As material design is gaining popularity, most designers are now using WordPress material design themes to visualize their blogs or websites. However, due to the variation in features and look and feel of these themes, I have seen many people struggling while choosing the right one for their websites.
That’s why, I’m writing this post to make it simpler for you to visualize various material design themes, understand their features, and download or buy one of them as easily as possible. Come on, let’s check out the best material design themes for WordPress platform.
Read Also: 70+ Material Design Resources for Android Developers
Free Themes
Hestia
Hestia comes with a well-built modern and intuitive interface within a one-page layout, which lets you use custom backgrounds. This responsive theme offers a live customizer (like any standard or premium theme) to view the site modifications in real time.
Apart from the commonly available features, this theme is SEO optimized, includes a drag-and-drop builder, and lets you readily translate the content. That being said, I think that Hestia is perfect to build a business portfolio, and showcase products or services.
Download | View demo
Realistic
The Realistic is a blazing fast theme that supports widgets and sidebar customizations. This theme is SEO friendly, and it will astonish your reader with its intuitive interface and smooth animations. Also, Realistic has a responsive layout with many color schemes.
Surprisingly for a free theme, Realistic also offers 40 lightweight background patterns along with material font icons. It has a powerful live customizer feature that lets you set up a custom error page, use breadcrumbs, and add related posts in your posts.
Download | View demo
Sirius
Sirius is a plain-looking theme that contains a special front page template to set up a one-page website. It also includes a featured section with call-to-action buttons and open content sections. The theme is perfect to build a small business website or a blog.
What I like is, you can change the background colors for each front page section. Thanks to its drag-and-drop page builder and numerous other features like live customizer, multiple menus, etc., Sirius gives you the ease to create any type of website quickly.
Download | View demo
CPMmagz
CPMmagz is a magazine-oriented theme which is specifically built for media companies. This template includes the live customizer tool that allows you to customize your site as per your needs — easily from a graphical interface like Hestia or Sirius.
It supports easy customization of colors and look and feel so that you can make the theme to suit your brand. CPMmagz also includes a top navigation to add social media channels. It is a cross-browser compatible theme that is good for creating simple blogs.
Download | View demo
Intemporal
Intemporal is a modern theme with a simple layout and standard typography. The theme encompasses minimal colors and works perfectly for various kinds of blogs and websites. It includes a content sidebar to showcase widgets and a menu icon to hide and reveal the top navigation bar. The theme is fully customizable including its header logo and favicon.
Download | View demo
Triad
Triad is an elegant and minimalistic theme which is best for a starter blog or a simple portfolio website. This theme lets you add custom backgrounds, custom header, and much more. Triad is a responsive, translation-ready theme that doesn’t bring numerous features like Hestia or Realistic, but seeing the fact that it’s free, it’s still a good choice.
Download | View demo
Renard
Renard is a lightweight theme with a clean design, and its full-width slider lets you show the featured posts on the homepage. The theme supports making any type of blog and suits almost all devices. Renard is fully customizable and translation-ready theme that even includes five widget areas and lot more customization options.
Download | View demo
SEO WP
SEO WP is suitable for any website or blog. This theme is SEO optimized, and interestingly, it is compatible with the latest Google’s algorithms. The SEO WP theme is built for speed and brings more features like support for the Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll feature.
The theme includes a top navigation to display your website categories or pages, and a sidebar to show the widgets on the right. Though it’s not a full-featured theme like Hestia yet it brings in necessary features to make a simple blog or personal website.
Download | View demo
MaterialWP
MaterialWP lets you customize the theme as you wish. You can also change its CSS directly to modify the look & feel per your requirements. Interestingly, you get access to all 700+ material design icons and all bootstrap features with this theme. Of course, this theme is simple and best for creating personal or portfolio sites only.
Download | View demo
MDLWP
MDLWP is a small and handy template that supports additional plugins like material design icons, portfolio, etc. to add extra features and extend the functionality of the theme. It even includes live customizer options and dev features like theme hooks.
You can build your portfolio and use it as your business website or even a blog. Although the theme has purpose to be the base theme for building material design themes yet you can use it to create a simple personal website or portfolio listing website.
Download | View demo
Paid Themes
Zephyr
Zephyr is a responsive and Retina-ready theme with a drag and drop page builder that lets you create flexible pages easily. The theme is translation ready and provides a unique header builder too. Also, you can change the theme colors according to your needs.
Along with being an SEO-optimized theme, Zephyr has five different portfolio grid styles and six unique blog layouts. From its various typography options and 1300+ icons, you can choose the best that fits your brand requirements. I also liked Zephyr because of its amazing animation and parallax effects and backgrounds that gives a premium look & feel.
Buy theme | View demo
POL
POL is a responsive and multipurpose theme that provides 16+ layouts and offers a built-in visual composer for creating customized pages quickly. Its page builder includes different sections, background options, breadcrumbs, and numerous more features.
The theme also offers two sliders to fit your needs and a powerful admin panel for making customizations to every one of its features. POL is fully SEO-optimized and at the same time, it’s heavily optimized to build speedy websites. Not only this, it also supports 640+ Google Fonts, Google Maps, and comes with built-in support for WPML and WooCommerce.
