You won’t have been able to ignore the ongoing popularity of content sharing websites like Reddit, not to mention the rise of the social networking sites we’re all members of today. However, what you might not know is that by using a specially designed content sharing WordPress theme, creating your own website of this type can be remarkably straightforward.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the best content sharing WordPress themes to help you see what’s on offer and ensure you choose the right tool for your project. Features to look out for in these themes include social media linked sign-up forms to simplify the registration process, front-end submission forms for easier content sharing, interactive tools like voting and comments, and of course, flexible and stylish designs to help attract more visitors. You might also want to keep an eye out for features that will help you monetize your website, such as a choice of advert locations and support for paid membership plans.
If you want to create a content sharing website then choosing the right WordPress theme will play a large part in whether your project is a success or not. So, here are our picks of the best themes for the job to help you get your website off to a great start.
1. UpVote
UpVote has been created to help you build your very own Reddit-style, content sharing website.
The clean and modern design of UpVote will ensure that your website not only loads as quickly as possible but also has the right look and feel to entice your visitors to sign-up and start interacting with your content. Through the theme customization options, you can easily modify many aspects of your website. This includes the color choices, layout options, and more.
It’s also very easy for your visitors to sign-up and start adding their content to your site. Thanks to the social login feature, they can instantly sign-up using their existing Facebook or Twitter accounts. Once logged in, as well as submitting stories, they can also vote other user’s content up or down to increase or decrease its visibility. Logged in users can also leave comments for the rest of the community. All of this interaction takes place through front-end submissions forms, rather than having users navigate their way around the WordPress admin dashboard.
To help simplify the content sharing process, UpVote includes a custom-built plugin that will automatically fetch content from any URL that is submitted. This content includes the post title, featured image, and description from the link that’s been shared.
With UpVote, your visitors will have no trouble joining your community and sharing their content with like-minded individuals.
2. BoomBox
BoomBox is a viral magazine-style WordPress theme that’s ideal for publishing sharable content.
With lots of templates to choose from, no matter what type of content you’ll be publishing on your WordPress website, you should be able to present it in the right way with BoomBox. In fact, with 16 complete website demos to choose from, not only will you be able to quickly launch your content sharing site with this theme, but there’s a good chance you’ll find a design that meets your requirements.
The pre-built content in the BoomBox package has all been built to generate shares from your audience. So if you want to launch a website that can grow its audience via social media, as well as more traditional channels, such as search engines, BoomBox is a suitable option. BoomBox has lots of features to help make your content site more interactive. These include a rating tool that uses emojis to allow your visitors to quickly give their feedback on any of your articles. Visitors can vote on your content too, helping the most popular pages to become more visible on your site.
Other interactive features of the BoomBox theme include front-end forms for accepting content submissions from your visitors, the ability to publish polls to get the thoughts of your audience on the latest topics, and a quiz builder for setting up fun games. When it comes to monetization options, BoomBox isn’t lacking there either. There are lots of locations for displaying adverts all-around your site while the ad manager in the dashboard makes it easy to keep track of all of your monetization content in one place.
BoomBox has lots of useful features and a stylish design to help your website become a content-sharing success story.
3. Buzz Stone
Buzz Stone works well for creating all types of content sharing and viral style news sites with WordPress.
Buzz Stone is primarily a WordPress blog theme but it’s clearly been built with a focus on helping your content go viral and get shared online. If you check out one of the many Buzz Stone demos, you’ll quickly see that you get access to lots of different templates for your articles if you choose this theme. Thanks to this, whether you’re publishing videos, short blog posts, long-form articles, or photo galleries, Buzz Stone should have templates for all types of content.
With this theme, your content won’t just look great but it will have lots of features to help it go viral. Some examples of the Buzz Stone features that can help improve engagement on your site include polls that allow your visitors to vote on specific topics, quizzes and surveys that can keep users entertained, and a rating system that allows your audience to leave feedback on your articles. When a visitor sees something on your site they’d like to share with their friends and followers, Buzz Stone includes lots of visible social sharing buttons to help your content go viral.
If you need to make any changes to the Buzz Stone templates, you can easily use the included WPBakery Page Builder plugin, a premium tool that makes it easy to edit the layouts through a drag-and-drop user interface. Customizing the rest of your website is straightforward, too, with Buzz Stone. Simply open up the theme options panel and start making changes to the visual settings of the theme. As Buzz Stone comes with some helpful documentation, whether or not you’re familiar with WordPress, you should be able to create the type of site you want with this theme.
Whether it’s just you or a team producing content for your site, Buzz Stone should be suitable for your project.
4. King
King comes with multiple layouts and templates for your content sharing WordPress website.
