BuddyPress is the social networking plugin for WordPress that enables you to build your own Facebook. Whether you want to create a social space for your friends and family, develop a collaborative environment for your co-workers and colleagues, or somewhere in-between, the free and flexible BuddyPress plugin is for you.
While any good WordPress theme should work with this social network in a box plugin, choosing a purpose-built template not only saves you lots of time and effort but also ensures that each feature of the plugin will match the rest of your website.
By choosing a theme with a good selection of BuddyPress page templates, your visitors will be treated to a consistent user experience as they move through your website. This covers the registration and login pages, the activity feeds, member profiles, private messaging tools, and more.
Some of these themes have also been built specially to integrate with the bbPress plugin. This is another tool for WordPress that lets you add social features to your site, this time in the form of discussion boards. Look out for support for membership plugins, eCommerce tools, and calendar plugins if you want to charge your users a fee for accessing your site, sell items online, or manage virtual or offline events.
BuddyPress and its add-ons offer a wealth of social networking features that when combined with WordPress and the right theme, provide unlimited possibilities.
1. BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss is an advanced WordPress theme for creating online communities and membership sites.
Some examples of the features you can implement on your site with BuddyBoss include the ability for your visitors and users to connect in many ways, such as by linking their accounts, sending each other messages, and publishing content.
Each user can create their own detailed profile that’s visible to the other visitors to your site. Public, private, and even hidden groups can also be easily set up, ensuring your users can communicate with each other about their shared interests. As BuddyBoss has good levels of Zoom support, it’s possible to integrate meetings powered by this service into your website.
If you’d like to monetize your website, that’s possible as well. Some options for doing so include charging one-time fees for access to your community or setting up recurring membership plans. You can also take advantage of the full eCommerce support of BuddyBoss to add an online store component to your community portal via the WooCommerce plugin.
BuddyBoss works with the GamiPress WordPress plugin too. Thanks to this, you can gamify your social network by issuing points that unlock achievements as well as rank your users based on how they interact with your site. BuddyBoss is also highly configurable, ensuring you’re able to get your online community or social network looking and working exactly how you want it to.
BuddyBoss has high levels of mobile friendliness as well as good support for creating a mobile app for your website.
2. KLEO
KLEO is a multipurpose theme that provides you with demos for various occasions, including pre-designed templates for over 40 inner BuddyPress pages.
There are many features that will be of particular interest to BuddyPress users such a BuddyPress profile search tool to help your members better connect with each other and support for a popular geo-directory plugin for adding location-based features to your community. As this is a fully multipurpose theme, if you want to add a shop, blog, forum, eLearning, or other components to your social networking site, it’s not a problem with KLEO.
Other modes you get access to with KLEO include a portfolio site, a Pinterest-style layout, an eCommerce mode, an eLearning set-up, and a business directory listings website demo, plus many more. Each demo version can be installed in just a few clicks to help you get your website online in no time at all.
KLEO offers plenty of customizable design elements alongside impressive third-party plugin integrations for adding many kinds of features to your site.
3. Armadon
Armadon is a gaming community theme built to integrate with BuddyPress.
This BuddyPress theme is ideal for websites for eSports communities, gaming tournaments, and game review blogs. Although Armadon only has one website demo, it can be easily adjusted to ensure that it’s right for your site. You can adjust the layouts, templates, and other settings to make it more suitable for a gaming tournament site or eSports community.
When it comes to adding community features to your site, Armadon has templates for player profiles and directory pages, the group directory and profile pages, and the discussion forum. All of these features are optional so you don’t have to use them on your site if they’re not needed.
Armadon also has events features for promoting and running your own gaming events.
4. SocialV
If you have a large community, you’ll need a theme that helps you streamline and manage your website more easily. That’s where SocialV comes in.
SocialV is a BuddyPress theme with a simple, user-friendly design. You can choose between a light or dark mode, and select pre-built pages for your newsfeed, groups, members, forum, and more. You also get multiple menu styles, a live style customizer to edit the design of your theme, and full Elementor support.
