In this article, we’re gonna cover 25 best WordPress themes specifically for an online courses platform. If you want to start an online courses website (or any other website related to e-learning, for that matter), you don’t need to look any further. We promise that in this list you will find something great for your business, as we have carefully selected only top-rated, most quality themes for your consideration.
When it comes to starting a website, one usually has two main options: either build everything from scratch themselves, or make use of the website publishing systems, also known as content management systems (CMS). While both paths have their pros and cons, most people choose to go the second route. CMS like WordPress can do all the dirty coding work for you, so that you can focus on more interesting things like thinking over your website’s design, creating content, and visualizing your information. Actually, by using WordPress you can get a website for your business up and running in mere hours, if not minutes!
Another thing that makes platforms like WordPress so popular is themes. A theme is a set of objects (images, graphics, customization settings, style sheets) that determine the overall functionality and look of a website. Basically, there is a huge collection of custom WordPress themes for you to choose from. Even if you don’t have an exact vision for your website yet, you can choose a nice theme to start with and customize it to your liking. Themes can be free or premium, multi-purpose or meant for specific use case only. In any case, everyone will find a theme to make a fast, professional-looking, and mobile-friendly website in almost no time.
Pointers to consider in choosing wordpress theme for online courses platform
Before we jump into that list, you might want to consider some pointers to guide you in choosing the best wordpress theme for your online courses website. First, you would probably be selling subscription based courses or one time off payment courses, hence you would need a payment gateway and/or a subscription payment mechanism. It would be perfect if the wordpress theme you are selecting have these options and in the channels preferred by your business needs.
Second, your online courses business ideally would be needing review functions or plugins that easily allow participants to rate the courses and the instructors in order to help future potential learners make their informed decisions. Do keep a lookout for such functions.
Third, if you want a successful online courses website, you should seriously consider integrating a forum and user community, where learners from different courses can come together in a forum or community and exchange views or information. Should your online courses website has such a function, you would be able to get your students and future prospective students as well as instructors to stick around your forum and sooner or later become customers or providers of your online courses.
As you scroll through these 25 wordpress themes looking for the best theme that meets your online courses website requirement, do keep in mind the above 3 criterias and any other needs you have to help you arrive at an informed decision.
If you are in a rush for time, zoom into these 3 best wordpress themes: Education, LMS and Tutor.
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- Education WordPress Theme | Eduma
The first theme on our list is Education, which is definitely one of the best themes for an online courses platform out there. It is specifically designed for LMS, training centers, course hubs, and college/academy/university/school/kindergarten websites. Here you will find an easy drag & drop curriculum manager, support of a variety of question types (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, paragraph, image choice), compatibility with multiple payment methods (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Offline), and integration with WooCommerce. And this is only a tip of the iceberg on the long list of the Education theme’s advantages!
Last but not least, you don’t need to be a tech-savvy person to get started with Education. It can be applied to a website and customized with an ease, so you don’t have to worry about the coding. Instead, you can spend your time working on the content itself. Overall, we find Education to be a very flexible, reliable, and fast theme. You definitely won’t regret selecting it for your online courses website.
2. LMS WordPress Theme
LMS is one of the most trusted WordPress theme for online Learning Management Systems. Actually, Learning Managements System (LMS) is exactly where this theme got its name from. So, if you are thinking of starting an online courses website, you should definitely check LMS out. It is already trusted by thousands of online tutors, training academies, online teaching instructors, and other training organizations all around the world.
LMS is compatible with WooCommerce, supports easy localization into multiple languages, and has a wide variety of other features to make running an online courses website an easy and pleasant experience. It boasts perfect compatibility with almost popular internet browsers, is SEO ready, and also supports parallax image scrolling effect. Basically, it gives your everything you need to start a beautiful and effective eLearning platform and requires no knowledge of coding.
3. Tutor – Online Education And Teaching WordPress Theme
Tutor is another great WordPress template made for online courses. We have found it to be minimalist and beautiful, yet powerful at the same time. Tutor is based on the free LearnPress plugin and gives you a fully functional online portal. With Tutor, you can easily create free and paid courses, lessons, quizzes, highlight the Popular Courses section, group your courses into categories, etc.
