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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Looking to create a community site?
Sites that feature user-generated content are among the most popular sites in the world.
In this post, you’ll find a wide variety of content-sharing themes modeled after a range of sites from Reddit to Youtube to AllRecipes. No matter which kind of user community you’re trying to create, you’ll find an excellent option available here.
Make sure to check out our BuddyPress community themes collection too.
Content sharing WordPress themes
Every theme listed here is up-to-date and highly-rated by its customers. As modern themes, all these themes are totally responsive, which means they look and work great on all screen sizes, from smartphones to widescreen monitors.
Here are my top picks for best content sharing WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Lynk by Javo Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Lynk integrates with both BuddyPress and bbPress for its social features, which means it has some awesome features like private messaging and activity feeds coupled with complete forum functionality. In terms of design, there’s a lot to check out in this community theme’s demos.
Lynk has capabilities that make it great for blogs, news, and even product sales pages. However, at its core, Lynk is best at featuring user-generated content. Community members can publish their own posts and share them throughout the community. It requires more investment from users than a link-sharing site like Reddit, but it doesn’t have the pressure of publishing public-facing content like on a site using Bimber. Instead, Lynk is more like a private social network.
You can use Lynk to create a public social network or a private intranet where all content is created and shared by members. With customizable menus, built-in notifications, live search results, and a customizable front-end submission form, Lynk is a full-featured theme you can depend on for building a content-sharing website.
2. Anesta by AncoraThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you are looking for a pre-designed WordPress theme for an internal or public community website, Anesta might be a perfect choice for you. It’s a feature-rich WordPress theme with a modern and trendy design that looks great on all devices and browsers. It includes a collection of four stunning homepage demos, a wide choice of inner pages, and numerous layout styles to match any content you create.
Beyond front-end customization, Anesta includes valuable tools in the back-end. There are dashboards where you can create and publish events, send notifications, create calendars, and publish news stories. You can also run internal polls and share the results using built-in tools. Lastly, you can create both free and paid online courses, thanks to the full integration with the LearnDash LMS plugin.
3. Divi by Elegant Themes
Theme Description
Divi is a good choice for anyone more concerned with site customization options than community features. Divi will give you a completely flexible platform for creating the site of your dreams. Start by importing one of the 200 available layout packs and tweak the styles as you see fit.
To add content-sharing functionality, you’ll want to add a forum plugin like bbPress or a front-end submission plugin. Divi is compatible with most plugins, so it won’t be hard to allow visitors to submit and publish their own articles or signup to join a forum.
The Divi theme also comes with premium plugins for social share buttons and email signup forms. Overall, it’s a very customizable WordPress theme and a good value for the money.
4. King by Red Kings (Themeforest)
Theme Description
King is designed for social sites where the community uploads all the content. It’s like a cross between Buzzfeed, Reddit, and Youtube. Members can create profiles, publish multimedia content, and follow each other to get notifications.
The King social content sharing theme has a heavy emphasis on the community aspect of the site. There are some great features like private messaging and following. Users can also register and log in with an existing social site account like Facebook or Google Plus and earn points for their engagement on the site. And of course, there are plenty of built-in social sharing buttons to encourage sharing.
King’s design is attractive and is great for showcasing images. Since images tend to get way more engagement and social shares than text-based content, the designers make a good decision. Images, articles, and videos all feel equally at home here. If you want a modern-looking theme to build a social community, King is an excellent option.
5. UpVote by ThemeWarriors (Themeforest)
Theme Description
There are many types of sites that rely on user-shared content. However, the most traditional of these designs is the link-sharing site. UpVote is a link-sharing community site, so it’s perfect for creating a site like Reddit.
If you don’t want users to create posts and instead prefer links only, UpVote is definitely your best option. It has a built-in upvoting system and front-end submission form. Members get their own profile pages where they can review their posts, comments, and the content they’ve voted for. Over time, a user’s voting history becomes like a collection of bookmarks, bringing them back to the site more often.
In addition to the member features, there are lots of customization options. You can choose any colors you’d like to use throughout the theme, customize the typography, and more. This highly-rated theme is a must-have for anyone interested in building a site like Reddit.
6. Uploader by Theme Bazaar (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you want to create a file-sharing site for images like Imgur, Uploader is the theme for you.
This media sharing theme comes with loads of front-end and back-end features for sharing images. You can feature select images on the homepage and allow deep navigation through categories and filters. In addition to images, the Uploader can also be used for articles, videos, and audio.