What’s more, SocialV is fully compatible with Better Messages, which allows you to set up a private messaging system on your site. It also integrates with LearnPress, so you can create and sell online courses to your members. Additionally, the theme includes a premium “Stories” plugin that enables members to post and share Facebook-like stories.
With SocialV, you get a feature-rich BuddyPress theme, complete with e-learning functionality.
5. Anesta
Anesta is an intranet and community theme powered by BuddyPress.
This BuddyPress theme has demos covering a range of projects, including intranets, extranets, and private and public online community sites. The demos have clean and modern designs to ensure that your site has the right look to attract and grow an audience. You can easily switch the demos between light and dark modes. Anesta also works with Elementor to give you full control over the design of every page on your site.
Regarding features, the BuddyPress integration ensures that you have all the functionality you’re likely to need. This theme also has its own features that let you do things like publishing polls, charts, graphs, and calendars on your site.
Anesta can be used with membership plugins to restrict access to your content.
6. Reign
Reign is a BuddyPress and bbPress theme for creating online communities with WordPress.
If you want to launch an interactive website that not only has all the features you need but looks great, Reign is hard to beat. Thanks to all the useful functionality and support for third-party plugins, you can use Reign for a range of projects, including launching an online community, creating your own social network-style website, or building a platform for delivering online courses and other learning content. As Reign has good eCommerce support, selling physical products and digital downloads from your WordPress website is very straightforward as is collecting payments online for other purposes.
If you want to personalize your website, you can use the varied settings and controls that are accessible through the theme options control panel. Installing your choice of page builder plugin is an option too if you want even more creative control over the design of your site.
When it comes to BuddyPress-related features, Reign doesn’t disappoint. When you activate this theme, you get access to some useful widgets to display BuddyPress content and features around your site. You can also enable other features such as social media logins, profile searching, member reviews, and much more.
7. Vikinger
Vikinger will help you create an online community that has a focus on gaming. The demo templates of Vikinger have a design and style that would definitely work well for gaming communities and social networks.
As well as working with BuddyPress, Vikinger was also built to integrate with the bbPress and GamiPress plugins. Thanks to this, you can easily add discussion forums to your website and gamify the user experience. With GamiPress installed, you can give your users points for completing certain actions, award them achievements, and assign them ranks as they interact with your website and its content.
As Vikinger is highly customizable, it can easily be adjusted for other types of BuddyPress projects. Elementor is the recommended page builder plugin for use with this theme, and its intuitive drag-and-drop content editor makes it easy to edit the demo templates of Vikinger. You can also make changes to your website via the theme options panel, making Vikinger a flexible option.
If you’re looking for a theme with good levels of gamification support, check out Vikinger.
8. Olympus
Olympus is a social networking WordPress theme that is fully compatible with BuddyPress.
To give you an idea of the types of websites this theme is best suited to, Olympus comes with demos and templates for creating online directories, events sites, and even online shops. The individual templates in the Olympus package ensure that you’re able to add FAQs, member pages, member activity feeds, and user profile content to your website.
You should find it easy to give your users lots of privileges to help you create an online community around your chosen topic. This includes displaying all of your member profiles in a stylish format complete with their profile photo and contact details and adding newsfeeds to your site. All of the content on these pages can be controlled to ensure that your site is set up in exactly the right way for your project, with the privacy of your users in mind.
While BuddyPress is at the heart of this theme, the popular Youzer user profile plugin for BuddyPress is also heavily integrated into the Olympus theme. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to take the user handling capabilities of your website to the next level.
All of the Olympus templates can be fully customized, thanks to the inclusion of the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin.
9. Socialize
Socialize is a flexible theme that has been built around the BuddyPress and bbPress plugins. No matter what type of social or community website you are trying to build, this theme should be able to adapt to your needs.
To help draw in the attention of your visitors, Socialize features a good selection of animation effects which can be applied to the various elements of your website. There’s also four homepage layouts to choose from. When creating new content, the included premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin gives you plenty of freedom to create your own layouts and designs, all without editing any code yourself.
