Choosing the right WordPress theme is important for everyone, but it’s especially crucial for ecommerce businesses: Your theme will ultimately have a direct impact on your conversion rates. As you know, conversions translate to dollars in the ecommerce world.
Here’s the thing — selling products online is extremely competitive. You’re up against global giants like Walmart and Amazon, as well the other smaller ecommerce shops in your industry. It’s unlikely that you have the same budget or resources to a pay a developer to build your site as the major online retailers. However, you still want your site to stand out and to convert visitors to customers. You might feel like a plankton swimming with whales.
The right WordPress theme solves this dilemma for you.
As a small business, your theme will be your website designer, developer, and a part of your tech support. Choosing the right one is crucial. There are thousands of WordPress themes on the market. Plenty of them are stylish, good-looking, and seem like they’d do the job, but not all of them are designed with ecommerce shops in mind.
When you’re trying to find the best ecommerce WordPress theme for your business, you need to look for ways to optimize the customer experience. What will they see when they land on your site? How are the products displayed? What’s the navigation like? You want everything to be easy to find and be visually appealing at the same time.
As an expert in this space, I’ve researched the best ecommerce WordPress themes and narrowed down the top five for you to consider. Use this guide as a reference as you research the best option for your ecommerce shop.
1. Artemis
Artemis is a great option for ecommerce shops that sell products with WooCommerce. This theme adds class and professionalism to your WordPress website.
Artemis has a modern design that’s extremely versatile. The theme comes with tons of different layouts and design options and it gives you the option to highlight what matters most to you on your homepage. You can showcase featured products, specific collections, discounts, and more.
It has a visual composer that lets you customize the page by simply dragging and dropping elements where you want them. You can start with a pre-built template and customize it to fit your needs and design style.
It’s great for sites that sell clothing but has the flexibility to reach niche categories as well. For example, let’s say you sell something unique, such as bicycles or watches. The theme makes it easy for you to emphasize specific features of your products with a combination of images and text descriptions.
I love that this theme supports videos in the product gallery. Rather than just showing your customers different angles of each product (which you should be doing), you can also include a video demonstration of the product. The theme is fully responsive and comes with the Slider Revolution plugin for free, so you can easily create a slideshow or presentation of your products as well.
With Artemis, you can also set up a shopping cart dropdown function on your site. Visitors can add items to their cart and continue shopping without being redirected. There’s also a wish list feature. These elements will help you increase the average order value for your ecommerce store.
Another benefit of this theme is the product quick view option. When a user clicks on a product, the image enlarges and shows a quick description of the item, as opposed to redirecting to a new landing page. This feature helps ensure you always have fast loading times.
Artemis is stylish, dynamic, and overall one of the best ecommerce WordPress themes you can buy. In my opinion, it’s well worth the $59 price tag.
2. Vitrine
If you want your ecommerce shop to stand out from all of the cookie cutter designs out there, I’d definitely recommend the Vitrine WordPress theme.
This is one of the best ecommerce WordPress themes because it’s so easy to use. You can import and install a demo with just one click. Other themes require complex downloads and configurations that are confusing and time consuming. You won’t have that problem with Vitrine.
There are more than 30 shortcodes available that make it easier for you to customize the content on your website. This theme is fully ajaxified as well.
Vitrine lets your customers add items to their wish lists, quick view items, and compare different products on your website. The theme also has extensive options for add-to-cart functionality.
I also like the sticky add to cart feature that this theme offers. Rather than putting your most important CTA at the top or bottom of the screen, where it can be hidden or out of view, the sticky button ensures that it’s in plain sight at all times.
Another reason why this is one of my favorite ecommerce WordPress themes is because it comes with blog design templates as well. Blogging is a great way to drive organic traffic to your website and keep people coming back, even if they’re not always shopping. But, your blog layout shouldn’t look the same as your product catalogs. Vitrine recognizes this with designs made specifically for ecommerce blogging.
Social media marketing is also vital for ecommerce shops — and the Vitrine theme makes it easy. Instead of downloading a separate social media WordPress plugin for that specific feature, there’s a built-in Instagram feed plugin. I love this because it amplifies the work you’re already doing on social and helps convert visitors into followers. You want to make sure your website visitors follow you on social media so you can continue to market to them in the future.
Vitrine employs lazy loading, which is great for websites with lots of photographs. Rather than loading all the images at once, they’ll only be loaded as the user scrolls. With lazy loading, you won’t have to worry about slow page loading times on product pages with tons of images. (And you want tons of images.)
The Vitrine WooCommerce WordPress theme costs $40.