The header of the theme is optimized for browsing and easy navigation, making it easy and intuitive to find a desired course. The slider part is built with the tried-and-true Slider Revolution plugin, providing great animation and functionality. Tutor also provides helpful documentation and boasts a committed support team standing behind it, ready to help you in case you have any questions. So, we enthusiastically recommend you to check this theme out.
4. SkIllum – Online Courses WordPress Elementor Theme
The first word that came to our mind when reviewing SkIllum theme was “bright”. And it indeed is bright! It has a very pleasant and eye-catching color palette, plenty of logical sections, and a variety of creative tools. This is just what you need to build a modern, stylish, and successful online courses website that would stand out from your competitors.
Support for Jet plugins, tabs, accordion blocks, animation effects, and mega menu with drop-down sections are just some of the nice-to-haves that SkIllum offers. This WordPress theme will help you expand your client base and attract new students to your courses. As always, no coding experience needs, so you can jump straight to business right away.
5. Education WordPress Theme – Masterstudy
A list of the best WordPress themes for online courses would never be complete without MasterStudy. We just love how it provides an amazing combination of functionality, customization, design, documentation, and customer care.
The list of nice-to-haves that MasterStudy includes is truly remarkable. It comes with Revolution Slider plugin, over 900 Google Fonts, customizable sidebars and widgets, advanced quizzes with multiple types of questions, Zoom conferencing support, integrated MailChimp subscription, and 24/7 customer support, to name just a few. MasterStudy is also multi-language ready, so you can use WPML with confidence.
Last not but least, MasterStudy has a very clean and elegant look. We are absolutely sure that any online courses website would reap a great benefit using it, so be sure to check it out.
6. Academy – Learning Management Theme
Academy is another WordPress theme oriented to online courses and other eLearning services. This theme provides awesome features such as extended user profiles, rating and question systems, file attachments, embedding self-hosted media, tracking course progress, WooCommerce integration and more. The overall style of the theme is familiar and classic, which is definitely a good thing. You can be sure that your customers will be able to navigate your website easily and have a pleasant experience doing business with you.
Academy has a great rating among its users. And based on their reviews, they specifically like the customer support and how well this theme is documented. From our point of view, this is a great advantage when building a website with a WordPress theme. So, it’s not hard to understand why we included Academy on our list of the best niche WordPress themes for online courses.
7. Englot – Clean Language Course WordPress Theme
Englot is a great example of a WordPress theme fine-tuned specifically for online courses, mainly language courses. It is especially relevant and valuable due to the fact that learning languages online is becoming so amazingly popular these days.
Englot allows for a responsive interface, supports all modern browsers, and makes it easy to customize your website. It’s also SEO optimized, which ensures your site is always ranked high in search engines. Once you download and install this theme, you’ll see that you immediately get a set of pre-made pages (like Home, About Us, Courses, Teachers, FAQ, Contacts, etc.). This is really appreciated, as you can start your website in minutes and make it ready to rock!
With Englot, your website will be equally useful to both foreign language schools and self-employed teachers. So, if you want to make a modern, convenient, and successful online courses platform, then Englot is ready to assist you.
8. Language Courses WordPress Theme
As its name suggests, Language Courses is another theme meant for online courses, mostly for language learning. And we should say that it does an amazing job at that!
Language Courses is a minimalist, very easy-to-navigate solution. But don’t think that this comes at a cost of functionality. No, it covers all the essentials and more. If you choose this theme, your visitor will be able to browse your website using a sticky horizontal menu with the main pages and an extra vertical menu with categories. Social media icons and the search box are placed in the header, which makes them accessible instantly. And thanks to the grid-based gallery and slider, you can fill the layout with some eye-catching visual content. Language Courses theme is also WPML-compatible, so you can easily run your platform in multiple languages.
Overall, Language Courses would be a great choice if you decide to use it for your online courses website, especially if you aim to give your website a minimalist and professional look.
9. Colead | Coaching & Online Courses WordPress Theme
Colead is a stunning, flexible, and multi-purpose WordPress theme for speakers, mentors, trainers, therapists, coaches, and, of course, online courses. It offers an amazing style that really stands out and serves well the purpose of representing your business. With Colead’s responsive and Retina-ready design, your site will look awesome on any device.
