22 Best WordPress Themes for Universities

Finding the best WordPress theme for your university or college website is super important.

Many themes work well for online businesses, but they might not meet the needs of an educational institution. For a university website, you will need a theme that looks professional and reflects the personality of your college.

At WPBeginner, we’ve helped many small business owners and educators find the perfect theme for their websites.

In this article, we’ll share some top WordPress themes specifically designed for universities and colleges.

Building a University or College Website With WordPress

Many top universities and colleges across the world use WordPress. It is easy to set up and can be customized for educational websites.

There are two kinds of WordPress websites. WordPress.com, a hosting solution, and WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress. To learn more, see our full comparison between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.

For a university website, you will need to use self-hosted WordPress.org. It’s highly flexible and easy to use. You get all the core features for free, including the ability to use add-ons (plugins) to extend your site’s functionality.

Before you start, you will also need a domain name. This is your website’s address on the internet, like wpbeginner.com.

You will also need web hosting that’s suitable for running a WordPress site. Your web host stores your site contents securely. It makes your site available worldwide, 24/7, to all the people who want to visit it.

We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a huge discount on web hosting.

After signing up for a hosting account, you can go ahead and install WordPress. Follow our step-by-step guide on how to make a website, and you will be ready to launch in no time.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress themes to use for a university or college website.

1. Divi

Divi is a stylish WordPress multipurpose theme. It comes with a built-in page builder that lets you customize your website visually without editing any code.

With their ready-made template for universities and colleges, you can quickly launch your website and offer online courses to students. It also integrates with popular WordPress plugins to add more features to your site, such as a bbPress forum.

The Divi builder is user-friendly and makes it simple to add elements to your site, like a contact form. The admin panel for the theme allows you to upload a custom header and logo and easily add social media icons.

2. SeedProd

SeedProd is a popular WordPress theme and landing page builder. It comes with ready-made layouts for coming soon pages, maintenance mode pages, user login pages, and more.

It may not be your regular WordPress theme, but SeedProd has everything you need to make a university website. You can use the built-in theme templates to get a head start and then make changes using the drag-and-drop builder.

SeedProd also integrates with MemberPress and other powerful plugins to add membership features to your university site. You can offer your students online courses, certifications, and awards.

3. Neve

Neve is a fantastic WordPress responsive theme that looks great on the front end. It offers dozens of starter sites, including a classic template for universities, colleges, and online tutors.

It supports WordPress page builders like Elementor Pro for easy customization. Other notable features include custom widgets, color schemes, and RTL language support.

Neve uses responsive design. This means your site will look great to students and parents browsing on mobile devices, as well as to those using computers.

4. Ultra

Ultra is a powerful WordPress all-purpose theme. It ships with multiple ready-made websites you can install in a single click. Each design can be easily customized using its theme options panel.

It includes all the features you’d expect from a premium WordPress theme, like an image slider, pricing tables, a progress bar, animated counters, and more. It’s WooCommerce-ready and packed with countless combinations of different layout options, header styles, colors, and design choices.

5. OceanWP

OceanWP is a beautiful and responsive WordPress theme well-suited for your college or university website or an education center. It comes with free and premium demo sites that you can import in 1 click to launch your website quickly.

The theme has a fast page load time that attracts more visitors to your site. It’s translation-ready and supports RTL languages out of the box.

6. Hestia Pro

Hestia Pro is a stunning WordPress one-page theme suitable for educational institutes. It’s highly flexible and easy to set up using your favorite drag-and-drop page builders like Beaver Builder.

Inside, you will find a few website templates, blog page layouts, custom landing pages, and more. It integrates with WooCommerce and WooCommerce plugins to sell courses online.

7. Authority Pro

Authority Pro is a powerful theme for teachers, lecturers, and personal coaches. It’s strong and secure and a great option for building your site.

Authority Pro lets you create online courses using LearnDash, MemberPress, Easy Digital Downloads, and more. The theme also supports video content to add lectures and to train online.

StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.

Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!

8. Academica Pro

Academica Pro is one of the best education WordPress themes. It features a widgetized 3-column homepage layout with event calendar integration.

There are multiple header styles, with four layout choices for your posts and pages. It also includes colors for text widgets, custom logo upload, and unlimited color choices. It’s WooCommerce-ready, so you can add an online store to your college website.

9. Astra

Astra is a modern WordPress theme built for any type of website. It comes with hundreds of demo sites, including a few templates for colleges, universities, and educational institutions.

It has a fullscreen custom header image, centered layout, homepage sections, and more. Astra is compatible with all popular WordPress plugins. These include WordPress user registration plugins to let students sign up on your website.

10. Stockholm University

Stockholm University is a WordPress theme designed specifically for education and university websites. Its homepage contains a large slider on top with your call-to-action button. It displays your recent news, courses, and student testimonials in a grid layout.