3. Halena
I’d recommend Halena to anyone who wants a modern and minimal theme on their ecommerce site. The layouts are very simple, which is great for showcasing top products on the homepage.
The layouts offered by Halena remind me of luxury websites. But that doesn’t mean you need to charge $10,000 for a watch to use this theme. You can transform any ecommerce site into one that’s elegant and tasteful by using Halena.
The designs are of high quality and really showcase your images in a way that is more creative, unique, and somewhat abstract. It’s certainly not a conservative or traditional theme.
Unlike other WordPress themes, the content and settings on different Halena demos can be mixed and matched. With all of the configuration options, I’m sure you’ll be able to create a design you’re completely satisfied with.
You can completely customize your product pages as well as additional landing pages. The theme can help you create an About Us page that generates leads.
Halena has four unique product layout styles.
- Product zoom
- Lightbox
- 360 degree
- Video
This theme has a comprehensive ajax product filter. It allows customers to narrow their searches down by selecting multiple attributes and filters from the side menu.
One of my favorite features of this theme is the unique lookbook. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you’re selling clothing on your ecommerce site. You can show images of models wearing different items, and allow website visitors to click on articles of clothing that grab their attention. By adding hotspot pins that are ajax enabled, users can add those items to their cart by directly clicking on the image, as opposed to navigating to a product page to buy it.
Don’t know how to code? No problem. Halena has a visual page builder that is simple enough for anyone to use, regardless of technical skill level.
Hundreds of free fonts come standard when you install this WordPress theme, which is priced at $49.
4. Shoptimizer
Shoptimizer is optimized for speed and conversions — two of the most important elements for every ecommerce website.
This plugin is unique in the sense that it’s built differently. Rather than focusing on the latest design trends, the developers analyzed data. After researching the top ecommerce websites on the Internet, they came up with themes that follow those best practices.
The first best practice: speed. The reason why Shoptimizer is so fast is because the theme automatically minifies the main CSS files on your website. It also creates a critical CSS file that loads content nearly instantly from the viewpoint of your website visitors. In addition to lightning fast page loading times, Shoptimizer is also made to improve your organic reach by improving your SEO strategy.
Next, a distraction-free cart. With Shoptimizer, the checkout process clean and keeps the user focused. By removing clutter and steps from checkouts, it will decrease your shopping cart abandonment rates while increasing conversion rates.
Shoptimizer also has a sticky bar for the product details. When people scroll on a product page to get more information, the title, product thumbnail, price, and add to cart button stay at the top of the page in plain sight. This theme includes critical information next to the add to cart button for every product. I’m referring to things like:
- Customer reviews
- Availability
- Return policies
- Shipping options
- Safe checkout badges
All of these add credibility to your website and increase the likelihood that your website visitors will buy something.
You can also leverage FOMO and scarcity on your product pages. This theme has an option for a sales countdown timer, as well as a real-time availability tracker. These persuasive techniques will help you drive more conversions.
The theme is built for accessibility, making it easier for you to reach as many customers as possible, including people with impairments or disabilities.
Speed and conversions aside, the theme is also beautifully designed. You can purchase this ecommerce WordPress theme for $99.
Pro Tip: If you want to buy this theme, add it to your cart but don’t check out right away. I left it in my cart for a couple of minutes, which triggered a popup offering it for $49 instead.
5. Hugo
You’re a business owner, not a website designer. Hugo recognizes the fact that not all ecommerce webmasters are skilled in design. Some website owners just want to sell without having to deal with complex configurations on their sites.
If this sounds like you, then you’ll definitely want to take a look at the Hugo WordPress theme.
The layouts offered by Hugo are extremely simple. If you want to make any changes, just to use the drag-and-drop page builder. It’s responsive and hassle-free to set up. Instead of spending days or weeks setting up your ecommerce shop, you can be up and running in no time at all.
Overall, the styles on Huge are modern. You can choose different color schemes to match your company logo and make sure that you’re appealing to the right audience.
Hugo’s biggest differentiation from other ecommerce WordPress themes that we’ve seen is the backend simplicity. It’s perfect for new WordPress users or ecommerce shop owners who aren’t concerned with minor design details. If you’d rather spend time selling as opposed to playing around with endless customized elements on your website, this is the best ecommerce WordPress plugin for you.
Conclusion
What’s the best ecommerce WordPress theme?
With so many options to choose from, it’s a difficult question to answer, but after extensive research, I’ve been able to narrow down the top five.
Each one of the themes on my list has something that makes it unique or stands out from other options. So take the time to review each to see which theme fits the needs of your ecommerce site. No matter which theme you choose, I’m confident that it will improve the overall design, layout, and performance of your ecommerce website.