In addition to the main content sharing layout in the King theme package, you can also choose from the other options, including an Instagram-style design that’s ideal for image-focused content and a masonry grid mode that displays your content in an interesting layout. There are lots of different templates for the individual pieces of content you’ll be publishing on your site, too, covering text-based articles, images galleries, videos, and more. If you want to keep your content looking fresh by using a range of templates for your posts and pages, King does include a varied selection of layouts.
Whichever homepage style you do choose, you’ll be able to enable lots of great features to help make your content sharing website a success. Some examples of these features include the browser notifications tool that your visitors can choose to turn on in order to get notified when you publish new content on your site, functionality that lets your visitors quickly follow tags and categories on your site to find more of the content they’re interested in, and badges that your users can earn for completing certain actions on your site. If you want to create a community around your content sharing site, then King has many features that can help you with your goals.
Customizing your content sharing site is easy with King. The settings in the dashboard help you define exactly how your site will look, while the ad manager tool gives you a lot of control over how your site is monetized. Through the dashboard, you can enable optional features such as front-end post submissions, social logins, and social sharing buttons.
With a one-click demo importer tool and some help documentation, it won’t take long to launch your content sharing site with King.
5. Pin
Pin could be just the content sharing WordPress theme you are looking for if you want to create a Pinterest-style website.
When using this theme, the design of your website will be similar enough to that of Pinterest to make it immediately clear what its purpose is, while still being different enough to avoid looking like a clone. Much of the features that have helped make Pinterest so popular can be found in the Pin theme.
These features include easy to use front-end registration and content submission forms, user profiles, live search, and a user rating system to make your website even more interactive. The design is fully mobile responsive to cater to smartphone and tablet users, and there are plenty of monetization options to make use of if you want to generate an income from your content sharing website.
The Pin Pinterest-style theme has everything you need to create your own visual content sharing website or social network with WordPress.
6. KICKCUBE
Kickcube is a flexible content sharing WordPress theme with a strong membership component.
Built to work with the best WordPress membership plugins, Kickcube gives you the option of creating a website where your visitors can sign up, become members, and then start sharing content on your site. You don’t have to enable a membership plugin to use this theme, but doing so gives you lots of options regarding how users can access your website and what they can do when logged in, while also giving you another way to monetize your site.
When it comes to creating a content sharing website with Kickcube, you can easily control what types of content can be shared. For example, as this theme has good video support, you could let your audience upload this type of content or embed videos from other sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo.
The theme also comes equipped with frontend submission forms that let your visitors create and upload blog posts to your website. Depending on how you configure your website and this theme, you could get an email notification each time a post is submitted. This then gives you the opportunity to decide whether to publish the article or reject it. Alternatively, you could give your paying members the ability to submit posts through the frontend forms that are automatically published, without the need for approval. You can also make it possible for your users to edit the articles they’ve already published. As mentioned, this is a flexible theme.
As well as the content sharing features of this theme, Kickcube also gives you six website demos to choose from. While the layouts are different, they’ve all been designed to display lots of content on each page. As well as getting a good idea of how your website could look if you choose this theme, you can log in to the demos to see how the functionality of Kickcube works.
Kickcube can be used to create a range of different content sharing websites with WordPress.
7. Foot
Foot is a flexible content sharing WordPress theme that gives you a number of different modes or layouts to choose from.
Whether you want to create a website with a traditional blog layout, one with a masonry grid layout, or use a magazine style interface, the Foot theme could be for you. There’s also a Pinterest-style mode, making Foot a good choice for creating your very own image based social networking site.
Thanks to the Facebook sign-up and login options, your visitors can quickly and easily become registered users and start sharing content on your website. Through the interactive features, they can also vote content up or down and leave comments for other visitors.
The live Ajax-powered search tool makes it easy for your visitors to instantly find what they are looking for, while the custom widgets make sure there’s always another link to click on, no matter where they are on your site. You can even turn on the infinite scroll feature to ensure your visitors never run out of content to view.
Foot has a good selection of different modes to choose from, as well as all the features you’d expect to find in a content sharing theme.
8. Video News
Video News is a magazine style WordPress theme, with a strong user-generated content element.
The design of the Video News theme makes it easy for you to display a large amount of content on your homepage, as well as show plenty of links to the rest of your articles in the areas surrounding your individual articles. If you want to try to ensure your visitors stick around on your site for as long as possible, the Video News theme has lots to offer.
All of the content submissions take place through a set of front-end forms, and depending on how you manage your website, your visitors can submit text, links, video, and other types of content. There is also a good selection of custom widgets to choose from, helping to turn the sidebars of your website into more useful elements. This could include links and even adverts. You can also create as many custom sidebars as you need, configuring them to display alongside specific pieces of content if necessary.
Video News could be a great choice if you are planning to create a busy news or magazine-style content sharing website and would like a theme that has been built specifically for that purpose.
