Building a community is one of the best ways to connect with your audience. And, what’s the best way than using free social networking themes to get started?
Social Networking themes are versatile in their approach. You can create a pure networking site with the ability to connect, communicate and reach out to improve your chances of success.
In this article, we will look at the best free social networking themes you can get for your site.
So, without any delay, let’s get started.
Overview
Best Free Social Networking Themes
Community Theme
Community theme is one of the best free social networking themes that you can get out there. It lets you create amazing communities, courses, and memberships.
The flexibility makes the Community theme one of the best themes out there. The three ways you can make the Community theme work for you include the following:
- Online communities: Creating amazing online communities is easy. You can add key features to your community, including forums, post updates, groups, and more.
- Selling online courses: Community Theme is completely compatible with various course content management solutions such as LearnDash and LifterLMS.
- Online membership programs: Membership programs provide value to the users as they offer a unique experience.
But what makes the Community Theme so special? Let’s take a look at some of its key features:
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- Membership profile: Users can create their own profiles to express themselves.
- Social Groups: The theme works with the BuddyBoss platform. This way you can organize users socially with separate member lists and activity feeds.
- Private Messaging: Ability to send private messages.
- Events: Create site-wide events to organize social events for members
- Albums and Media: Offer users to organize, upload and share their media with others.
Other key features that make Community Theme worth looking at include:
- Offer a sustainable social media platform using memberships and subscriptions
- Create fully functionally online courses.
- Brand customization.
OceanWP
OceanWP is one of the top free WordPress themes that you can get. It supports BuddyPressBuddPress, which means that you can create a powerful and feature-rich community using the theme.
On top of that, OceanWP is highly extendable and lightweight. Other than that, you can also use the site for other purposes. In case you want to add a blog to your community page, you can also do so with OceanWP.
It also comes with other comprehensive features, including the following:
- Translation ready
- SEO optimized
- WooCommerce features so that additional services for your audience.
- Works with popular page builders including Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, and so on.
- RTL supported
- Professional, beautiful design
Customify
Customify is a responsive, lightweight yet powerful multipurpose theme. It offers you the ability to host a full-fledged community site with the help of community builder plugins such as BuddyPress.
So, with Customify, you can create a social network site. As Customify thrives on customization, you are free to add and explore the different functionalities.
Moreover, it is compatible with popular page builders. Even with page builders, it comes with a WYSIWYG header and footer builder for basic customizations.
Apart from that, you also get demos to get started.
But, how can it be used as a social networking site?
Well, you can use popular community plugins and then covert it to the fully-fledged community site. It’s customizability to the core. So, you can use it with the likes of bbPress or BuddyPress.
Moreover, you can also import demo sites to get a good starting point.
The key features worth mentioning include:
- Works with most plugins
- Compatible with page builders
- Can use community plugins to enhance the theme
- Offers in-built WYSIWYG header and footer builder.
Spacious
Our next theme is Spacious, a heavily downloaded WordPress theme with over 60,000+ installations. It is a multipurpose theme that can be utilized based on your requirement. This means that you can create a social networking theme based on any of the theme designs.
To help you get started, you get access to 4 different page layouts. It also comes with 13 widget areas, four blog display types, five custom widgets, and other customization features.
In case you want to showcase what your social networking site has to offer, you can use the awesome slider that comes with it. Further customization can be done using a color change scheme, changing the layout from boxed to wide.
To create a social networking theme, you need to use it with a community plugin such as bbPress or BuddyPress.
The theme is constantly updated so that you do not have to worry about vulnerabilities. You also get access to new features as it updated.
In a nutshell, it offers the following features:
- Full customizability
- Different blog types or layouts
- 13 widget areas
- 5 custom widgets
Astra
Astra is one of the best themes that you can use for your social networking site. Astra is the number one free theme that you can get from WordPress.org. With over 1+ million active installations, it is one of the most used themes out there.
But what makes Astra so successful? Well, it is the customization aspect that makes it so great. It is a beautiful and customizable WordPress theme that can be used for different sites, including creating a personal, business, or WooCommerce storefront. Its ability to be used for different types also means that you can create a powerful social networking site from it.
Astra’s popularity can also be gauged from the fact that it can be utilized with many demos from their store. To amplify it, the theme works great with community plugins so that you can create a powerful social networking theme.
The key features offered by Astra include:
- Fully responsive
- Works with WooCommerce
- Supports RTL translations.
- Fully customizable
Neve
Neve is another interesting WordPress theme that offers an excellent feature-set for creating social networking site. It takes a mobile-first approach where the site is rendered perfectly on mobile devices. This also means that it is AMP compatible and also works with popular page builders.
You can get started with Neve for free. Apart from that, you will also notice how lightweight and fast the theme is. It also offers flexibility and ease of use.
Other key features offered by Neve include:
- The 100-speed grade for better performance
- Loads under 1 second
- Reduced weight
- Custom header and footer design
- Fast and fully customizable
BuddyX
The last theme that we are going to define is the BuddyX theme. It is a membership and community theme. So, you can use it to create a free social networking site easily. It supports all kinds of communities – giving you full control over what you can do with it.
BuddyPress support makes the theme an instant hit. This way, you can know that you can create a successful site. This means that users can send private messages to the users, set profiles, and even create groups.
To provide optimal performance, the theme is kept lightweight. It is also responsive, which means that it will load in different places. Moreover, it also supports SEO optimization, RTL & translation ready.
In case you want to make your site sell anything, you can use WooCommerece to do it. It also supports Gamipress, LearnPress, LearnDash, and WCVendors to optimize your site further.
Moreover, you get to fully optimize your theme using page builders such as Gutenberg and Elementor.
In short, BuddyX is a great pick for creating your social networking themes. Its key feature includes:
- Works with WooCommerce
- SEO optimized
- RTL & Translation ready
- Works with Elementor and Gutenberg.
Conclusion
Creating your own social networking site can seem a daunting task. But with the right tools, especially with themes, you can do it! Most of the free themes come with basic needs. However, there is always one point where you might need to go for a paid theme. In our list, you can create a basic social networking site without hassle.
So, which theme are you going to use? Comment below and let us know.
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