21 Best WordPress Themes for bbPress (2024)
Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for bbPress?
bbPress lets you add forums to your WordPress site easily. However, it’s important to choose a theme that will work well for creating an online forum. Many WordPress themes are not suitable for bbPress.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress themes for bbPress that you can use.
Building a Forum With bbPress and WordPress
WordPress is the ideal platform to build an online community. Aside from creating a blog, you can easily add a forum to your website using a plugin such as bbPress.
For an online community website, you will need self-hosted WordPress.org. It’s super flexible and supports all themes and plugins.
Before you can create your website, you will need to sign up for a WordPress hosting account. All websites need hosting, which is like your website’s home on the internet.
You also need a domain name for your site. Your domain name is your website’s address, like wpbeginner.com.
We recommend using Bluehost for your web hosting. They are one of the largest hosting companies and an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a huge discount on web hosting. You can get started for just $2.75/month.
After signing up for hosting, you can go ahead and install WordPress. For more details, you should check out our guide on how to make a WordPress website.
The next step is to install bbPress. Then, you should follow this step-by-step guide on how to add a forum in WordPress.
Now, let’s take a look at our handpicked list of the best WordPress themes for bbPress that you can use.
1. Astra
Astra is a fast WordPress theme with a multipurpose design that lets you create any type of website. It also comes with several built-in templates that support the bbPress forum plugin.
With drag-and-drop page builders like Beaver Builder, you can fully customize your forum website’s colors, fonts, background, and so on. Astra is compatible with WordPress membership plugins to let people sign up as members on your website.
Plus, Astra has a great admin panel that links straight to key settings in the live customizer. This also lets you easily add free plugins. With Astra Pro, you get lots of additional customization options as well.
2. OceanWP
OceanWP is a classic WordPress free theme and makes a great forum theme, too. It provides a 1-click demo content importer and multiple ready-made templates to launch your forum website quickly.
It includes both free and premium layouts that are easy to customize using a page builder. The theme is translation-ready, which means you can create a multilingual forum website for your business.
With the premium version of OceanWP, you can add special Elementor widgets to your site. These include Ajax search (live search), Google Maps, animated headings, and much more.
3. Divi
Divi is a beautiful WordPress theme and the ultimate visual builder to create any kind of website. It has hundreds of page layouts, including bbPress templates and landing pages.
Divi lets beginners set up forums without writing any code. With loads of customization options, you can freely choose from unlimited colors, text styles, header styles, and more for your online community website.
You don’t need to know any CSS to tweak how your site looks. You get the full range of Google Fonts with Divi, as well as lots of useful icons. You can even buy extra Divi modules to get things like an events calendar for your site.
4. Neve
Neve is a modern WordPress theme designed for any type of website. It integrates with drag-and-drop page builder plugins like Elementor and Visual Composer to let you create and customize forum pages.
The theme is highly optimized for SEO to help your site rank well in Google and other search engines. It’s also compatible with popular caching plugins to load your pages fast.
5. Ultra
Ultra is a premium WordPress theme that ships with Themify Builder and fully integrates with the bbPress plugin to create an online forum. It has header and footer layouts that let you add a custom logo and useful links.
For a quick setup, Ultra also comes with a few ready-made templates that you can use. More features include the free builder addons, background options, parallax scrolling, and a mega menu.
Ultra uses responsive design and is retina-ready. That means your site will look great on all devices at all screen sizes.
6. ForumEngine
ForumEngine is a user-friendly community WordPress theme that’s great for creating a WordPress forum with bbPress for social interaction. It lets users reply to questions, like answers, post links, add photos, and more.
It’s highly customizable from the front end to change colors, fonts, and so on. You can also use your forum to show ads and make money online.
7. ForumPress
ForumPress is an excellent WordPress bbPress theme. It lets you create forums so your users can discuss topics and start conversations. Other than that, it offers lightning-fast search, demo content, personalization options, quick and easy setup, and more.
ForumPress supports all popular WordPress plugins to extend the features and functionality of your online forum. You could even add elements like an online store to your website to help with monetizing your forum.
8. Insight
Insight is a highly flexible WordPress theme suitable for bbPress forums, blogs, and news websites. It ships with color schemes and also allows you to create your own color schemes.
This theme offers both grid and list layouts to display your blog posts. Insight is translation-ready and can also be used to build multilingual websites using WPML.
9. Hestia Pro
Hestia Pro is a multipurpose WordPress theme built for all kinds of websites. It’s fully compatible with bbPress, and you can use it for business websites, online communities, or blogs.
