The best websites rely not only on engaging content but on impressive design and a smooth user experience to excite visitors and convert leads into customers. That’s why you should consider using a parallax theme for your website – there is something particularly jaw-dropping about browsing a site that features parallax scrolling.
In case you’re nodding your head but aren’t quite sure what parallax is: it’s a technique in web design where background images move down the screen more slowly than foreground images, which creates a sensation of depth and adds to your user’s immersion and heightens their browsing experience.
Below are 20+ highly-rated and incredibly beautiful WordPress parallax themes; all of them fully responsive, featuring premium or custom-created plugin integration, and hundreds of fonts and icons. These WordPress themes are all created by authors with excellent customer service, so you don’t have to worry about going it alone when you set up your website.
1. Sydney
Using a parallax effect can help you project a sophisticated image. However, you’ll also want to design a site that aligns with your branding. That’s where Sydney comes in.
Sydney is a freemium theme that’s packed with customization options. To get going, you can choose a starter site in your desired category (business, portfolio, eCommerce, etc). Then, select a header and footer preset, choose a color palette, and customize the typography. Plus, with Sydney, you can add a parallax background effect to any row in your theme layout.
When you upgrade to Sydney Pro, you’ll gain more freedom over your site’s design. For example, you’ll get additional slider options for your header. You’ll also have access to a large selection of Elementor widgets, including animated headings, image hotspots, and pricing tables.
If you want a theme that offers a lot more than just parallax effects, look no further than Sydney!
2. Divi
There’s no point in having gorgeous parallax effects, without the means to add the ‘wow’ factor to the rest of your site. Divi (our review) is a sumptuous, powerful, and easy-to-edit multipurpose theme, with a number of parallax-specific options.
Divi packs a lot in under the hood and it presents a smorgasbord of ways to create a sleek, responsive, image-focused website. The built-in Divi Builder represents a stellar way to create layouts using a drag-and-drop interface. The intuitive theme options panel makes the process of configuring your site’s elements an effortless process.
There is also a variety of demos, catering to niches such as interior design, cafes and restaurants, photography, and more! Of course, you can also choose one of the gorgeous parallax demos and there’s the option to further enhance your parallax effect by adding a video backdrop.
You get more than your money’s worth with Divi. It scores top marks for support and security (in addition to style and functionality), and it certainly should be a part of your shortlist.
3. Stockholm
If you only have time to learn how to use one theme, it needs to handle almost any niche or design vision you throw at it. Enter Stockholm!
Much like the city it’s named after, Stockholm showcases a classic, timeless style. The theme includes over 140 ready-to-go demos, including architecture firm sites, photography portfolios, and everything in between. Every design uses negative space beautifully which makes them all look effortlessly elegant.
With a theme that offers so many options, you need an intuitive way to customize your pages. Stockholm comes with the WPBakery Page Builder plugin bundled in, along with eight other premium tools to make your life easier. The key takeaway here is that editing your layouts will be a snap thanks to WPBakery’s drag-and-drop functionality.
Stockholm is one of the very few themes that comes close to delivering its promise of being multi-concept.
4. Rhye
Parallax themes can be used to build a wide variety of websites. If you’re specifically looking to design a portfolio site with a parallax effect, you might want to consider Rhye.
This Ajax portfolio theme is relatively new and has excellent ratings. Powered by the Elementor page builder, it comes with over 45 pre-built pages, a customizable image cursor, fluid spacing presets, and up to 10 color presets. It also includes dark and light themes, animation adjustments, and compatibility with the Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics.
Rhye lets you choose from multiple, smooth AJAX page transitions and modern WebGL effects to help ensure that your site stands out. Thanks to features such as image lazy loading and a customizable preloader, it’s also optimized for speed and performance.
If you’re looking for a simple yet stunning parallax theme for a portfolio or photography site, Rhye is definitely worth considering.
5. Corpus
Corpus is a clean, lightweight theme that pairs a sleek user interface with cutting-edge design – the perfect choice for your corporate website. There are close to 300 theme options for you to play with when building your website with Corpus, which makes for a highly customizable experience that prioritizes your users in all sorts of beautiful ways.
Minor details receive a lot of attention in this theme, starting with the header at the top. The anchor menu stays invisible when you are at the very top of the page but thanks to beautiful layer animation, it slides into place once you start scrolling down, with different tabs slotting in from the side as you move downwards.
