Best WordPress Themes For Affiliate Marketing
If you’re looking for the best WordPress themes for affiliates in 2017 then we’ve got a treat for you. With so many thousands of themes, it can be difficult to find themes that suit your needs, are secure (actively developed) and perform well speed wise and so on.
If you’re an affiliate marketer, you want a theme that’s going to provide you with a few things;
- Fast load times
- Clean layouts
- Features
While there’s no doubt that most WordPress themes in 2017 are responsive, not all of them are necessarily coded well. A poorly coded site means that your website is going to load far more slowly than a competitor with a better built theme. Additionally a poorly developed theme can open up your site to security vulnerabilities.
Clean layouts allow affiliates to focus readers attention on the content, within the content you’ll have your affiliate offers. So if you have a theme that has dozens of focal points or a poor layout structure generally, your conversion rates will suffer, which costs you money.
Also it’s worth remembering that themes with a lot going on, generally have a lot more code which can compound the issues of a slow site.
While you don’t want a theme that is packed with features, as they can both slow down sites and negatively affect your conversion rates, as an affiliate you do want a theme that offers some basic features.
Some good features to look for include the uses of improved popular posts widgets, follow us on social media widgets and so on. While these don’t offer you a massive amount of options as an affiliate, you’ll want to utilize plugins or developers to bridge the gaps. As an example, on this site we use Thrive Content Builder to help format our content, and we even built the homepage of the site with it!
Free Themes Versus Paid?
Affiliates often want to keep the costs of a project down, so fairly often people will look for free themes or nulled premium themes. While there’s no doubt that if you don’t have the money, buying a premium theme simply isn’t an option, there is little case for using free themes over premium themes when you do have the choice.
Free themes are not only used by thousands of sites, but they’re often not great for affiliates (see the above section). This is because they are often poorly designed which reduces a visitors trust in your site, they can be poorly coded and full of vulnerabilities. Even if they weren’t vulnerable when you downloaded and installed the theme, a year with no development can render many themes insecure.
Paid or premium themes on the other hand are often customizable to a high degree, meaning that regardless of if lots of people bought the same theme, you can easily make it unique. Good paid themes will often be in constant development, and you know that means security should never be an issue due to your theme itself. Even if you do find an issue, there are usually support forums available by all good theme developers in 2017.
Lastly paid themes are built by experts who make a living selling their themes, it’s in their best interest to create themes that are better than their competitors. So they are putting their hundreds of hours of knowledge about web design into your future site. Whereas free themes are often built by people just getting started.
Where To Buy Themes?
If you’re wondering where to buy the best WordPress affiliate marketing themes, or themes generally it helps to know a few of the best places to go to.
Themeforest
Themeforest is a marketplace for all kinds of web themes, not limited to just WordPress. However it’s where a lot of the biggest theme teams got started, and there’s still a lot of underrated themes on that site. You just need to really look through it!
Thrive Themes
Thrive are a team that produce themes and plugins, focused around conversions and speed. If you’re looking for something that’s customizable, but you can’t code then all of their themes are going to be a good place to start looking.
Solo Pine
Solo Pine make some of the most underrated affiliate marketer themes for WordPress available. While their themes suit the more visual niches better, with a little work you can make these themes look wonderful for just about any kind of site.
ElegantThemes
Elegant Themes have been around for a long time now, and while some of their older themes kind of suck by today’s standards, they also have some of the best themes available for WordPress right now such as Divi which is highly recommended.
8 Best WordPress Themes For Affiliate Marketing
Now you know what to look for, and why paid themes are your best option (plus we’ve given you a few ways to go off and do your own research), this post wouldn’t be complete without our list of the best themes for affiliate marketers using WordPress.
8. REHub
This theme is one of the best Amazon Affiliate Marketing WordPress Themes. Yes, I’m aware that was a mouthful. While this theme is packed with features, you by no means have to use them all.
What’s so great about REHub is that it’s got everything an affiliate site should have, such as ratings, useful widgets and it’s in constant development. The use of fonts is great for affiliate sites as well, especially since people tend to skim through content more when the font isn’t quite right.
The main downside to the theme is that it’s a little harder to customize it to a higher degree, but this is only because there’s so much packed into the theme that it takes some serious work to customize the whole site.
7. Genesis
Genesis has been popular for a long time because out of the box it’s already pretty good, additionally it’s a framework meaning there are child-themes which was at one time very useful. The downside to this, is now a lot of themes have caught up to what Genesis offered, meaning if you’re using a Genesis child-theme and want to switch themes you’ll lose a lot of functionality in the process.
On the plus side Genesis as a standalone (minus the child themes) still offers a lot, and it gets right what a lot of themes still don’t in 2017. It implements a clean and usable navigation, and easy to read fonts with plenty of room for integrating more to your site through WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) drag and drop plugins.