With Socialize, the blog section of your website won’t look like an afterthought either. There are six blog post layouts to choose from, allowing you to pick the right template for each piece of content you publish. The theme also integrates well with some of the best plugins for WordPress. This includes an events calendar, the online shop builder plugin WooCommerce, and the multilingual content manager WPMU.
Socialize can be used for a wide range of purposes, all of which will feature BuddyPress or bbPress at their core.
10. Cirkle
Cirkle is a social networking BuddyPress WordPress theme.
If building your own social network sounds appealing, Cirkle is a theme that can help you to make that happen. Built to work with BuddyPress, bbPress, and the extensions available for those two plugins, you should have no trouble adding the features you need to your social networking site. Anything you do enable for your site, such as private messaging, discussion forums, and user profiles, will all be styled by the library of templates that come with Cirkle.
When it comes to website templates, Cirkle gives you lots of options to work with. The complete website demos have all been designed to a high standard. The individual page templates all look very good, too. As this theme is regularly updated, your website will have a fully modern design if you choose Cirkle.
Cirkle was designed to work with GamiPress to help you gamify your website.
11. Cera
Cera is an intranet and community WordPress theme built around the BuddyPress plugin.
This theme gives you the ability to easily add member and group directories to your website. You can display lists of your users in an easy-to-read format while also displaying a range of information about them. All of your users get access to a nicely designed user dashboard area too, giving them a stylish and functional way to manage their accounts.
If your users would like to communicate with each other through your website, Cera and BuddyPress can make that possible with a secure private messaging system. As Cera also works very well with the bbPress plugin, you can create a private forum for your registered users to post messages, ask each other questions, share ideas, and get to know each other better.
You can even enable social networking features such as an activity wall that lets your users share their thoughts and latest content with their followers, photo and video galleries for storing and publishing a range of media, and the ability for users to connect with each other by becoming friends in a similar way to how relationships and connections work in Facebook.
Cera should give you the ability to add any functionality you need to your WordPress community website.
12. Beehive
Beehive is a social network WordPress theme that’s powered by BuddyPress. Thanks to its modern design, Beehive is sure to give your online community or social network a stylish and appealing look.
The demo templates cover all the parts of your website that you’re likely to need, including the login page, different feeds, and user profiles. There are also templates for adding job listings to your website, publishing products, and creating a blog. You can use the supported Elementor page builder plugin if you need to edit any of the templates, giving you full creative control over your site.
Beehive uses Ajax forms to remove the need for page loads each time a user logs in, updates their feed, or publishes any content on the site. The search tool works in a similar way, delivering results without the need to reload a page. This all helps to deliver a smooth user experience.
Beehive has some very professional-looking templates combined with many useful features.
13. Seeko
Seeko has been designed to help you build a dating-focused community website with WordPress and BuddyPress. With two pre-built website modes created for exactly these types of projects, you should be able to lay the foundation for your community very quickly.
You also get access to some useful features to help make your website a success. One example of this is the powerful search tool that aims to give your users the ability to find exactly the type of person they’re looking for, whether that’s someone to date or a mentor – although you could easily adjust the focus of this theme for other types of matchmaking sites.
Seeko also has its own matchmaking system that uses a flexible algorithm to help your users build better connections. Other reasons to consider Seeko for your website include the counters, galleries, and pricing tables.
Thanks to the tight integration with the powerful Elementor page builder plugin, you can easily customize all of the pre-built templates in the Seeko theme package. Support for the leading eCommerce plugins should come in handy too, especially if you want to charge your users a fee for accessing your community.
With powerful searching and matching features, Seeko can help you create a strong community website with WordPress.
14. Gwangi
Gwangi is a BuddyPress theme for all types of social networking and community websites. The pre-built demos in the Gwangi package cover dating, eLearning, and spiritual websites as well as some generic options.
If you want to monetize your BuddyPress website, Gwangi makes it easy to add free and paid memberships to your community portal. Through integration with the supported Paid Memberships Pro plugin, you can easily restrict access to your content so that only certain users can access it, with the option of charging a fee. As Paid Memberships Pro supports one-time and recurring payments, you can set your subscription pricing up in the way that you want.