Colead also comes with 1-click Demo importer, multiple header layouts, full support for WooCommerce, parallax effect, drag & drop page builder, more than 600 Google fonts and icons, unlimited colors & skins… The list of benefits just goes on and on!
This theme is great for both high-skilled professionals and beginners with no knowledge of coding. Colead is just a perfect all-in-one solution that will definitely help you achieve success in your chosen field of business.
10. High School Promotion WordPress Theme
High School Promotion is a WordPress theme designed for eLearning platforms like education institutions’ sites and online courses platforms. One of the first things you notice about this theme is its color scheme, as it uses mostly shades of green and gray. The authors claim that green symbolizes prestige while grey signifies professionalism, and we cannot agree more with them – this color choice is such a great idea.
High School Promotion is carefully built with Elementor page builder. It is fine-tuned for mobile view (which is so important nowadays), provides comprehensive and accurate documentation and 24/7 lifetime support.
High School Promotion was not only designed to look nice and professional, but to also help you gain more attention at your business and generate more customers. Just give this WordPress theme a try using the Live Demo page and see how it suits your online courses needs.
11. Flatsome
Flatsome is one of the most popular and well-trusted themes for WordPress, period. One may think that it’s not exactly meant for online courses, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. As we already discussed in the beginning, WordPress themes can be either niche or multi-purpose, and Flatsome is just a great example of the latter approach.
Flatsome offers such an astonishing variety of customization and tuning options that it can be used to create almost any type of website, including sites for online courses and eLearning. It offers Live Theme Option panel, Live Page Builder, a library of pre-defined layouts and sections, WPML support, unlimited header options, clean and optimized code (it’s one of the fastest WordPress themes on the market), regular updates, and much, MUCH more. There’s just not enough space in this article to cover everything that Flatsome has to offer. It has more than three thousand 5-star ratings, which by itself says a lot.
In short, everything about this theme just screams quality. Our list of the best WordPress themes for online courses just wouldn’t be complete without Flatsome, so be sure to check it out.
12. Rainbow Colleges – E-Course WordPress Theme
This Rainbow Colleges theme was developed for an effective learning website, such as a web page of an educational institution or an online courses platform. It uses the LearnPress plugin, which has some great advantages like simplicity of updates, intuitive interface, and rich options of customizations specifically for an online learning website. This theme also supports WooCommerce integration, which means you can proceed to selling your educational courses right off the bat!
Rainbow Colleges has a very responsive design that comes in wide and boxed versions and five predefined color schemes. So, just give this WordPress theme a try and watch your business grow! And just in case anything goes wrong, their client support team is always there to help you.
13. Phoenix WordPress Theme
Phoenix is a minimalistic WordPress theme for online courses with an elegant look and feel. Its clean layout draws users’ attention to important details like educational programs, teachers’ info, etc. A large hero image features several bold banners with a cool hover effect. To save on space and add a more balanced look to the layout, content was organized in a grid-based list. The theme is highly customizable, with several custom page templates. Its fully responsive layout will look perfect on any screen size. To make your website easily accessible to everyone around the world, Phoenix is WPML-ready and supports all modern browsers.
To sum up, Phoenix is a powerful WordPress theme that should appeal to online courses platforms of all sizes.
14. Education Pro – Best Education & LMS WordPress Theme
Education Pro is a WordPress theme designed specifically for educational purposes, namely websites for online courses, universities, school, and colleges. One of the best competitive advantages of this theme is that it’s so lightweight. Education Pro is based on the super-fast and light Elementor page builder with drag and drop function for easy content management. Also, it uses only essential plugins to make your website’s pages open at lightning speeds. The authors also added lots of options in the theme’s Redux Option Panel for easy customization. So, you don’t need any coding knowledge to operate this theme whatsoever.
Education Pro works great on desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile devices. It’s also compatible with all popular browsers, so you can be sure that your clients will always get the best experience interacting with your online courses website.
Finally, Education Pro offers SEO optimization, integration with multiple fonts, smooth parallax effect and 24/7 customer support. And you can always check one of their multiple existing demos to see how this theme could work for your business before committing.