6. Extra
The Extra Theme by Elegant Themes is pretty stunning to look at, it uses clean elements and lots of spacing between each of those. Having said that, the theme is hardly minimal, so it’s doing something pretty special to pack in so much without it looking noisy or cluttered.
What I like most about this theme is the simplicity, you can easily apply it to just about any niche provided you’re producing enough content to make the theme justify itself.
Being that this theme is by Elegant Themes you can feel pretty safe in knowing that it’s both in constant development, and that it’s going to be kept secure.
5. Hickory
Bold and minimal, hickory is the perfect theme for anyone looking to put a big emphasis on content, images / products etc. It’s a great theme that leaves little confusion for the visitor, the user experience (UX) is pretty straightforward.
As a responsive theme it’s perfect for demographics that browse primarily from their handheld devices, and it offers a lot of customization for widgets and the like, which is great for affiliate marketers.
The main con of this theme is the font inside of the content, it’s not the best, but luckily you can change this so it does require a little bit of work to get it exactly how you’d want it to be. Other than the font choice, it’s one of the best themes I’ve used for my affiliate marketing sites.
One of the big benefits of this theme is that it’s by Solo Pine which means you’ll not likely encounter many other sites using the theme as is just yet. This is largely due to the fact that Solo Pine aren’t the most talked about theme studio at the moment, and I see them as a bit of a hidden gem.
4. Focus
Don’t be fooled by the rather simple looking homepage on this theme, the blog is where it’s all at. Since as an affiliate marketer you’ll mostly be utilizing inner pages and posts this theme really focuses on that (pun not intended I swear).
It keeps things simple, and the result is a theme that’s fast, easily customizable and user-friendly. If you’re blogging about any one specific thing, and your content is what separates you from your competitors, then this theme is easily worth taking a longer look at.
Since it’s by Thrive Themes, you can always grab a yearly membership and get access to all their themes and plugins, along with access to their support forum – which I highly recommend if you build more than one site a year!
3. Redwood
Redwood is one of my all time favorite themes for the female demographic targeted niches, it’s elegant and minimal, while also having features you’d expect in 2017. It’s responsive, fast and has integrated widgets for things like the ‘about me’ section, social media and much more.
Generally the only thing that I have to say about it, is that first of all the fonts in the posts themselves is a little difficult to read compared to some themes, so you’ll want to change that. Which isn’t hard by the way!
Also it’s worth mentioning that the top navigation is fixed there, so if that’s something you really don’t like then you might want to give this theme a miss.
If that’s not a problem for you (it wasn’t for me) then you should definitely look into it more, because I don’t see a lot of sites using this theme, so it could really help set you aside from competitors.
2. Sprout & Spoon
If your site uses or plans to use a lot of how-to content, then this theme is the absolute best I’ve come across. It’s not exclusively good for these types of content either, it’s a very robust theme that’s got a lot of features packed in, without using excess code on features that nobody really uses anymore.
This theme really helps you stand out from the crowd in any of the niches I recommend it for below, and the reality is that it’s so packed with features that you’ll be going back and improving existing content constantly for a few weeks.
When you consider that there are loads of things built into this theme, such as a nice call-to-action e-mail subscribe bar right on the homepage, it does mean you will be able to use far fewer plugins to achieve what you want a site in these niches to do, which is convince and convert for multiple different goals. Mailing list subscriptions being just one of them.
As with most Solo Pine themes, where it lets you down is with the font in the actual content, but as I’ve said about their other theme in this list, you can easily change that with a bit of work. It’s certainly not enough of an issue to write off such an amazingly unique and beautiful theme.
1. Rise
Rise is my number one theme for my affiliate sites for one reason, it’s highly customizable, fast and secure. It integrates a lot of common widgets, and while this theme is intended to be used with Thrive Content Builder for maximum effect, it doesn’t require it.
The usage of fonts on this theme are solid, and while the default purple color doesn’t really do it for me, it takes about 30 seconds to change the color scheme properly.
As it says on the sales page of this theme, it was built in collaboration with a veteran affiliate marketer, and it really shows. While I’ll admit Rise probably isn’t going to be your choice if you’re looking for a magazine style theme, it’s probably what you want if you’re focusing on a specific niche with just a few sub-topics.
That means the theme is perfect for authority sites, niche sites and even micro-niche sites.
Ultimately it gets the number 1 spot for me because I have nothing bad to say about it.
Conclusion
I’ve used hundreds of themes over the years, as I’ve always been a WordPress user. These themes have all been crutches of my affiliate sites, and they’ve all performed wonderfully well. Some of them are well-known, while others are hidden gems.
Regardless of what theme you end up using, I hope you’ve enjoyed this list and got some good ideas from it.
Enjoy our list or find this article helpful? Remember to share us!