WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It’s owned by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and is a great choice for building any type of online store. One of the advantages of WooCommerce is the vast number of themes available.
Unfortunately, this can also make it difficult to make the best choice for your needs. In this post, we’ll look at WooCommerce themes, see what features they need, see how to find them, and look at several of the best WooCommerce themes available to help you get started with your next online store.
What is a WooCommerce Theme?
WooCommerce is a highly compatible eCommerce plugin that works well with most WordPress themes. However, some WordPress themes are designed with eCommerce shops in mind, making them better choices to showcase and sell your products. They include features to promote and sell your products and grow your store.
WooCommerce themes include premade layouts that look like stores, making it easy to get your store running quickly. They can be designed for stores in general, or specific industries. They can focus on products or promote your services.
What a WooCommerce Theme Needs
WooCommerce already lets you specify pages for your shop, checkout, cart, etc., but those are pages with WooCommerce shortcodes to add the content. Out of the box, those are pages without any special design.
Themes designed for WooCommerce go a few steps further. They include templates and features that improve your shop page, product pages, checkout and cart pages, and the overall eCommerce experience. They add new and unique shopping carts and upsell options.
A Few More Things to Look For…
WooCommerce themes should make it easier to create a store that looks great and works well, promotes sales, and brings visitors back for more. With this in mind, here are a few things to look for in a WooCommerce theme.
Professional Design
The theme should be designed for eCommerce and look and feel professional. It should include all the elements needed for a WooCommerce store. The design should be clean and uncluttered, simple, and attractive. Customers shouldn’t have to figure out what items are products and which elements are buttons to purchase products. It should be appealing to the eyes and customers should know at a glance that it’s a store.
Speed
Your WooCommerce theme should load fast. Slow websites see high bounce rates, and a slow shopping experience contributes to a high rate of cart abandonment. 57% of shoppers abandon their carts if it takes 3 seconds to load. Speed also affects the website’s SEO.
SEO
The theme should be SEO-friendly. Many visitors will come to your store through search engines such as Google. Even though WordPress is SEO-friendly, your theme should also include SEO optimizations to ensure your shop can be found easily. This includes the proper tags, schema markup, breadcrumbs, and AMP options.
Responsive
Many customers shop through their phones and tablets. Your site should be easy to use, navigate, search, and make purchases from any type of device they might use. To ensure your WordPress site is mobile-ready, the theme should be responsive and look great on all devices and screen sizes.
Easy to Use
The design should be intuitive for both you and your customers. The layout should make sense, look like a store, and promote sales. All the settings on the front end and back end should be easy to learn and follow. Settings that are difficult to understand make the theme needlessly difficult to use.
Customization
It should have customization options so you can match your branding and create a unique design. Look for themes that let you change the colors, fonts, backgrounds, widgets, and sidebars. For the most customization, you might consider a theme that gives you control over the layouts. Even if you want to keep the layouts, you might want to make small adjustments to move, delete, or add elements.
Plugin Compatibility
It should be compatible with all of the plugins you want to use. This includes any WooCommerce add-ons you want to add as well as any features you want to add to WordPress. Depending on the features of the theme, you might want to use plugins for payments, checkout optimizations, upselling, cross-promotions, deals, etc. Most WooCommerce themes are highly compatible. Just make sure there are no plugin compatibility issues mentioned. For more information about WooCommerce plugins, see the article Best WooCommerce Plugins & Extensions.
Support
The theme should have good support from the publisher. The more popular WooCommerce themes have lots of support and products from the community. Look for documentation and written or video tutorials.
Regular Updates
Look for themes that receive regular updates. WordPress is updated regularly to add new features, fix bugs, and solve security issues. A theme that isn’t updated is prone to bugs and security issues. Look for a theme with frequent and recent updates. We recommend avoiding any theme or plugin that doesn’t get regular updates. Anything that has had an update in a while probably doesn’t have good support.
Excellent Ratings
Be sure to check the ratings. This gives you an idea of how well the theme has worked for others, the types of problems it might have, and how those problems have been solved. Sort them by date so you can see the most recent ratings to get a snapshot of their current condition. WooCommerce themes with 4 stars or higher are usually the best themes.
How to Find the Best WooCommerce Themes
Since there are thousands of WordPress themes with some sort of WooCommerce compatibility, it can be difficult to find the best options. Searching with Google and similar search engines shows sponsored results first, so instead of seeing the best options, you’ll see those who’ve paid for you to find them. You’ll also find many positive reviews that are either sponsored or affiliates. These can still be honest reviews, but some only focus on the sale. With this in mind, here are a few tips to find the best options for your needs.
Search the WooCommerce Store
The WooCommerce themes page is a great place to find high-quality themes for your store. They have a curated list of themes they recommend. Searching for themes on the WooCommerce store shows 62 themes in 3 categories and 13 industries.















