While there are a vast array of themes available in the general WordPress repository you need to have a theme that works within your niche and that helps present the content in a consistent and clean way to your visitors.
In the end for an affiliate niche website you don’t need to always start with a theme that can do everything you want to do in two years once you have traffic. You are looking for something to make it through the growth years and that allows you to focus solely on your content and getting people to your site.
Not to mention in two years when you may want to look at adding a course, or membership the software and plugins will be vastly different and you will more than likely need to adjust to the times. What is presented below are fast, efficient, and will help get you moving full speed ahead.
Please note the links below are affiliate links where I will make a commission should you choose to make a purchase. This doesn’t change my decision to have them on this list, these are the best themes for niche websites to launch fast and efficiently.
These are my personal choices for my niche websites when I get started as they require very little effort and are very plug and play to move me forward into the important content generation phase.
It just does happen that almost all these free options offer paid versions that increase their functionality should you want or need it. I would definitely say with these themes you are set up to build your site up without spending more effort on visual appeal.
This theme is one of the fastest base themes available online for your WordPress website and to boot he has a totally free version! They have reduced their theme to an incredibly light 30kb, honestly that’s very impressive and you PageSpeed scores will show it.
Since they offer a Premium version for only $49.95 you can also easily add more power as your site grows to allow you even more customization without needing to fully change out your theme.
Additionally, the GP team has focused on making sure accessibility is crucial and so they follow WCAG 2.0 standards to make sure no one is left out when browsing your website. Make sure to pick up GenerateBlocks to supplement the theme once you choose GeneratePress!
This theme is mentioned everywhere with affiliate marketers who are attempting to have a quick base theme so that they can start working on their content. I actually own Astra Pro as it is one I am currently building a site with to learn more!
This tutorial is by Ferdy who makes awesome tutorials that can teach you valuable things and he has a very good video here that can help you understand if Astra is the right theme for you.
Kadence is a freemium version like the two above but the free version doesn’t skimp on functionality and would be an amazingly helpful start to your niche site by giving you some customization but not overwhelming you with changes.
Kadence has a couple of additional plugins they provide that will allow you to import a starter set of pages and another plugin that they provide some high quality functioning blocks to work within their theme.
OceanWP is a very simple and straight forward theme that was built for hobby users (not you) and for those power users for a business (definitely you). The theme is built to be responsive and easy to use so that you can get in, build out your starter site and move to the next stage.
I had never heard of this theme before WPEagle used it to build a website tutorial on YouTube (also below) with Elementor, it is actually really clean looking with good font choices and makes for a good layer to start your niche site on.
I have tried it out since seeing it on his video and I can agree that it is a nice solid base for an Elementor website. On its own it doesn’t have a large feature set and doesn’t look very appealing to me but Elementor being a freemium plugin can help this out.
With a paid theme you are looking for the ability to drastically customize your website and allow you to have a solid groundwork but build your own visual style or “brand”.
Many of these options below are page builders in addition to being themes, they allow for a level of customization that helps distinguish your site from others in your niche, just don’t forget that you need content and don’t spend weeks working on the site appearance as it is a hamster wheel.
Elegant Themes has a history of nearly a decade in producing high quality themes for WordPress and when they built DIVI it was groundbreaking. Over time they have continued to add in functionality and many cool features while maintaining a comfortable builder for a new user.
Currently they are enhancing the builder still and added more functionality in header building, sticky elements (stay in place while scrolling), and more tools to help you build your perfect image of your brand as a website.
This is the upgrade to the free version of GeneratePress listed above and it deserves this spot on both lists due to it being a solid platform to continue to grow your site and this just adds on multiple additional elements to maximize your sites value while maintaining their site speeds.
Themify build a very powerful theme in Ultra that is able to help you build responsive websites that fit the look and feel you desire. They come with skins and demos to look and transform your site in mere minutes into a pre-built layout that you can then customize.
Kadence like others offers a premium version of their theme which just adds on more abilities and features from the base free version we covered above. This is one of the themes that has garnered a large volume of love online from other affiliate marketers but is newer on the scene versus Astra and Ultra.
Astra adds on much more features similar to Kadence and GeneratePress in their Pro paid theme. They are one of the longest existing themes in this list and are incredibly feature rich, Ferdy gives a good look at pro below and just the Custom Layouts functionality.
I have come to love Carbonate but this theme is not for the feint of heart, there is no GUI everything is done by editing the theme files themselves. There is no support available and this is expressed up front on their site, that being said it is impressive and out of the box runs super fast.
Carbonate is built on Bootstrap4 which allows you to make it the most custom theme ever if you understand the bootstrap framework you can make each page exactly as you want it to be.
Acabado is built and designed by the team at Income School and is really designed to help a new starting blogger be up and running in 10 minutes. This theme doesn’t have a large or vast ability to customized and is really focused on building your content.
Once you have this in place it is lightening fast and will make sure your content always loads exceedingly fast to keep your visitors on page and reading your posts helping send Google the signals that you have amazing content.
Many of these themes are aligned for quick installation and a decent layout so that you won’t get caught up in spending massive time building and toying with the visual styles of your site, you need content to get people to even see your styles.
As you grow you can look to tweak a little further as you see you visitors and start to learn what they want and need. Nothing is as saddening as spending hours and days adding some cool “feature” to your site that no one ends up using leaving you out the time and possibly money.
Please don’t cause your own failure by focusing on website customization and instead find one of the above that you can drop in and jump into building up your website and the content and then tweak as necessary as you gain understanding.
The Acabado theme was created by Income School and is a quick to setup theme which drives you directly to creating blog posts and content with minimal work!
Today we are looking at how to change the date field from a static date to a more human friendly relative time (eg 6 months)
