nine options (and you can select more than one):
- Two column
- Three column
- AdSense optimized
- Fixed header
- Full width
- HTML5/CSS3
- Responsive
- Slider
- Translation ready
When you’ve found a theme you like the look of, you can click through to the theme’s product page. Here, you’ll be able to read more about the theme’s main features, plus you’ll get an idea of the theme’s popularity — each theme includes a community rating out of five.
As you’d expect from one of the top theme sellers around, each theme also comes with its own demo (or demos).
Before you buy a theme, I’d strongly recommend spending a few minutes exploring this demo. You’ll be able to sample the theme’s layouts, try out the different customization options, and get a general idea of how the theme looks and performs.
Most Popular MyThemeShop Themes
To give you a taste of the visual quality of the themes, let’s take a moment to look at a few of the best it has to offer. No sales figures have been made available, so we’re trusting the ‘popularity’ search function here. (Note: Click a screenshot to be taken directly to the theme’s demo page.)
All the prices that I’ll list are for a single-site license. You can also purchase multiple-site licenses for slightly more money.
1. Schema (Blog/eCommerce Theme)
From social media to the search engines, Schema is a theme tailored to dominating the SERPs — achieved by a carefully designed, SEO-optimized layout. The theme is also lightning quick, with site speed an important ranking factor. The site uses a stylish-yet-simple design, plus it comes packaged with review functionality and ad management. For an SEO-focused theme named Schema, the theme, of course, adds the necessary Schema markup that powers Google rich snippets.
Finally, Schema comes with three different pre-built demos — Default, Minimal, and Shop.
Price: $45 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 5 stars (322 reviews).
2. SociallyViral (Magazine/Blog Theme)
Social traffic is consistently growing, and entire websites have popped up feeding almost exclusively off social traffic. If you’re looking to build a viral social website, SociallyViral was built for you — the theme boasts a variety of features to skyrocket social shares and also cater to viral traffic. That means a website with lots of social buttons, trending post widgets, and, with one eye on monetization, advanced AdSense optimization.
Price: $45 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.5 stars (238 reviews).
3. Ad-Sense (Blog/Advertising Theme)
As the name suggests, the Ad-Sense theme is specifically built to help you optimize your revenue from display ads. To do that, it comes with built-in features for ad block detection, ad management, and content locking for people using ad blockers.
Ad-Sense also comes with 10 different demo sites for everything from recipes to technology to fashion to baby blogs. Below, you can see the Viral demo, which is one of my favorites.
Price: $45 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.3 stars (142 reviews).
4. Coupon (Coupon Site/Blog Theme)
Coupon is a great-looking theme built specifically for coupon businesses. It helps you showcase coupons from a variety of stores using an easy-to-navigate interface. The best feature, though, is the “Show coupon” button, which requires users to click to see a coupon (just like how Retailmenot does it). This ensures you get that important affiliate click, while also creating a user-friendly experience for shoppers.
Coupon comes with seven pre-built demo sites, including dedicated options for eCommerce and blogging.
Price: $45 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.6 stars (162 reviews).
5. Corporate (Business Theme)
Corporate is a multipurpose business theme for agencies, corporations, businesses, and freelancers. To help you show your business in the best light, it includes dedicated sections for features, team members, services, a portfolio, testimonials, pricing plans, and more.
Corporate includes two demos — one for a generic business and another for an app.
Price: $45 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.6 stars (240 reviews).
MyThemeShop Plugins
As well as themes, MyThemeShop also offers 22 WordPress plugins, including 18 premium and four free options.
These plugins allow you to add very specific functionality to your website, such as notification bars, time-to-read estimates and coming soon pages.
You can search for plugins in the same way as themes, but, because plugins vary in terms of their capabilities, the plugin product pages are the most important places to look for whatever details you’re after.
Each plugin page has a long list of the plugin’s features, giving you a clear indicator of what it can (or can’t) do. You will also see a user rating, plus there’s a handy demo for each plugin so you can see each one in action.
Most Popular MyThemeShop Plugins
Because there are fewer plugins than themes, let’s run down the top four MyThemeShop WordPress plugins. I’ll also provide a brief summary of what each plugin can do.
