You’re ready to make a website, but you’ve been scrolling through WordPress themes trying to figure out the best way to make its design stand out.
It’s time that you start looking at themes that some of the most successful corporations rely on — styles based on material design. These are created by web developers and designers to serve individual proprietors and blog owners interested in beginning a startup, a website, online stores, and more.
But first, let’s get a better idea of what material design really is.
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What is material design?
Material design is a type of design system made by Google to build interactive and high-quality digital experiences on mobile and desktop webpages. This type of interface features bold design methods that are fluid and intentional in both motion — and color choice — for an immersive experience.
Building a website that is visually stimulating with natural movement can set your blog, shop, or portfolio apart from your competitors. Take a look at this list of our favorite material design WordPress themes to see just what makes this style so special.
Material Design WordPress Themes
If you’re short on time, here are our top choices:
- Zephyr: Most trusted multipurpose material design theme
- Greatway: Most affordable theme with clean design
- Fab!: Excellent choice for innovative designs
1. Zephyr
Pricing: $49
Zephyr is the topmost theme for a material design website. In fact, it won Envato’s Material Design Most Wanted Competition. Along with a responsive layout, it's also compatible with WooCommerce, PHP, CSS, HTML, and JS files.
This theme includes a drag-and-drop page builder, six different blog layouts, parallax effect for background, unlimited sidebars, child theme layout, unique header builder, and unlimited colors to make it more attractive. Moreover, it has a one-click installation, retina readiness, exclusive documentation, and code that’s optimized for SEO.
2. Materipress
Pricing: $40
Materipress brings a multi-purpose, clean, straightforward, and fast material design theme perfect for your blog. An excellent aspect of the theme is its use of fewer resources which makes it quick to load and operate.
Along with the responsive design, it comes with complete user documentation. It has a beautiful layout that can be custom-created with unlimited color options, various homepage styles, related posts, breadcrumbs and dynamic heading for search engine optimization, and floating share buttons. It's a genesis child theme that’s ready and compatible with the cross-browser platform. And, it includes full CSS, HTML, PHP, and JS files.
3. Materialize
Pricing: $55
Materialize is a creative multi-purpose material design theme. It’s most suited as a corporate web solution for independent developers, agencies, freelancers, designers, photographers, or other creatives.
This template is well documented and responsive for all screen types with high resolution. It offers very easy customization with incredible layouts, clean and friendly code standards, a Slider Revolution plugin, six portfolio styles, and a masonry layout.
4. Lincoln
Pricing: $49
Lincoln distinctively serves the multi-purpose objective of using material design for education and learning centers like schools, colleges, universities, online tutorials, e-learning, and course centers. However, it's still pliable for the visionary business website.
You can smoothly create tutorials for individual classes, assign tutors, and upload courses for free, discounted, or full prices. Its compatibility with WooCommerce, Intuitive LMS, Revolution Slider, LearnDash, Visual Composer, BuddyPress, RTL, and WPML, makes the online education store more successful.
5. Unick
Pricing: $40
This theme is specifically used for blogs and magazines. The one-click installation with negligible configuration requirement, full responsiveness irrespective of the screen size, three- and two-column layouts, and clean smart header design for featured posts are the desired UI attributes of this theme.
The integration with the WordPress live customizer provides an array of color options, making customization a quick and easy task. Built on an underscore framework, the theme includes PHP, CSS, JS, and documentation files.
6. Fab!
Pricing: $60
Holding relevance with its innovative name, Fab! claims to be an ultimate, multi-purpose,next-generation, material design eCommerce theme. It's designed using Google’s material design specification and lite framework. It's compatible with WooCommerce, Revolution Slider, and WPML.
The theme features a one-click installer and you can easily download the demo using the video tutorials. PagePress lets you choose your webpage design without coding for easy customization. The other features of this theme include seven ready-made demo websites, distinct post formats, online documentation, cross-browser compatibility, fast technical support, Google Fonts support, wishlist, quick product view, and product zoom plugins.