It comes with advanced features like a mega menu, custom backgrounds, full live customizer support, WooCommerce compatibility, and more. Plus, it integrates with translation plugins and supports RTL languages.
10. BuddyX Theme
BuddyX Theme is a WordPress social networking theme that allows you to set up a community forum site. It also lets you create a membership site, social learning platform, and social marketplace.
The outlook of the theme looks like a social media platform. It shows the recent activity and other sections on the homepage. You can also add a login form for users to sign in to the site.
BuddyX is a good choice for membership sites, gaming communities, and other online forum sites.
11. Magazine Pro
Magazine Pro is a powerful WordPress theme for bbPress and magazine websites. It features a spacious minimalist layout to help showcase your content prominently.
Magazine Pro is eCommerce-ready and comes with a theme options panel. The theme’s homepage features widget areas and a fully customizable header. Plus, it’s compatible with all popular plugins.
StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.
Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!
12. Excellent
Excellent is a free bbPress compatible WordPress theme with flexibility and easy setup. You can use it to create any website, but it focuses on business sites and comes with a sleek homepage layout.
With Excellent, you get a contact form template, gallery template, corporate template, and multiple sidebars. It is also a good option for a support forum.
13. Answers
Answers is a fantastic bbPress WordPress theme. It lets you create a forum or online community to let users post questions and answers easily.
The best thing about this theme is that both you and your visitors can vote for the top answers on the forum. This will help users find the best solutions for any question.
You can also customize Answers using widgets and even shortcodes. A number of custom widgets are included to help you.
14. Noozbeat
Noozbeat is a clean and modern WordPress theme for bbPress with a news/magazine-style layout. It has a fully widgetized homepage layout, which lets you drag and drop widgets to set up the website.
It has multiple featured post layouts, custom widgets for social media integration, and color control on your theme. For customization, the Noozbeat theme works with all popular WordPress page builder plugins out of the box.
15. Mags
Mags is a WordPress magazine and newspaper theme with bbPress support to create sports, fashion, travel, and other community websites. It’s a great option if you want to build an online community for your business.
Apart from bbPress support, Mags also includes custom widgets and content discovery features. It has a beautiful homepage template with multiple sidebar and content layouts.
Mags is a fully responsive WordPress theme. Plus, it lets you add an email subscription option using the WPForms plugin and lets your users sign up for your email newsletter.
16. Webenvo
Webenvo is a free WordPress theme with a minimalist approach to design and a traditional blog layout for the homepage. It’s fully compatible with bbPress and WooCommerce and could make a good theme for a company’s knowledge base.
Basic also includes a full-width page template and optional sidebar templates. It lets you add a custom header and background image. Plus, you can manage layout options using the WordPress theme customizer.
17. BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss is designed specifically as a bbPress and BuddyPress theme (BuddyPress is social network software for WordPress). It lets you create a social interaction website from scratch within a few minutes.
Some of BuddyBoss’s key features include a custom logo, live notifications, sitewide search, compatibility with WordPress translation plugins, and more. It also lets you create beautiful forms to connect with your users professionally.
18. Square
Square is a free WordPress theme for business websites with bbPress support. The homepage layout uses a slider at the top, followed by different sections.
It lets you set up and customize theme options like the slider, header image, background image, and more. Square is also WooCommerce-ready to add payment solutions easily.
19. Altitude Pro
Altitude Pro is a multipurpose WordPress theme. It comes with a spacious layout, beautiful typography, and simple theme options.
It supports bbPress to create an online community for your business. The theme includes a widgetized homepage, a customizable header area, and background choices.
20. Presence
Presence is a great option for many types of bbPress communities. It’s a WordPress multipurpose theme with a clean and modern layout.
Presence includes multiple demo templates for different kinds of websites, including business, blog, magazine, education, real estate, hotels, and more.
Each site comes with its demo content and unique features. Presence is simple to set up but offers lots of flexibility and different theme options.
21. Nayma
Nayma is a stunning WordPress all-purpose theme. It lets you create pages with modules easily. It’s fully compatible with bbPress and comes with ready-to-use websites.
It offers modules for pricing tables, carousels, sliders, testimonials, portfolio, services, and so on. The theme setup is easy, even for absolute beginners.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress themes for bbPress. You may also want to check out our other WordPress guides for your community and forum site.
Best WordPress Guides for bbPress Forum Sites
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