Hidden side navigation rids the theme of an unsightly side-scrolling bar. Multiple hover effects perfectly accentuate your image gallery, project portfolio, or blog post entries. Full-width background sections make for a visually arresting and compelling browsing experience. And of course, smooth parallax scrolling gives your website a slick and glossy design effect that will speak volumes about your company’s stature.
6. Brooklyn
If you want to set yourself apart, you need a theme that not only bleeds style but tells visitors you have a project worth reckoning in. Brooklyn may be just the theme you need.
In the box, you’ll find 50+ fully built website demos Just like Brooklyn itself, all of the styles scream urban life. The default combination of dark colors with bright yellow accents is fantastic and makes your site almost ‘pop’ out of the screen. As for functionality, Brooklyn comes bundled with the WPBakery Page Builder plugin. This enables you to customize every aspect of your website using over 60 different modules. The parallax module looks amazing when combined with the right images.
If you’re looking for a modern, highly customizable theme, Brooklyn might just be the perfect choice.
7. Parallax
Parallax is a stunning single-page theme with a beautiful design, lovely animations, and a whole lot of features.
The theme comes with an elegant scrolling effect, multiple custom post types, a custom header for each page you create, and more. Layouts are easy to customize with the custom columns shortcode. You can also create dividers, quotes, Google Maps, sliders, boxes, and buttons with the shortcodes. An infinite scroll option allows you to load an infinite number of posts in your blog feed. Parallax features an expandable portfolio, and you can even showcase multiple images per portfolio item.
Themify’s drag-and-drop builder makes building your home page a breeze with Parallax. Six custom widgets are available to display your Twitter feed, Flickr photo stream, featured posts, and recent comments and to list your pages and categories. Plus, over 600 Google Fonts and custom social icons are integrated with the theme.
8. Ronneby
Ronneby is a powerful, bold theme that is equally impressive as a portfolio as it is as an eCommerce or business website.
The bundled WPBakery Page Builder and Revolution Slider plugins make constructing beautiful, streamlined web pages easy. Thanks to over 40 demo websites and an in-depth admin panel, building and customizing your website is a breeze. Extended parallax scrolling effects and special features such as a one-page design and a multitude of thematic layouts make Ronneby suitable for a variety of different purposes.
42 different portfolio templates and 13 blog page templates give you a deeply customizable display medium. Using the custom-made side-by-side scrolling layout feature, you can add a sharp and trendy aesthetic to your site. There are also 23 different hover variants for you to take advantage of when you set up the theme, and 48 custom widgets let your users browse your site as conveniently as possible.
If you want your website to make a strong statement about the power of your work, then Ronneby is an ideal choice.
9. Royal
Royal – a flexible one-page parallax theme – presents a great way to achieve easy navigability with a modern style.
Royal is bundled with the WPBakery Page Builder plugin, enabling you to drag and drop modules, headings, and other elements to create your layout with ease. The theme also comes complete with pre-built templates for creating standout portfolios, masonry grid blog pages, sidebar-focused pages, and more. Of course, all of these can be complemented with a retina-ready parallax backdrop effect, which will look flashy on any smaller device.
What’s more, Royal gives you the option to add background videos with an optional parallax effect. This is a major perk that distinguishes Royal from myriad other parallax themes. The process of adding a video effect is easy, and Royal also includes child theme support – preserving any tweaks you make once the theme is updated.
If you want to create a polished-looking one-page site quickly, Royal is certainly an option to consider.
10. North
North is a one-page parallax WordPress theme that’s suitable for a wide range of projects.
To add the slideshows to the North templates, this theme comes with the powerful Slider Revolution and LayerSlider plugins. Thanks to this, you can create eye-catching slideshow presentations for the homepage and other parts of your website using these premium tools. You can also edit any of the demo sliders that come with this theme too. If you want to display images as part of your portfolio, publish an informative slideshow presentation, or use sliders in any other way, the North theme has all the relevant tools you’ll need.
Thanks to the integrated page builder plugin, all of the North templates can be edited through a drag-and-drop user interface. Other changes to your website can be made through the North theme options panel, giving you the ability to launch a tailor-made website.
North is a particularly good choice for creating websites for agencies and studios that want to incorporate parallax scrolling.
11. Newave
Newave is another parallax WordPress theme that uses the popular one-page layout.