15. Edugroit – Online Course Website Template WordPress Theme
The authors of Edugroit have created a good-looking and informative theme for an online courses website. With Edugroit, you can not only publish courses and programs, but also post news and upcoming events in the area of education.
Edugroit is based on Elementor – one of the most popular WordPress website builders. It also includes Jet plugins and uses parallax to make everything work nice and smooth. You also get an access to the calendar widget, galleries, fonts, photo carousel, and full screen pictures. As a bonus, Edugroit offers a pack of high-quality stock images.
In short, Edugroit covers everything you need to make a great website for online courses. We can therefore recommend it without reservation.
16. Education Help
You can make your online courses platform look smart and modern with the Education Help theme for WordPress. It is cross-browser compatible, fully responsive, and SEO optimized. All of that will make your website a pleasure to use and easy to find on the internet.
Speaking of the look and feel, Education Pro is designed in metro style. It supports parallax effect, comes with advanced functionality, rich customization capabilities, and lots of options for font and color selection. You can make your website even more interactive with accordion/carousel/isotope sliders, audio player, and video integration. Portfolio, Blog, Our Team, Services, and Testimonials pages are provided out of the box as well. Finally, you can further increase customer engagement with the built-in online chat functionality. So, be sure to check this theme out.
17. Educor – Education Courses WordPress Elementor Theme
The Live Demo page of Educor welcomed us with the following words: “Let’s make something great”. And these words seem to describe the nature of this theme pretty well. Educor immediately stroke us with its bold color palette: the selection of bright orange, white, and cerulean blue just screams confidence, optimism, and creativity… and we totally love that!
With Educor, you can build a well-structured, informative site for online courses which you will be proud of. It supports Jet widgets and plugins for super-fast customization. It also offers tons of high-quality stock images, extensive and accurate documentation, and 24/7 lifetime support.
Educor operates perfectly with any devices in any browser and allows you to customize your site with no knowledge of code. It is truly an eye-catching theme, and we are most happy to recommend it to everyone.
18. Baby Kids – Education Primary School Children
Baby Kids is a WordPress theme that specializes in building an online courses platform for children. It’s fun, convenient, and interactive – exactly what you need for such a use case.
Baby Kids offers video tutorials on how to install this theme with no knowledge of code, so you can get started with your website in just a few minutes. If also comes with unlimited colors, support for popular plugins like Page Builder and Revolution Slider, compatibility with MailChimp and WPML.
Interesting fact: the authors guarantee monthly updates, and we find this to be an excellent bonus. In today’s world, regular updates are essential to maintain the website’s full compatibility with the latest internet features and WordPress versions. So, if you want to build a reliable web platform with the best online courses (especially for children), then Baby Kids is a way to go.
19. Efor
Efor is considered to be one of the top-selling educational themes for WordPress, and this status is very well deserved. It feels high class and premium through and through, so no wonder we recommend it to anyone who wants to build a successful online courses platform with a creative and one-of-a-kind UI/UX.
With its flexible nature, Efor allows for quick and easy customizations that will help you design a website exactly how you want it. For example, in addition to the regular must-haves (responsive design, Google fonts, WooCommerce support) Efor offers multiple layout options, over 70 design elements, stylish popups, and a powerful Live Customizer. Put is simply, Efor just provides everything you need to build a platform that would rock.
One of the things that we want to emphasize about Efor is its demos – there are a few of them, and they all are beautifully and thoughtfully designed. We just fell in love with Efor’s demos the moment we saw them. So, if you want to build an online courses platform that would truly shine among the competitors – you should look no further.
20. Ed School: Education WordPress Theme
Featuring a bold design, innovative ideas, and a highly praised customer support, Ed school is a very strong choice for anyone who wants to start an online courses website.
Offering more than 70 page-building elements (such as event plugin, Google Map widget, testimonial widget, to name a few), Ed School is filled with the useful features needed to easily create a beautiful, fluid, and contemporary educational websites. Be bold and creative! Your clients will love you for it. Make your website blazingly fast with a thoroughly responsive design and never worry about device compatibility again. With Ed School, all of that (and more) is ready right off the shelf to help you create an awesome school website without touching a single line of code.
