Matt Mullenweg announced during WordCamp SF 2014 that 23% of the world’s sites are run using WordPress. Every year this number is growing larger and larger, as is the variety of sites being created with WordPress.
One of the fields in which the use of WordPress is growing is educational systems. Be it a kindergarten, primary school or even a top university, many educational institutions have turned to the power of WordPress.
There are many reasons for this, one of the main ones being the inexpensive nature of creating a site with WordPress rather than having it custom-built. Most of the smaller schools and colleges cannot afford to pay for a fully customized website, especially when you consider that it will only be used by a small amount of people.
But it’s not just small schools that use WordPress. Some of the largest universities in the US and beyond have started using WordPress to power various sites and blogs due to it’s ease of use and extensive flexibility.
Here are some of the best WordPress themes I found for education.
WordPress Themes for Education
HappyChild
HappyChild is an outstanding WordPress theme created with a responsive layout based on the Bootstrap 3.1 grid standards. It’s got 8 premium plugins incorporated into the theme including Layer Slider 5, Slider Revolution and Visual Composer.
You get extensive style options as well as trendy animations for each module and over 630 Google Fonts. The parallax effect background is also built into the theme, as are video and image backgrounds and WooCommerce integration.
Suitable for: Childcare Centre, Kindergarten, Preschool
Price: $58
Get HappyChild
Kindergarten
Kindergarten is a clean, modern and multi-purpose theme aimed mostly at kindergartens and preschools. It also includes plugins right in the theme saving you $88 on the Royal Slider, Revolution Slider, PO Composer as well as Visual Composer.
It’s optimized for mobile devices with various menu options, parallax and video background, various blog styles and much more, while also being multilingual and SEO ready.
Suitable for: Kindergarten, Preschool
Price: $58
Get Kindergarten
Magicreche
Magicreche is a responsive and retina display ready WordPress theme created specifically for a creche or preschool. It incorporates unlimited Google Fonts, Google Maps, multiple contact forms and much more.
It’s also translation ready and offers various theme interface options, Font Awesome icons, staff sliders and even a timetable responsive schedule.
Suitable for: Creche, Preschool, Primary School
Price: $43
Get Magicreche
Carry Hill School
Carry Hill is a beautifully designed WordPress theme for childcare centres or children’s schools. It comes ready with a Drag and Drop page builder for easy page designs together with a powerful premium slider & a Font Awesome icon set.
It’s theme options panel is powerful but easy to use. You’re given an unlimited colour palette, over 500 Google Fonts as well as 9 pre-set colour schemes to ensure you can customise the site just the way you want it.
Suitable for: Childcare Centre, Preschool, Primary School
Price: $48
Schoolfun
A WordPress theme for any kind of school or university, Schoolfun comes with many features including a sticky header that shrinks and follows the browser’s movement, 3 colour variations, and even widgets for Twitter, Flickr, News and a lot more.
This theme offers various easy-to-use theme options such as changing the logo, social networks and Google Analytics integration while always being responsive and retina display ready, and even localisation ready.
Suitable for: School, University
Price: $49
Get Schoolfun
Buntington
Buntington is an ideal theme for a school, college or university. It was built with Bootstrap and Vafpress, giving you control over customising theme options, metaboxes and shortcodes at any time.
It’s got a Visual Home Pages builder, reusable shortcode content called Content Chunks, a Courses section, Upcoming Events section, galleries, and a lot more. It also incorporates Google Maps and Google Web Fonts among others.
Suitable for: School, College, University
Price: $48
EDU
EDU is a great theme built for various schools, colleges and universities that is very easy to customise using a Drag and Drop page builder, shortcodes, custom widgets, font selectors and more.
It’s built with Themeforest’s SmoothThemes Framework and st Toolkit plugin to ensure all these options give you a code-free customisation process that any beginner can handle.
Suitable for: School, College, University
Price: $58
Get EDU
University
University from Creative Market is a professionally designed WP theme with BuddyPress support. Once again it can be used for various educational institutions and uses a completely responsive layout for use on any device.
It’s got many features on offer including mobile optimised menus, advanced typography, 6 page templates, 7 built-in widgets and even a beautiful theme options panel. University is also multilingual ready and supports social networks with Social API.
Suitable for: School, College, University
Price: $49
Get University
Statfort
Statfort is a WordPress theme designed for colleges and universities to easily modify and showcase their educational institution in a professional manner. It comes with 10 pre-made colour variations and can also be customised to your own colour scheme using the theme options.
It includes an advanced page builder, classes management, Font Awesome icons, unlimited slider, and is also WooCommerce, translation and WPML ready.
Suitable for: College, University
Price: $58
Get Statfort
University – Education, Event & Course Theme
University from Themeforest is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that can work great for colleges or universities. It’s got a user-friendly and responsive design that focuses on education.
It includes the Visual Composer page builder and Revolution Slider plugins, and is also translation and WooCommerce ready among many other features.
Suitable for: College, University
Price: $58
Get University – Education, Event & Course Theme
Conclusion
So as you can see there’s quite a variety of education-related themes for any level. As I mentioned earlier these WordPress themes are being used by many schools and other educational institutions, some of which include:
- Harvard Law School – USA
- Georgia State University – USA
- Eastern Institute of Technology – New Zealand
- University of Berlin – Germany
- and many more…
This list alone is proof of the popularity of WordPress as a site-building tool for academia. It’s easy to get started, intuitive to maintain and much cheaper than a completely custom build.
Have you found any other great themes for educational institutions like these? Which are they?
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