As the six Newave demos all have creative homepage layouts that contain lots of useful features, you can use elements such as the skills graphs, team member profiles, and client logos to provide the information that’s needed to make a good first impression on your visitors.
If you do need to add any more elements to the Newave templates, such as pricing tables, video players, or sliders, you can use the integrated premium page builder plugin to do so. This tool comes with its own library of elements and templates, giving you lots of customization options.
Newave also has some useful widgets and elements that you can add to the sidebar and footer areas of your site. Other features such as the library of portfolio templates make it easy to display your work while the blog templates can help you publish attractive news stories on your site.
If you need a versatile theme that can be used to create many types of websites, Newave is worth considering.
12. Skrollex
Skrollex is a modern parallax WordPress theme with an eye-catching look.
The main pre-built website demo of Skrollex can be adjusted to suit a range of styles, simply by switching between the large set of pre-defined color schemes. As Skrollex is a highly configurable parallax WordPress theme, you can customize nearly all of its aspects. Thanks to the integrated powerful page builder tool, you can edit any of the Skrollex templates with ease or design your own custom layouts from scratch.
While the parallax backgrounds of Skrollex look great, you don’t have to use them on every page of your website. With this theme, you also get the option of using video backgrounds on your website. Other reasons to consider the Skrollex theme include the optional animation effects that you can use throughout your website, the Font Awesome and Linecons icon integrations to help you decorate your content, and the multilingual plugin and RTL text support for publishing your articles in more than one language.
If you’d like your website to create a lasting impression on your visitors, Skrollex, its effects, and other features can help.
13. Bridge
Bridge is a multipurpose theme that offers an especially dynamic platform for creative businesses and individuals to thrive on.
This theme comes loaded with over 600 demos, so there are plenty of options for you to get started without having to build up an entire website from scratch. If you want to create something truly unique, the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin comes packaged. A superlative list of features includes parallax scrolling for a heightened visual experience, a sticky header with a logo that shrinks down once you navigate past the top of the screen, blog layouts that range from classical to masonry, and online shopping cart and course integration.
One of the notable features of this theme is the custom-designed slider, with fade in/out elements animations and slide/fade transitions which can be specified for each graphic, display text, and overlay pattern.
Because Bridge features such a massive number of creative possibilities and downloadable content, it’s a great choice for you no matter what your website is for.
14. Uncode
For creatives who want an impressive online presence or a beautiful portfolio, you need a standout theme. Uncode can help you, no matter the niche you’re targeting.
It comes bundled with an enhanced version of the drag-and-drop WPBakery Page Builder plugin which will let you create your website without the need for coding. In addition, you get access to advanced customization options, such as over 70 demos and the ability to import additional templates. You can also add slick visual effects to your pages, thanks to bundled premium plugins such as Layer Slider, Slider Revolution, and more.
Uncode features smart adaptive image functionality, which means your graphics and images will look amazing on mobile devices.
If you love the modern look and feel of parallax, you can’t go wrong with Uncode. It’s a stylish theme that will surely make your business stand out from the crowd.
15. KALLYAS
An online store requires a robust, modern theme to help bring your products to the next level. If this rings true for you, Kallyas should be your next stop.
The integrated drag-and-drop Zion Builder gives you a great page-building experience without touching a line of code. You also get access to over 70 designer templates, over 100 customizable elements, fonts integration, and more. You can add stunning parallax effects to practically any element, and with the Advanced Toolbox, you’ll be able to control almost all aspects of your site.
Kallyas also boasts advanced integration with the free WooCommerce plugin and includes three store landing pages, making it ideal for any online shop. You can also press other premium bundled plugins into service, such as Slider Revolution.
Overall, Kallyas is a near-perfect eCommerce theme. If you want to invest in a truly premium experience and bring your online store to the next level, this is a theme you should consider.
16. 907
907 is an interesting parallax theme with lots of options.
This multipurpose creative theme comes with 25+ demos that make it easy to get your website up and running. As 907 is compatible with both Elementor and WPBakery page builders, you’ll have no trouble editing the pre-built templates or designing your own. In fact, WPBakery is bundled with the theme and you’ll also get over 130 theme blocks to make page building a breeze.
907 supports both parallax and video backgrounds, with the option to enable color overlays. For even more options to display your media, you can use the bundled Revolution Slider to create nifty slideshows. The theme also offers lots of portfolio features to showcase your best work.