Other supported monetization options include paid feature access that enables you to charge users a fee for access to specific aspects of your website and widgets for displaying adverts alongside your content.
For those who plan to promote online or offline events on their website, Gwangi has good support for that, too. These could be events that you hold inside your community area or are taking place elsewhere that your users might be interested in.
Some of the other BuddyPress features that you can easily use on your website if you choose the Gwangi theme include publishing member directories, creating user groups, and displaying a site-wide activity feed.
Gwangi is a highly versatile BuddyPress theme that’s suitable for lots of community websites.
15. Aardvark
Aardvark is a multipurpose BuddyPress WordPress theme with lots of demos.
Some examples of the types of websites you can build with Aardvark and BuddyPress include online communities, paid membership sites, and online course platforms. Thanks to the social media registration and login functionality, your visitors won’t even need to sign up if you don’t want to make them do so. Instead, they can just use their existing accounts on sites like Facebook and Twitter to gain access to your website.
With Aardvark, you get a lot of pre-built demos to choose from when starting your site. With demos that cover dating, social networks, intranet, eLearning sites, plus many more, you should be able to find a suitable option here for your BuddyPress-powered portal.
This theme comes with the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin, giving you full control over how your website will look. Aardvark works with all the best third-party plugins too, so if you want to add eCommerce functionality to your site, online course creation features, or membership capabilities, it’s not a problem.
Aardvark has good support for right-to-left (RTL) languages and also works with the best multilingual plugins. If you want to publish content in more than one language or translate your site, you’ll be able to do so with this theme.
Whatever type of BuddyPress website you want to build, you should be able to get the job done with Aardvark.
16. Woffice
Woffice is an intranet and extranet WordPress theme that’s built for use with BuddyPress.
The demos in the Woffice theme package can help you to quickly set up a feature-rich private or public community website using WordPress and the BuddyPress plugin. Some notable features of this theme include directory support for publishing user directories and other lists of content on your site, Slack integration for displaying notifications from your community in Slack channels, and the ability to enable social media logins and registrations to simplify the process for gaining access to your website.
Another interesting aspect of Woffice is the project management functionality. These features make it possible to use your website for managing projects, thanks to task tracking, file sharing, and the ability to assign users to certain tasks. Syncing with calendars is supported, too, enabling you to connect your chosen calendar apps with your website. Woffice also supports event publishing, giving you the ability to hold events on your website as well as promote events that are taking place elsewhere.
Thanks to compatibility with many of the best WordPress plugins, you can add a wide range of extra features to your site with Woffice.
17. Buddy
Buddy uses a timeless layout that is often overlooked for more fancy and overblown designs.
With this Buddy theme, you are going back to basics in some ways but in terms of features and integrations, this theme is cutting edge. The responsive Retina-ready design means your users will be just as at home on your site whether they are using a smartphone or tablet, while also getting a great impression of your site thanks to its support for the latest generation of high-resolution monitors.
While BuddyPress users are well catered for, those wishing to add a discussion forum to their site with the bbPress plugin are also well supported. Other features include a selection of custom layouts, a library of shortcodes, a skin manager, and front-end login and registration pages.
Buddy is a WordPress theme that BuddyPress users will be able to use to its fullest potential.
18. Gorgo
Gorgo is a content-focused community theme aimed at writers and readers.
If you want to create a community blog or multi-author website with WordPress, Gorgo might meet your requirements. The community demo in the Gorgo package looks a bit similar to the popular Medium website, thanks to its clean and modern design. As this theme comes with lots of different article templates, you can display your content in the way that’s right for each piece of work you publish.
As part of its BuddyPress-powered features, Gorgo has templates for displaying your list of authors in a stylish format and also presenting each author’s individual profile page. If you want to enable other community features, such as groups and forums, Gorgo has all the necessary templates for that, too. If you want to restrict access to your content or create a membership site, Gorgo has been built to work specifically with the Paid Memberships Pro plugin.
The custom sidebar functionality of Gorgo gives you lots of control over this part of your site.
