Versatility, ease of use, and customization are important factors for digital agencies that use WordPress.
Digital agencies and WordPress developers have specific needs when it comes to WordPress themes.
Many of the best and most popular WordPress themes are designed for web entrepreneurs building their own websites. They contain all the tools and features needed to make that website run smoothly.
But what if your business is building websites for digital businesses? Web agencies need tools that can build a wide range of websites with different features and functionalities. They can’t easily work with a hundred different themes for a hundred different clients – not if they also want to offer comprehensive maintenance and security plans alongside their development service.
Your choice of the theme directly impacts your ability to create fully-featured, highly customized WordPress websites and maintain them at scale. We’ve handpicked some of the best WordPress themes for digital agencies whose business model relies on fast, scalable website deployment.
10 Best WordPress Themes for Web Agencies
- Divi
Divi is a powerful multipurpose theme designed to help WordPress developers create high-performance websites with a great degree of creative freedom. It features a broad variety of highly editable templates, a powerful page builder, and lots of helpful documentation.
As one of the most popular WordPress themes on the marketplace today, Divi is the product of years of additions, changes, and revisions. It has become a full-featured site builder with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a top-performance page builder.
However, learning to use Divi properly can take some time. Fully mastering the page builder requires getting to know the underlying architecture of a system designed for complete creative control. As a result, learning to use Divi may be overwhelming for people who don’t need such a high degree of customization.
- Astra
Astra is the theme of choice for more than 1 million websites. It includes an intuitive page builder, dozens of high-quality design templates, and a number of useful extensions for paid subscribers. Astra is highly customizable and extremely lightweight. Its developers maintain that Astra websites should load in less than half a second, which is great for improving Core Web Vitals scores.
Astra supports a few popular third-party website builders, including Elementor and Beaver Builder. This is a major selling point for Astra because it gives developers the ability to choose the builder they know best, instead of settling on Astra’s built-in option.
While Astra’s builder is great, many developers appreciate being able to use the same builder they’ve used for years instead of having to learn a brand new one.
The only disadvantage to using Astra is that most of its most valuable features are only available with an annual pro subscription. You can buy a discount lifetime subscription, but it comes with a pretty steep one-time cost.
- Avada
Avada is a popular WordPress theme with more than half a million users and counting. It had earned its success in only a few short years, making it a newer option than many others on this list.
Avada is powerful, well-coded, and fully responsive. It gives web agencies the ability to add and configure almost any website element without writing code. The included website builder is lightweight and highly visual, giving users a streamlined experience. It even includes powerful options for WooCommerce customization.
Avada is a highly customizable premium plugin, so it’s probably not the best option for creating simple websites and blogs – most of its multipurpose features won’t be put to good use in those cases. It may also conflict with cheaper hosting provider services, so make sure you have a reliable host before you use it.
- Ultra
Ultra is a WordPress theme designed for power, efficiency, and flexibility. It’s convenient and easy to use and includes all of the things web agencies need from a premium WordPress theme.
It has an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, a full-featured customization panel, a banner content builder, and more. It offers a useful set of bonus builder add-ons for paid subscriptions and has a large number of impressive pre-designed layouts.
Ultra can have a bit of a steep learning curve, and its support team isn’t the quickest to respond. This may be an issue for certain agencies who want to know they have a team of experts on-hand they can rely on.
- OceanWP
OceanWP is a highly customizable WordPress theme that is compatible with a wide range of page builders. It is simple, easy to use, and highly adaptable. It offers subscribers a number of free extensions for unique features like modal windows and post sliders.
OceanWP definitely earns points for being fast, clean, and easy to use. It incorporates the latest SEO practices and is developer-friendly. One of the things that OceanWP is particularly well-suited for is helping freelancers crank out fully functional websites quickly.
Most of the downsides of OceanWP revolve around its premium extensions. While the theme itself is free, you can’t create a website to match the free demo sites without paying for at least some of those premium extensions. Those extensions don’t cost much, but if you buy them piecemeal, their prices can add up over time.
- Kadence
Kadence is a relatively new WordPress theme that has quickly gained a significant following based on its fully-featured starter templates, unique customization options, and block-based workflow.
Kadence offers a globally linked color palette that drastically simplifies the process of choosing a set of colors for your finished website. It uses drag-and-drop functionality for website building, offers multiple starter templates, and has innovative elements feature built-in.
One of the only things holding Kadence back is the relative lack of starter templates. They provide subscribers with a pretty small number of templates, designed for a small number of use cases. If the company releases more, they will fast-track their way to the top of the list.
- Enfold
Enfold is a feature-packed theme with a valuable selection of performance-optimizing options at its disposal. It contains many useful features but avoids slowing down your website. This makes it easy for web agencies to guarantee high-quality, fast-loading performance while still delivering features that clients demand.
The development team behind Enfold built SEO features into the backend of the theme itself, so you can be certain your websites have what it takes to rank well. Overall, it’s a highly organized theme that is both customizable and easy to use.
In order to get the best out of Enfold, you’ll have to update it frequently. You should also know that direct customer support is not very accessible. You may not get quick answers to specific problems from Enfold’s developers. At the same time, it costs a little bit more than most similar options on the market.
- Hestia
Hestia is a robust WordPress theme that uses the freemium model to attract web creators of all kinds to its service. It’s particularly well suited for small businesses, startups, and the web agencies that serve them.
The free version is available to all and offers a great starting point to learn what Hestia has to offer. The premium Hestia Pro service is an extension that gives access to some of its most valuable features. Hestia’s customization tool is one of its most innovative and useful features since you can use it to change just about anything to suit your liking.
The only drawback to using Hestia is its limited website library templates. It doesn’t have much to offer an agency that needs to make lots of different types of websites quickly. You can create your own templates easily enough, but there are other themes that offer readymade templates from the very start.
- Salient
Salient is a lightweight and responsive theme designed to help web creators obtain Core Web Vital success. It’s a great option for agencies that want to guarantee fast page loading and excellent performance.
With 350 different templates to choose from, web agencies have plenty of fuel for quickly creating bespoke websites for clients. Salient’s customization features are good on their own, but it is also compatible with WPBakery, ensuring top-of-the-line website builder performance. It also supports WooCommerce, making it easy to create fully-functional online stores.
The only drawback to Salient is that it doesn’t clearly show which features will slow down your website performance. Page transitions, for example, have a significant effect on page load speed, and Salient users who don’t know that may accidentally sabotage their own Core Web Vital optimization attempts.
- X Theme
X Theme is a great choice for web agency creators who want access to decent templates, customizable headers and footers, and the ability to leverage dynamic content for a great user experience. It has a slight learning curve to it, but the team behind X Theme offers excellent support, which more than outweighs the cost of learning how to use it.
The key to using X Theme is understanding stacks. These are pre-made layouts that include website elements and third-party integrations in various ways – in essence, stacks are miniature themes in themselves. It’s an innovative approach to WordPress website design and a successful one at that.
However, since X Theme is blazing its own path when it comes to its user interface, there is a bit of a learning curve involved. The website builder is powerful and full of features, but not quite as intuitive as some of the drag-and-drop options on this list.
Which WordPress Theme is Best for Your Agency?
Selecting your go-to WordPress theme can be a challenge. As a digital agency, you should be able to meet all of your client’s demands with a relatively small set of technologies you know intimately well. Any of the WordPress themes on this list can do the job, but we recommend you spend some time experimenting with them before adopting them fully.
Don’t be afraid to use a high-performance white label WordPress developer as your website building partner. We use some of these themes every single day and have in-depth experience building, running, and maintaining impressive WordPress experiences using them.