For users, there is a modern drag-and-drop uploader for publishing media to the site, previews for uploaded images, and instant form validation via AJAX. It’s a fast and seamless process to add new content to the site with the built-in media manager.
As the admin, you’ll want adequate tools for managing all the media added by members. Uploader made the wise choice of not separating user uploads into a separate database table but rather integrating them within the existing media library. This gives you the full power of WordPress’s media management plus a few additional features added by Uploader.
7. Bimber by Bring the Pixels (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Bimber is a viral content theme much like Buzzfeed. It’s great for showing off eye-catching images and irresistible headlines. Also, users can submit their own articles and lists to the site.
Bimber has a sharp, modern design full of color and life. It feels alive and very active at a glance. There are numerous layouts, and many of them are best-suited for a magazine-style website. In fact, that’s how you should think of Bimber – a theme for an online magazine that accepts user submissions.
Bimber has built-in user ranks and a complete point system that awards them for their participation regarding the user-generated content. That also includes loads of pre-designed badges and leaderboards. Anyone can register and create a profile thanks to the BuddyPress integration used to power the social aspects of Bimber.
There are so many fun and amazing features included in Bimber, like front-end submissions, built-in social sharing buttons, multiple types of polls, image editing tools, an ad management system, and more! You’ll have to visit the sales page to scroll through the seemingly endless list of features to find out more. Use this awesome responsive theme to make a site like 9gag or your own Buzzfeed clone.
If you want to create a content-focused site with viral user-generated content, there’s no better option than Bimber.
8. SocialChef by Themeenergy(Themeforest)
Theme Description
Want to create a recipe-sharing site? SocialChef puts a spin on the standard social sharing community site design to create a theme for building a site like AllRecipes.com.
The layout and style of SocialChef are comparable to any recipe site on the web. The design is completely focused on the recipes and their images in particular. Recipe archives display the dishes listed in a grid with a much larger image displayed on the individual recipe pages.
SocialChef lets members add their own recipes and also rate other members’ recipes. This serves as an excellent filtering system as the best dishes rise to the top. Members can also favorite recipes they love and print them out. Thanks to the compatibility with BuddyPress and bbPress, users can create robust profiles with all of their activities in a feed, sort of like Youtube.
The front-end submission form is sufficiently advanced for publishing recipes filled with ingredients and measurements, and users can also add lengthy descriptions or personal stories about the recipe. Another handy feature in SocialChef is the WooCommerce integration which allows you to sell digital and/or physical products right from your site.
9. VideoPro by CactusThemes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you’re looking to create a user-driven video site like Youtube, VideoPro is an amazing theme. I’ve published a full tutorial on creating a site like Youtube with VideoPro, but here’s a quick rundown of the theme.
VideoPro is a slick and dark theme with a modern flair. As you can tell already from the thumbnail, this theme is excellent for featuring video content. It doesn’t distract from the videos with other content anywhere besides injecting some social sharing buttons or promote top channels. And that brings me to my next point…
There are plenty of video WordPress themes out there. However, VideoPro is the one with the most community features. For instance, visitors can create their own channels and even combine videos into new playlists. Members of the site can follow their favorite publishers, like videos, leave comments, and even save videos to a “Watch Later” list. One of the newer features added to the theme is live streaming, so you can even recreate a site like Twitch with VideoPro. With a respectable 4.48/5 rating on Themeforest, VideoPro is a well-made and dependable video community theme.
10. BuddyBoss Theme by BuddyBoss
Theme Description
If you want to create more of a social network, BuddyBoss is probably the best theme for your website. Most social themes rely on the BuddyPress plugin, but since it’s volunteer-based, development is slow, and bugs are left outstanding for years. That’s why the BuddyBoss team rolled out their own solution.
With the BuddyBoss Theme, you’ll also get the BuddyBoss plugin instead of using the BuddyPress plugin. You’ll get way more functionality, you won’t have to manage dozens of plugins from different developers, and you can expect full integration with the BuddyBoss theme.
The design of the theme itself is excellent. It’s modern, beautiful, and fully responsive. With custom colors, branding options, and integration with page builders like Elementor, you get total control over your template design.
Overall, BuddyBoss is an outstanding platform for creating a social content-sharing website.
Which content sharing theme is best for you?
Divi is best if you are more concerned with site customization options than the community features.
Lynk earned a top recommendation because of its wide range of community-focused templates and features.
King is the next best theme and includes just as many community-building tools as Lynk.
When choosing the right theme, remember to consider both the features and design options included. You can sometimes replace missing features with plugins, so customization tools should take priority.
Thanks for browsing this collection of the best content-sharing WordPress themes.