21. Education Center | LMS Online University & School Courses Studying WordPress Theme
Education Center is a fresh and modern WordPress theme designed for educational purposes. It includes pre-made pages (like Teachers List, Courses List, Personal Teacher/Trainer page, etc.), so you can make use of those and save a lot of your precious time. This theme also offers a convenient course builder, advanced quizzes, lesson timing and schedules, dynamic forums, as well as course points, awards, and certificates. Other threats come in the form of 4 color schemes, Retina support, cross-browser compatibility, mobile-readiness and a fast loading speed, to name a few.
With Education Center WordPress theme, creating an outstanding online courses website is as easy as 1-2-3. We therefore recommend this theme without reservation.
PS. Special kudos for the child theme, we totally loved it!
22. Guru | Learning Management WordPress
Guru Learning Management WordPress theme is a basis for a truly result-oriented online courses platform. It gives you a possibility to make use of the most popular web features. Start easily with the Visual Page Builder, use drag & drop, add the desired widgets and choose among the variety of offered UI elements. It is easy yet powerful at the same time.
Guru supports Sensei plugin, events calendar, login & registration form, various tests and quizzes, blogs and portfolios, analytical sections, etc. The advanced possibilities for visual representation are endless. Choose between fullwidth version or boxed with patterns, integrate with the Retina ready theme – with Guru you will nail it for sure!
23. Education Pack
The name of this theme speaks for itself – Education Pack. Yes, it has it all. The ready-to-use designs are sorted based on the types of educational institutions and the specific needs of your business. Pretty useful, right? A number of attractive demos are ready to be checked out within seconds.
With Education Pack WordPress theme, you can customize the webpage the way YOU want it. Interested in adding a comparison feature? Here it is. Need a bookmark list? You are welcome to add it. Want to make it social? Your users can follow their favorite teachers and share the course with others on social media platforms.
With this theme, you can create an online courses platform in no time. You can make real-time changes with no knowledge of code, switch between multiple languages, manage customer reviews via dashboard, etc. Take advantage of all the offered features be ready to rock and roll. And don’t hesitate to meet their support team if need be, they say it’s awesome!
24. Academist – Education & Learning Management System Theme
Do you need a website with online courses with a true academic spirit? Something that represents your professionalism and reputation in the world of education? If yes, then the Academist WordPress theme is the choice for you.
Academist helps you highlight the status of your business as a modern and respected platform that provides only the best online courses. All the necessary features are at your service: course-specific layouts, useful forums, bulletin boards, personal user profile, etc. And it is 100% compatible with the events calendar and WooCommerce plugins. No code knowledge needed – just concentrate on the things that actually matter. In several clicks, you will create a perfect home page and intuitive inner pages. And remember: the secret to genius is not complexity, it’s simplicity. If you’re on the same page with us on that, then be sure to check this online courses theme out!
25. Edubin – Education WordPress Theme
Eye-catching, flexible, professional – these are the words that describe what you get with Edubin WordPress theme. Turn your imagination on and start creating the online courses website of your dreams. With a complete set of various functionalities, you can easily create a website with no coding experience. Use Google fonts, unlimited color options, multiple header styles and sticky headers to become the true designer of your website. Complete it with trending features like Zoom connectors, WooCommerce support, payment gateway, event listing, translation options, and you will easily blow your competitors out of the water!
With Edubin WordPress theme, your online courses platform will be bold and stylish. It’s just as good as it gets, so we gladly recommend this theme to everyone.
Which is the best wordpress theme for online courses?
To single out the best wordpress theme for online courses is quite a difficult task, as it depends on what type of niche you are going for. For example you are only providing online courses for elementary or high school or college then the wordpress theme in consideration of each niche will differ, due to the specific nature of each market segment.
It also depends on the type of offerings you will provide in addition to online courses such as offline course materials add ons or offline face to face meetings. Such needs will further define the needs of your wordpress theme in helping you to achieve success in your online courses business. Once you understand what needs are imperative and what are good to haves you will be able to arrive at an informed decision.
If you are having a hard time, we recommend zooming into these 3 wordpress themes to start your online courses business: Education, LMS and Tutor.
We hope this post has been useful at least to help you curate and shortlist the top 1 to 3 best themes to consider for your online courses business. You might also be interested in the creative multi purpose wordpress themes and the best educational LMS wordpress themes.
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