Top 5 WordPress Material Design Themes
Google’s material design trend has been swiftly growing because of its strikingly polished and professional look.
In our post, we will discuss in detail on how to use it on the WordPress platform.
What is Material Design?
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, ‘Material Design is an Android-oriented design language created by Google, supporting onscreen touch experiences via cue-rich features and natural motions that mimic real-world objects. Designers optimize users’ experience with 3D effects, realistic lighting and animation features in immersive, platform-consistent graphical user interfaces (GUI).”
Here is a video from Google which gives you a more detailed view of what material design is.
Material design, a design concept based on how real materials respond to human touch was inspired by the paper and ink study. The design uses grid-based layouts, responsive animations and transitions, padding, and depth effects (lighting and shadows). Touch response is inspired by how ink spreads on paper. The responsive animations and transitions are amazing. Overall, Google has done a great job by uniting material response with motion.
Know more about material design
- Google’s Material Design guidelines and library – https://material.io/design/
- Useful list of resources for both designers and developers – https://cssauthor.com/material-design-resources/
Building a Website With Material Kit Pro
Material Kit Pro is a Bootstrap UI Kit which is inspired by Google’s Material Design. It is completely built on top of Bootstrap 3 and safe to use in your existing or new Bootstrap project.
Material Kit Pro has many individual components that are flat, minimalistic and easy to use. This means that you get the freedom of choosing and combining from many possible combinations. The components have many color variations and can be modified using SASS files. Also, to get the desired effects, you have to integrate JS plugins.
The UI kit has a free version that can be downloaded and used to build a simple HTML website. With the free version, you get only 60 components, 2 plugins and 3 example pages. The paid version costs $79 and has advanced features like 1000 components, 5+ plugins, SASS files, Photoshop files, 11 example files and more.
Also, please note that it is hard to implement Material Kit Pro in WordPress. So the best way to get material design for WordPress websites is via themes.
Material Design and WordPress
Google’s material design is ultra-modern as it utilizes bold colors, clean lines, stunning typography, and modern animations. In short it’s everything you’d look for in a modern and stylish website.
If you want a WordPress website with material design implemented, check out the following material design WordPress themes. They are modern looking and packed with essential functionalities.
5 Leading WordPress Material Design Themes
1. Hestia Pro
Hestia Pro is a material design WordPress theme that is designed specifically for startups that need a modern and stylish website. While the default mode of the theme is set on one page, you can easily choose the elements you wish to display on the homepage or any other page. You can see several sites that are using Hestia Pro from their home page under the heading “Unique Sites Built with Hestia PRO”.
The theme has intuitive theme customization options through which you can easily fine-tune the one-page website. Hestia Pro has many convenient features like professional portfolio showcases, elegant testimonials, attractive pricing plans and more. Also, the theme features a cross-compatible modular Bootstrap design and deploys Google’s own material design protocol.
Features
- Translation and RTL ready
- SEO friendly
- Live Customizer
- Optimized for speed
- Responsive design
- WooCommerce ready
- Well documented and good customer support
2.Materialize
Materialize is one of the most flexible Material Design WordPress themes which is suitable for most types of businesses. This minimalistic and classy theme has over 150 shortcodes and content blocks that allow easy customization. It has 36 custom and 45+ visual composer elements, 11 header styles, and 4 footer style options.
The theme comes with many pre-built blog layouts, portfolio layouts, and accordion styles. It includes Visual Composer page builder, Slider Revolution and is fully compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. Furthermore, it also comes with the TT Plugin and TT Elements add-ons which further enhance the capability of Visual Composer.
Features
- Fully responsive and retina ready
- Google material based design
- Cross-browser compatibility
- Includes Revolution Slider
- Includes the Visual Composer Pagebuilder
- Parallax and video backgrounds
- Extensive documentation and good customer support
Theme information
- Number of sales – 456
- Last updated on 23rd December 2018
- Average ratings – 4.33 out of 12 reviews
- Price – $55
- Extend support to 12 months – $16.13
- Live preview
3.Zephyr
Zephyr is a theme that is popular for its clean and robust features. Using this WordPress material design theme, you can create any kind of layout for any business.
This theme has smooth animations and visual and hover effects as it uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 code integrations. It has a complete drag-and-drop page builder, an exclusive header builder, unlimited colors, portfolio gallery layouts, and more. With Zephyr’s one-click installation and demo importing system, you can have your website up and running in no time.
Above all, through its test drive option, you can migrate your entire website, test compatibility of any third-party plugins, and see what layouts can be built.
Features
- Retina-ready and fully responsive
- Optimized for SEO
- 5 portfolio grid styles and 6 unique blog layouts
- Advanced typography options
- Customizable Google maps
- Parallax background effects
- Includes Slider Revolution plugin
- Extensive documentation and good customer support
Theme information
- Number of sales – 9,395
- Last updated on 21st August 2019
- Average ratings – 4.88 out of 472 reviews
- Price – $49
- Extend support to 12 months – $13.88
- Live preview
4.All Business
All Business is a WordPress material design theme that is suitable for large corporations as well as SME’s. The theme is built with the best material design practices. It has amazing features such as multiple theme colours, the ability to switch between full-width and boxed layouts and header configuration. You have the option to create a one-page or a multi-page website.
The portfolio style is completely responsive with masonry puzzle and grid layouts along with lots of customization options. You can make your content really stand out through this theme’s awesome animation features. Also, the drag-and-drop editor allows you to easily rearrange the content on your pages.
Features
- Fully responsive and retina ready
- Translation and WPML ready
- Compatible with most of the popular WordPress plugins
- Includes Layer Slider, Revolution Slider and many custom cms masters plugins for free
- Compatible with Events Calendar Pro plugin
- 99+ custom shortcodes
- Well-documented and good customer support
- Includes WooCommerce store integration
- Optimized for SEO
Theme information
- Number of sales – 352
- Last updated on 23rd April 2019
- Average ratings – 4.64 out of 11 reviews
- Price $59
- Extend support to 12 months – $17.63
- Live preview
5.Benchmark
Benchmark is an excellent theme for creating lead pages, landing page templates, and single page applications (SPA’s). It is easy to use for beginners and at the same time flexible enough for developers. The theme has built-in support for plugins like Contact Form 7, Woocommerce, the SiteOrigin page builder and more.
It comes with 8+ prebuilt homepage layouts, 12+ color schemes, 30+ shortcodes with inline documentation, easily manageable mega menus, drag and drop page builder and an intuitive theme panel.
You get free updates from time-to-time to make it compatible with the latest updates and standards. They also add new features as per customer feedback and current trends.
Features
- Responsive design
- Unlimited parallax backgrounds
- Gird, list and classic display styles for blogs
- Optimized for SEO
- Translation ready with sample POT file
- Unlimited Google fonts
- 890+ material design icons and 160+ simple line icons
- Well documented and good customer support
Theme information
- Number of sales – 210
- Last updated on 18th June 2019
- Average ratings – 4.64 out of 11 reviews
- Price – $59
- Extend support to 12 months – $17.63
- Live preview
Conclusion
Material design amplifies aesthetics features and 3D functionalities. You would have already come across such designs while using Google products like Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and more.
If you’re looking to create a beautiful, modern and simple WordPress website with material design, we think Zephyr is the best as it provides premium features like page builders, extensions etc. at an affordable cost.
We hope that with the help of our article you’ll be able to select a material design WordPress theme for your website.
Which is your favorite material design theme on our list? Did we miss any? Please share your answer in the comments section below.