ThemeGrade

Top 10 Best WordPress Theme Providers

Top 10 Theme Providers

Ranking in this category is system generated.

Welcome to the 2023 Edition of ThemeGrade’s popular Top 10. We have been very selective as to which themes are included in our directory. During months of relentless search for quality WordPress Themes, we now have listed 2584 Themes developed by 378 providers.

And among these providers, we are looking for the cream of the crop!

You have seen the top 10 Theme providers in the graphical, functionality and coding categories. This page combines the ratings in these 3 categories and reveals the top 10 Theme providers who excel in developing extraordinary WordPress Themes.

How Does The Ranking System Work?

The overall score of each developer is based on the sum of the providers’ score in each category. Theme providers with the highest overall score will be rated as the TOP WordPress Theme providers.

Take ElegantThemes for example: if they were to score 10, 9, and 9 in the graphical, functionality and coding categories respectively they would have the overall score of 28.

Our system takes into account user feedback and ratings as well as our own scoring system that is explained on each Theme review. Basically, we take into consideration all the important features of good WordPress Theme development, analyze these features on a Theme by Theme basis, then simplify it all down for our visitors to one, easy to understand score. Before buying your next WordPress Theme, be sure to check out their ThemeGrade!

Top 10 Best WordPress Theme Providers

ElegantThemes

1
Founded in 2008 by Nick Roach, ElegantThemes has been sticking to their principles of creating top notch WordPress Themes. They are the only provider which is ranked in the top 3 in all 3 categories (coding, functionality, and graphic design). With over 70 Themes to choose from at a price of $39 per year, it certainly is a the best bang for your WordPress buck.

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View all 69 themes from ElegantThemes

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic10Rank #1
Functionality9Rank #2
Coding6Rank #5
Overall25Rank #1

StudioPress

2
Led by Brian Gardner, a self-taught web designer, Studiopress is the pioneer in the premium Wordpress theme industry. They dedicate most of their time updating and upgrading their existing themes to fix bugs and compatibility issues so you can be assured of the quality of their themes. However, if you like nice graphics, Studiopress' themes are not the best choice for you.

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View all 56 themes from StudioPress

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic0No Rank
Functionality10Rank #1
Coding7Rank #4
Overall17Rank #2

Templatic

3
Templatic is one of the more well known Premium Theme developers with a great portfolio of diverse and multi-functional WordPress Themes. While they got off to a relatively rocky start as you can read by some of our user comments, the entire team behind Templatic has been making an incredible effort to tighten up their code while continuing to innovate with eye-catching designs you simply won't find anywhere else.

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View all 30 themes from Templatic

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic8Rank #2
Functionality4Rank #9
Coding4Rank #7
Overall17Rank #2

ThemeForest

4
Founded in late 2007, ThemeForest has gone on to become the most popular WordPress Theme marketplace with an astonishing 1700 Premium WordPress Themes and counting. Different from most "Theme Clubs," ThemeForest allows authors to list their digital files (WordPress Themes, HTML Templates, etc) for sale so as to leverage the huge community of buyers that actively shop the ThemeForest marketplace.

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View all 202 themes from ThemeForest

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic4Rank #9
Functionality7Rank #4
Coding5Rank #6
Overall16Rank #4

WooThemes

5
Started by 3 designers in 3 different countries, WooThemes has become one of the biggest Wordpress theme providers with several dozen team members. In 2012 they made some business changes that did not go over very well with their community, and they have been slowly re-evaluating some of those decisions. In early 2013, they abruptly closed their affiliate program leaving thousands with a sudden and unexpected turn of events. While they continue to create themes, WooCommerce has become a staple part of their product offering.

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View all 54 themes from WooThemes

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic5Rank #5
Functionality8Rank #3
Coding0No Rank
Overall13Rank #5

Templatelite

6
Founded in 2008, Templatelite has got over 30 high quality themes in their portfolio. Professional graphic design and clean coding are what make it one of the best Wordpress theme providers. The best part is majority of the themes can be downloaded free. The drawback with their themes is the lack of functions.