It’s quite easy to set up with a custom theme options panel and a drag and drop page builder. You can also use a plugin like LearnPress to create courses for online learning on your site.

11. Presence

Presence is a gorgeous WordPress multipurpose theme designed for businesses, non-profits, universities, and training centers. It includes ready-made demo sites, including one for a university or college.

It has pre-defined color schemes, slider styles, blog layouts, and full-width and boxed layouts. You can fully edit your website using the WordPress live customizer.

12. Museo Pro

Museo Pro is a classic WordPress theme for schools, colleges, and universities. It makes a great educational WordPress theme with an attractive website header and multiple page templates.

It comes with unlimited color schemes and flexible customization options. You can also use a page builder like Visual Composer to make changes to your website.

13. Capital

Capital is an elegant WordPress theme designed specifically for education, corporate, and non-profit websites. It has a widgetized homepage for quick and easy setup.

Other notable features include an event calendar, homepage builder, full-width slideshow, eCommerce integrations, and so on. It’s compatible with WPML to create a multilingual website.

14. Monochrome

Monochrome is an excellent WordPress theme that features a spacious, minimalist design that will work for any kind of website you want to build.

It’s eCommerce ready, making it a great option for e-learning and online education. Monochrome has a fully widgetized homepage, custom widgets, and dedicated widget areas. Other features include customizable headers with custom logo support, landing pages, pricing pages, and more.

15. Nayma

Nayma is a good-looking WordPress multipurpose theme suitable for all kinds of websites. It comes with ready-made website designs, and each one is easy to customize using a drag-and-drop builder, such as Visual Customizer.

It includes modules for photo galleries, sliders, carousels, testimonials, calls-to-action, and more.

16. Course Maker Pro

Course Maker is a perfect WordPress theme for academic and educational institutions, including universities. It lets you professionally display information about your elementary school, college, or university on the homepage.

The theme supports third-party learning management systems like LifterLMS to create and sell online courses. It has built-in speed and performance optimization for fast-loading pages.

17. Education Hub

Education Hub is a free WordPress theme designed specifically for colleges and universities. It features a clean, modern layout with a slider on the homepage.

It is easy to set up using the live theme customizer. It supports custom backgrounds, headers, multiple sidebars, a separate blog page template, and more.

18. Sydney Pro

Sydney Pro is a great choice of WordPress theme if you want to build a content-rich website for your university or college. It features multiple sections on the homepage to add your courses, projects, class schedules, and more.

It comes with custom widgets for content discovery features that keep users engaged and increase your page views. The homepage is available in multiple styles and can also be set up with widgets easily.

Sydney Pro is also designed for good WordPress SEO (search engine optimization) to help your site rank highly in Google and other search engines.

19. University Hub

University Hub is a free WordPress theme built for high schools, colleges, and universities. It has an elegant layout design with beautiful color choices for a header, icons, buttons, and text.

It features a full-width template, content slider, custom background, footer widgets, left sidebar, and more. It’s easy to set up using the WordPress customizer with live preview.

You can easily add plugins to University Hub, including ones that use shortcodes. This lets you extend the theme’s features.

20. Bradbury Pro

Bradbury Pro is a unique WordPress theme for universities and academic institutions. It has two templates for university websites with a 2-column and a 3-column layout, a sidebar navigation menu, and more.

It supports video content to add online courses easily. With built-in color styles and variations, it lets you design a fully customized website in just a few clicks.

21. Education Xpert

Education Xpert is a free and advanced WordPress theme for universities. It comes with a 1-click demo content import to launch your website and replace the content to make it yours.

The theme lets you display your courses, teachers, testimonials, and institution history. It is SEO-friendly, translation-ready, and lets you add a custom header and logo.

22. Infinity Pro

Infinity Pro is a modern WordPress theme for universities. It comes with multiple page templates for default, archives, blog, and landing pages.

It has a custom theme options panel, and it also supports the live theme customizer. The homepage has widget-ready areas that let you drag and drop widgets quickly.

FAQs About the Best WordPress Themes for Universities

If you are still not sure which WordPress theme is best for your university website, here are some frequently asked questions (FAQs) that can help you select a theme.

1. Which WordPress theme is best for educational websites?

Divi, SeedProd, and Neve are some of the best WordPress themes for educational websites. These themes come with custom templates for schools, colleges, universities, and academic institutions. Plus, they are easy to set up using the built-in or third-party drag and drop page builder.

2. What should I look for in an education WordPress theme?

An education WordPress theme should include multiple sections and landing pages to display courses, online course signup forms, membership forms, teacher portfolios, student forums, and more.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress themes for universities and colleges. You may also want to check out our WordPress guides that can improve your educational site.

Best WordPress Guides for University Sites

• Best WordPress LMS Plugins Compared (Pros and Cons)
• How Much Does it Cost to Start a Membership Site?
• Must Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
• How to Start a WordPress Blog (Beginner’s Guide)
• Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses
• Best Business Phone Services for Small Businesses

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