1. Rank Math
Rank Math is MyThemeShop’s full-service WordPress SEO plugin. Though it’s fairly new, it’s already active on over 90,000 WordPress sites while maintaining a 4.8-star rating on over 420 reviews at WordPress.org.
Rank Math is a complete alternative for popular plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. It can help you set your meta titles/descriptions, add schema markup, optimize for keywords, suggest internal links, and lots, lots more.
MyThemeShop is putting a ton of resources into Rank Math, which is why it even gets its own dedicated website.
At the moment, Rank Math is 100% free, though I’m guessing MyThemeShop has plans to monetize it at some point in the future.
Price: Free | Full Details
Rating: 4.8 stars (423 reviews at WordPress.org).
2. WP Review Pro
As the name implies, WP Review Pro adds review functionality to any WordPress website. This lets you rate products in style, using a range of rating systems and customization options. The plugin also adds the schema markup to your review posts, which powers Google’s rich snippets functionality. (Note: it’s featured in our best review plugin roundup.)
WP Review Pro also lets you have your visitors submit review ratings and comments, and you can display users’ ratings as part of your review box. Another neat feature is the ability to create comparison tables to compare and contrast different products.
Price: $77 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.1 stars (200 reviews).
3. WP Quiz Pro
WP Quiz Pro helps you build all different types of quizzes for your WordPress site. You can create viral Buzzfeed-style quizzes or more serious implementations, like surveys or online exams.
What’s great about WP Quiz Pro is that it includes smart marketing features to help you get the most from your quizzes. For example, you can collect email addresses before a user starts the quiz or sees their results, and you can also insert ads in between questions.
Another neat feature is the ability to create interactive list posts, where your visitors can vote individual list options up or down.
Price: $67 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.9 stars (201 reviews).
4. WP Subscribe Pro
WP Subscribe Pro lets you display stylish popups and subscription boxes to grow your email list. This plugin boasts plenty of design options to play with, plus support for exit intent technology. You can also integrate WP Subscribe Pro with the most popular email marketing autoresponder services, including AWeber and, of course, Mailchimp.
Price: $29 | Live Demo | Full Details
Rating: 4.7 stars (262 reviews).
MyThemeShop Support
MyThemeShop offers quality, 24/7 support for all its customers. It takes place primarily in public, in its support forum, so that other users can learn from common problems.
The forums are quite active, with over 500,000 posts across the various forums (mostly in the Theme Support forum):
There’s a dedicated section for themes and plugins, plus separation between free and premium products. Simply post your problem on the forum and one of the MyThemeShop-employed support team will respond to your query promptly — usually in no more than an hour or so.
Rather than only concentrating on paid members, MyThemeShop offers great support to free users as well, believing that the support a person receives for a product shouldn’t depend on whether they paid or not.
The forum also supports a search function, so you can look for existing solutions to a problem — usually the quickest way to find answers. Resolved queries are indicated with a green Answered stamp.
MyThemeShip also offers a collection of 33 WordPress 101 video tutorials teaching the basics of WordPress. You can also find even more tutorial videos dedicated to specific MyThemeShop themes and plugins, and MyThemeShop also has another set of videos dedicated to fixing common WordPress errors.
So even if you’re not a MyThemeShop customer, you can still get a lot of value from their support offerings.
Finally, while MyThemeShop offers ticket support for both its free and premium offerings, paid users get priority support, so there’s still an incentive to open up your wallet.
Final Thoughts
Overall, MyThemeShop is almost certainly one of the best WordPress clubs around — it offers an impressive range of themes at an affordable price. Throw in an excellent, versatile selection of plugins and ongoing support, and it isn’t hard to see why more than 600,000 customers have taken the plunge and become MyThemeShop customers.
You may be wondering whether you should buy themes on an individual basis, or as a job lot as part of the ‘club’ subscription. Of course, that depends.
If you build lots of websites — perhaps as a freelance developer or a creative agency — then the club membership is bound to be the most appealing option. This package will give you access to nearly a hundred themes to impress your clients, plus each one comes loaded with customization options so you can tailor a website to a client’s liking.
If, however, you’re an individual building a single website, the decision is a little more difficult. On one hand, you’ll save money by buying a single theme; on the other, paying for a club subscription allows you to test your website under a variety of guises until you find the perfect one.
Using MyThemeShop? Any favourite/recommended products? Thoughts?