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View all 24 themes from Templatelite

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic2No Rank
Functionality0No Rank
Coding9Rank #2
Overall11Rank #6

MyThemesShop

7

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View all 11 themes from MyThemesShop

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic0No Rank
Functionality0No Rank
Coding10Rank #1
Overall10Rank #7

Press75

8
Press75 is one of the earliest theme providers offering premium themes. It specializes in creating multimedia themes. Though most of their themes are fairly gray toned, they look professional nonetheless.

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View all 26 themes from Press75

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic4Rank #7
Functionality5Rank #7
Coding0No Rank
Overall9Rank #8

Solostream

9

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View all 6 themes from Solostream

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic2No Rank
Functionality7Rank #4
Coding0No Rank
Overall9Rank #9

WPNow

10
Being ranked as one of the top 10 theme providers is not easy in this highly competitive market. Wpnow has proven that they deserve a spot here. If only they put in more effort in the coding and produce more themes, they definitely could have ranked in the top 5.

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View all 10 themes from WPNow

CategoryPointsRank
Graphic4Rank #6
Functionality4Rank #10
Coding0No Rank
Overall8Rank #10

See Our Top 10 Providers in Other Areas!

  • Top 10 Theme Design
  • Top 10 Theme Functionality
  • Top 10 Theme Coding

[close] 66 Readers to Win Professional Premium WordPress Themes – Guarantee Win for PR2+ Blogs

After 6 months since this post was created, we would like to announce that
this contest was closed on Oct 4, 2010.

Congratulations to all the winners. We hope to launched another fantastic contest in the future.

It has been 4 months since ThemeGrade was launched and moving to 2010, we promise that there’ll be lots of exciting things going on here.

First of all, we’ll be holding contests regularly for our readers. In this mega contest, we are giving away premium themes from Elegantthemes, Woothemes, Studiopress, Wpzoom, Modthemes, Wpnow, Obox-Design, Richwp, Vivathemes, Prothemedesign, Themejam, Signaturetheme, Organizedthemes, Gabfirethemes for the 66 winners of this contest. The total value of this contest worths more than $2000!!

Many of the Elegantthemes’, Woothemes’ and Studiopress’ themes have been tested by us and majority of them get either a Bronze, Silver or Gold status. In the premium theme market, no doubt their themes are some of the best you can find. And if you look closer at ThemeGrade, this site is actually designed base on the Aperture theme from Woothemes!

Up for grab

  • 5 one-year membership from Elegantthemes (5 taken)
  • 3 regular themes developed by Woothemes (3 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Studiopress (5 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Wpzoom (5 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Obox-Design (5 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Modthemes
  • 5 regular themes developed by Wpnow (3 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Richwp (2 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Vivathemes (1 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Prothemedesign (2 taken)
  • 5 regular themes developed by Themejam
  • 5 regular themes developed by Signaturetheme
  • 3 regular themes developed by Organizedthemes
  • 3 regular themes developed by Gabfirethemes (2 taken)

Quality Themes by Modthemes

Quality Themes by Wpnow

Quality Themes by Richwp

Rules

Part 1
  1. Leave a comment below specifying which provider you would like to win the theme.
  2. Subscribe to the RSS feed of this site
  3. Tweet this message to your followers! (Optional)
Part 2
  1. Write a unique post on your own WordPress blog about ThemeGrade and either one of the providers that you want to win their theme with a minimum of 50 words.
  2. Use the keyword “WordPress themes” to link to ThemeGrade.com

For part 2, if you are not sure what to write in your blog, send me a request and I will write for you.

If you have a PR 2+ self-hosted WordPress blog written in English, you are GUARANTEE to win a copy of the theme if you follow the instruction above.

If your blog is below PR 2, you will be subjected to internal evaluation.

The contest will be closed when there are enough eligible participants and the winners will be announced in this post.

Why wait? grab the theme now!

Note:
The terms and conditions are subjected to change to prevent exploitation of this contest.

Winners

Upon announcement of new winners in this section, within 2 weeks, requests will be sent to the respective theme providers to arrange theme delivery to the winners.