7. Sheila
Pricing: $30
Sheila is a WordPress theme built with no compromise in design. It's a preferred choice for creative agencies, freelancers, graphic designers, photographers, and all kinds of art institutions or people.
It's compatible with Visual Composer, Revolution slider, and Bootstrap. Undoubtedly, Bootstrap integration gives it a responsive layout. The other standout features of this theme include a Google Maps integration, support documentation, SEO-ready design, unlimited theme colors, and easy customization.
8. Dama
Pricing: $49
You can effortlessly create an eCommerce store, blog, or corporate website with this theme. It's WordPress Multilingual ready, Retina ready, WooCommerce, bbPress, Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, and Bootstrap compatible.
The theme supports Google font, cart to CRM, Spicy Form, SEO, EU cookies, 404-page templates, warranty and return plugins, and a language switcher. Dama includes PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS ThemeForest files along with easy, quick installation sample data.
9. Haswell
Pricing: $59
Haswell suits people looking for a simple design with beautiful details. It’s a premium multi-purpose material design theme, and features posts based on popularity (like Reddit).
The theme comes with a page builder, sidebar layout options, color options, multi-post styles, post-filtering, more than 20 material design flat images, along with PSD files, smooth quick installation, easy navigation with smart AJAX, automatic updates, custom widgets (Flickr, Instagram, Twitter), Responsive Google ADS Widget & Shortcode, theme options panel and sticky menu.
10. Pappaya
Pricing: $49
This theme is multipurpose and provides many layouts for blogs, eCommerce pages, and serves as a great portfolio display. Pappaya is a 100% interactive design for both pc and mobile usage, with vibrant colors and textures that reflect the material design system guidelines.
Pappaya offers Unyson page builder capabilities — a free tool to easily update and customize your site’s theme options and more. Choose from pre-made blog, shop, and portfolio pages for a well-structured website of your choosing. You can also build your page with video, movement, and more from 30+ shortcodes.
11. Universh
Pricing: $59
Universh does a fantastic job creating web designs for educational organizations. With the fluidity of movement and pops of color inspired by material design, this theme can be used for universities, online courses, and creative agencies.
This theme is built with clean code for SEO optimization and incredible speed. When building your website, you’ll be able to choose from a range of headers, footers, and layouts to make your professional website with ease. Universh makes creating a business website extremely customizable with hundreds of shortcodes, fonts, and icons to choose from.
12. Greatway
Pricing: $23
Airing on the more simplistic side of material design, a budget-friendly WordPress theme to choose is Greatway.
Made for corporate websites and other creative agencies, it makes a clean design across all browsers and mobile devices. This theme ties into material design by being fully responsive, featuring animations and unlimited theme colors to choose from.
13. All Business
Pricing: $49
Hence the name, this WordPress theme is suited for all business types and scales. Based on material design, it offers an incredibly in-depth knowledge base for new users to take full advantage of its stunning features and visuals.
Explore All Business’s custom backgrounds and its responsive layout that auto adjusts for PC and mobile devices. The theme features more than 99 custom shortcodes to build your page in an easy-to-manage way. Custom projects and profiles can be made in an instant with a large collection of widgets and displayed elegantly in layer and revolution slider format for a breath-taking effect.
14. Woffice
Pricing: $79
For those looking to build an efficient and lively intranet — look no further than Woffice. With calendar and scheduling widgets, file management, and more, its price reflects its capabilities.
Woffice offers demo content with round-the-clock support. It also has built-in extensions to improve your SEO, Wiki, maintenance, and project management. The theme even comes with a free LearnPress plugin to manage and sell courses.
15. KLEO
Pricing: $59
Lastly, KLEO is useful for those looking to build an online shop or blog space. It’s beginner-friendly, letting users create an online community through sleek and vibrant theme options and easy-to-select formatting.
Create custom carousels and accordion tabs to simplify navigation and enjoy over 600 fonts for headings and text. It even offers third-party integrations to WooCommerce, BuddyPress, Facebook, and Google Maps.
Find the Best WordPress Theme for Your Material
Material design can take a good website to an impressive website. We hope you take advantage of a theme in our list and use it to create something wonderful.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