Buy theme | View demo
Gridlove
Gridlove is a grid styled template which is specifically designed for magazines and news related websites. The theme comes with many flexible homepages and allows you to choose and organize the post groups with its drag and drop module system.
You can highlight posts and widgets, and customize using unlimited fonts and colors to make the theme your own. Moreover, Gridlove is optimized for high speed and offers ad monetization slots. You can also use sticky sidebars and WooCommerce with it.
Buy theme | View demo
Unika
Unika provides a unique navigation and portfolio layout with its classic drop-down menu along with the latest design tools and techniques. Surprisingly, the theme supports video backgrounds and full-screen sliders to help you impress your audience easily. And moreover, it’s easy to design pages using its drag and drop page builder.
Unika is translation ready, and you can choose from unlimited colors, Font Awesome icons and different background types to customize the theme or you can also create a unique color variation to match your brand. The theme also comes with support for Ecwid Shopping Cart, helping you to start an e-commerce portal as easy as starting a blog.
Buy theme | View demo
Appica 2
Appica 2 is specifically designed to showcase your apps, and it comes with multiple template options such as full-screen video, parallax slider, fullscreen slider, etc. This theme incorporates a stylish, animated intro section and a mobile like off-canvas navigation.
It also brings animations imitating iOS or Android-like behavior and provides you user-friendly options panel to configure everything easily. I feel that the theme is best for showcasing your apps and present their features in a unique, stylish manner.
Buy theme | View demo
Moharram
Moharram is a powerful multi-purpose one-page template, which is Retina ready and is also integrated with BuddyPress — making it a complete package. It’s translation-ready and that’s not all, it comes with full-width slider and Visual Composer drag and drop page builder and surprisingly, its builder is also packaged with an addon (Ultimate VC).
Moreover, you can choose from 2000+ fonts, various colors, typography and RTL options and create customized pages with its drag and drop module. It is also 100% responsive and boasts to be compatible with popular WordPress plugins including WooCommerce.
Buy theme | View demo
Buggy
Buggy offers multiple home pages and supports RTL like Moharram. It also provides unlimited colors and typography options, and one-click import of demo content for testing out the template configuration. The theme is SEO-optimized, Retina-ready, and includes a visual page builder for creating customized pages using drag-and-drop modules.
Being a blog and magazine styled theme, Buggy supports advanced typography and color options along with ten homepage options and support for plugins like WPML and WooCommerce. Like other premium themes, you can customize header options, contact forms, and more using its theme options panel and custom page-builder elements.
Buy theme | View demo
Sylor
Sylor is built upon bootstrap framework, and consists of a drag and drop page builder and a revolution slider like other premium themes. It supports RTL and contains a clean responsive design that’s optimized for speed. The theme is translation-ready and SEO optimized, and is best for creating personal or agency portfolio websites.
I liked its clean and simple interface — a minimalistic design that works for almost all types of websites. And along with its other features, it’s WooCommerce-ready and comes with built-in support for Google Maps, and also various plugins like Contact Form 7.
Buy theme | View demo
RS Card
RS Card is a resume, vCard, and CV template which is meant for professionals. One can easily create a portfolio or resume website using this theme as easily as installing the theme configuring your details along with a logo and your profile picture. Moreover, the theme includes a separate social media section with statistics counter.
RS Card incorporates a skills section, image slider section, products section, and a clients carousel section. You can also use it for creating a simple blog with a contact form and map. Overall, if you’re willing to create a personal website, I’ll suggest to try it.
Buy theme | View demo
Host Material
Host Material comes with advanced page builder including 35 page elements and 20+ pre-built creative layouts. It supports various animations and style options like color schemes, typography, etc., and the theme also includes a revolution slider. The theme also avails various card styles and various blog and portfolio layouts.
The theme is WooCommerce-compatible, and I think that Host Material is perfect to create agency and portfolio websites. It is WPML-compatible and translation-ready theme which includes a live customizer for easily customizing the look & feel of your site.
Buy theme | View demo
MATX
MATX is built to design creative agency and portfolio websites. The theme comes with a clean design and layout along with a revolutionary slider. It offers a drag and drop page builder, six portfolio styles, and many more features. At the same time, it is also SEO optimized and comes with a masonry layout for making a simple blog.
You can choose from 2200+ icon fonts, six blog layouts, and advanced header layouts. MATX supports a parallax effect backgrounds and provides an advanced theme panel like other premium themes for customizing every option to suit your brand needs.
Buy theme | View demo
Conclusion
If you’re looking to create a beautiful yet simple website without making a hole in your pocket, then you can use Hestia or Realistic. And if you’re ready to spend some cash, then I’ll suggest to buy a premium material design theme because I feel these are much more beautiful, powerful and featureful than their freely available competitors.
If you ask me, I like Zephyr, Appica 2, and RS Card the most among the premium themes as these provide most of the premium features including good page builder, extension theme options, etc. and are elegant and user-friendly at the same time. Don’t you agree?
Which is your favorite material design theme among the above? Is your favorite material design theme not present in this list? Please let me know your answers using the comments section or writing to me directly at @aksinghnet on Twitter. I will love to hear from you.