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shandyisme (Elegantthemes)
Marcel Boast (Obox Design)
Mihai O. (Elegantthemes)
idham (Studiopress)
alaJoAnn (Obox Design)
Tyo (Woothemes)
Caziuc Stefan (Studiopress)
dementia (Vivathemes)
Bobby (Gabfirethemes)
Nice from Thailand (Woothemes)
ZXT (Studiopress)
ericas stjohn (Woothemes)
Mark (Obox Design)
nhansense (Studiopress)
Themes Warehouse (Elegantthemes)
Renz (Wpzoom)
Netchunks (Obox Design)
Vincent Chow (Elegantthemes)
Bloggingjunction (Elegantthemes)
Misao (Studiopress)
Ken VN (Prothemedesign)
Dũng (Wpzoom)
technshare (Wpzoom)
Tinh (Wpzoom)
TuanTH (Richwp)
Việt Coding (Gabfirethemes)
beingPC (Obox-Design)
nithinr6 (Wpnow)
Lee Ka Hoong (Wpnow)
ariff (Wpzoom)
denaihati (Prothemedesign)
James Fisher (Richwp)
wendyachmmad (Wpnow)

How to Install a WordPress Theme

This guide is for WordPress Version 2.8.5 but may be applicable to older versions.

One of the major reasons why WordPress is considered as the best blogging platform is because it is user-friendly and has thousands of free and premium themes available online. Of course you don’t want to have a blog that looks crappy caused by a poor theme. Have you found a beautiful free theme but don’t know how to install? Then this is the end of your problem.

WordPress theme installation is easy and can be done in less than 10 minutes by following this simple instruction. The most important things that you need to have of course are your theme and an FTP client.

Read full article

WordPress Theme Test Criteria

Each and every one of the WordPress theme listed on ThemeGrade has gone through comprehensive tests. The tests cover general coding issues as well as the SEO.

In this post, we outline the tests being used, the weight of each test as well as the calculation details.

General Test

The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General Test. The tests with the higher score are more difficult to pass than the tests with the lower score.

  Description Pt(s). Info
1 W3C Compliant – HTML 2 Detail
2 W3C Compliant – CSS 2 Detail
3 Browser Compatibility – IE7 1 Detail
4 Browser Compatibility – Firefox 2 Detail
5 Browser Compatibility – Chrome 1 Detail
6 Support from Designer 2 Detail
7 Post area – Proper Image Alignment 1 Detail
8 Post area – Floating Content 1 Detail
9 Post area – Auto Adjustment 1 Detail
10 Post area – Nested/Threaded Comments 1 Detail
11 Sidebar – Link Hierarchy 1 Detail
12 Sidebar – Auto Adjustment 1 Detail
13 Special Effect variable Detail
  Total Points 16 + variable

If a theme passes all general tests, the theme will score 100%.

In all cases, a theme will be tested against the first 6 general tests.

For most of the times, a theme will be tested against the first 11 general tests.

Calculation method of the General Test.

  • Step 1 – Find out how many items a theme has been tested on.
  • Step 2 – Add the total score of the tested items
  • Step 3 – Add the total score of the passed items
  • Step 4 – Take the score of the tested items and divide it by the score of the passed items. Multiply that number with 100 to get the percentage score of the theme.

SEO Test

WordPress does a very good job in internal linking so that makes it easy for search engines to index the pages. To rank for the pages, generally, two main factors are considered: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The off-page optimization is relating to external links and it has nothing to do with the theme itself. To see if a theme is optimized for search engines, we need to review the theme coding (on-page optimization).

The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines.

When pass, the score will be added to the SEO Test. The tests with the higher score are more difficult to pass than the tests with the lower score.

  Description Pt(s). Info
1 W3C Compliant – HTML 1 Detail
2 W3C Compliant – CSS 1 Detail
3 Home page Heading SEO 1 Detail
4 Post & Page Heading SEO 1 Detail
5 Post & Page Title Tag (Title as seen in SERPs) 1 Detail
6 Content Code Position 2 Detail
  Total Points 9

Calculation method of the SEO Test is the same as the General Test.

Calculation of the total score of a theme

General Test Score x 0.6 + SEO Test Score x 0.4

GoldAwarded to themes
over 90%
SilverAwarded to themes
between 75-89%
BronzeAwarded to themes
between 60-74%
G S B

Hi-Fi WordPress Music Theme

The DJ WordPress Music Theme

ElegantThemes Review