From high schools to kindergartens, the world of the internet has come crashing into the education field, prompting principals, deans, and alumni teams to create blogs, email newsletters and websites that offer event information and educational materials to students, parents and alumni. After all, what better way to contact people about the next homecoming game or five-year reunion than by writing a blog post about it or sending out an email newsletter?
Why Schools Need A Website
The same goes for advancing education for kids, since the internet allows students to buy merchandise and books online, along with the ability to check grades, view event calendars and even do their homework. It’s the best way to keep them updated with school curriculum, field trips, and upcoming events as well as letting them access additional educational material.
WordPress is a Great Way To Start
How does a school go about creating a website with all of this functionality? It all starts with an education WordPress theme, which is a pre-built template that you can implement on your site to make it look great and function well. Take advantage of various modules that come with these themes such as event widgets, staff widget, online courses and lessons, and much more to make education fun and easily accessible.
Best Education Themes For Modern-Day Schools
Plenty of education WordPress themes are available online, so which are the best ones to choose from? Keep reading to find out for yourself.
Enlighten
Enlighten is the responsive and highly customizable free WordPress education theme. It is ideal for school, college or any educational institution. Being fully Customizer-based, it allows you to set up your website from the Customizer panel with live preview. Enlighten has a homepage slider, Services section, multiple menu options, latest news, a Twitter feed section, and much more – because of which, it is suitable for any business website as well.
Enlighten provides you several features like a Counter section, which is primarily available on premium themes. You can create a very attractive and powerful homepage with a slider, portfolio section, service section, video section, FAQ section, Testimonials section and much more. Besides, building website is extremely easy with Enlighten as you can import demo data using the AP Theme Utility plugin. This way, you can create elegant and unique websites for your educational institution in no-time.
Education Zone Pro
Education Zone Pro is a highly customizable and easy-to-use WordPress theme designed for educational institutions and colleges. To start with, the homepage is well-organized into different useful sections, including a welcome section, featured courses, news & events, testimonials, faculty and more. The top section includes space to prominently feature your email address and phone number, and an advanced slider right below to highlight the best aspects of your school and drive people further into your website.
The events module allows you to promote your upcoming events, while the team section is perfect for presenting members of your faculty. You can easily display student testimonials to boost your credibility, and there’s also a gallery to show off photos of your institution. Better still, there’s a newsletter module for people to easily subscribe to your email newsletter. We also like the included blog that allows you to share updates related to your school and the social media icons that will help increase your online visibility.
Education Center
People are more eager to learn online than go the library nowadays. If you have something interesting to tell the world you should have an Education Center or Training Course of your own. This WP theme is specifically designed for such purposes. Just fill it with your valuable content.
Lincoln
The Lincoln theme is the perfect choice for schools, universities, and eLearning programs. This education theme comes from LunarTheme, the skillful team behind the popular theme Ink. The theme is useful for both eLearning/ecommerce sales and brochure-style educational institution websites and is now compatible with the popular LearnDash learning management system.
Your theme purchase will include several premium plugins like Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, and Advanced Custom Fields. Additionally, the theme is built to allow you to manage course schedules, classes, and enrollment. The theme is fully responsive and compatible with the popular WooCommerce plugin. Lincoln should be at the top of your list if you are on the market for an education or elearning theme.
Invent
The Invent theme is a great place to begin your search, since it’s designed to help colleges and all educational institutions that are inclined to post courses and other learning materials. It provides a clean and modern design that’s also responsive and works great on mobile devices. Eight custom post types are included as well as infinite color schemes which assist with implementing your school’s colors. The parallax and video sections allow you to add visual content and tons of shortcodes help with elements such as buttons and columns, without the need for coding knowledge.
Select from unlimited header styles and even integrate with the WooCommerce plugin, which is wonderful for selling school merchandise or books. Invent has over 500 Google Fonts and 200 setting options, giving you plenty of customization options to create a stunning website. Not only that but over 1500 retina icons provide visual elements for your site. Some of the custom post types include pages for courses, events, news, departments, and faculty.
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Schoolmaster
Consider the Schoolmaster theme if you run a high school that needs an online facelift. It offers a responsive design which looks and works great even on mobile devices. The theme is fully editable through the admin panel. Custom post types help with adding images, quotes, galleries, and videos, while the multilingual nature of the theme makes it easy to translate your website into another language. Over 80 shortcodes allow you to easily add buttons, columns, toggles, and more without touching a single line of code.
The Schoolmaster theme has a two-step installation process, which is ideal for beginners. Multiple color options are available to choose from and filterable portfolio works well for showcasing events or photo galleries. Several custom widgets are available which help you add content blocks like social media buttons and comment modules. Along with fantastic sliders, custom typography, and advanced backups, the Schoolmaster theme is certainly one to look into.
Capital
The Capital WordPress theme is a solid choice for educational institutions as it provides a responsive layout and multipurpose settings for creating a clean and modern online presence. It’s built on the ZOOM Framework, which enables you to customize just about anything you would want and the events integration makes it easy to promote upcoming events. The dynamic homepage area works with widgets which makes it easy to add content to your homepage. Capital offers a visual customizer for changing colors, logo, and fonts, along with a full-width slideshow for showcasing recent news and events.
Menu management is fairly easy, and custom background allows you to add your own style to your website. Translation features are included to translate your website. Along with that, Capital has a one-click install button to help beginners get started and the documentation includes extensive instructions in case you have any problems along the way.
Elearning
The Elearning theme is all about course management because it has various tools and settings to post items like lessons, courses, quizzes, and questions. You can even sell the courses or give them away for free. Elearning integrates well with the bbPress plugin, which is ideal for encouraging user participation through a forum. Additionally, the blog and timeline areas help with improving your SEO and sharing valuable content with your visitors.
If you’d like to sell your courses, the WooCommerce plugin combines with the theme perfectly, and you can even hook up popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe. A notable feature of the theme is the ability to create your own certificates for students who complete certain parts of your courses. The certificate designer has a drag-and-drop interface so you don’t have to spend much time on building them. Finally, you can compile all courses into collections, making it easier to navigate through the site.
Flat University
The Flat University theme is a wise choice for colleges that are looking to improve the student experience with a stunning website. The design is completely responsive so your students can access the content even while they’re on the go and it has a simple admin panel for customizing colors, logo, and typography. Custom post types and formats include options for videos, galleries, and audio, while the shortcodes allow you to easily add buttons and columns.
The two-step installation works wonders for beginners and advanced users alike and multiple color options allow you to easily incorporate your own brand. A standout feature is the slider area, which provides several animations and text overlays, all of which work to grab attention and send students to more important parts of the website. Custom widgets are available for implementing comment areas and social buttons and the advanced backups ensure that none of your content will ever get lost.
Masterstudy
Consider the Masterstudy theme if you’re looking to build a website that features online courses. It’s also a great option for companies that are selling tutor services. Sell paid and free courses through your website using payment options such as WooCommerce and PayPal. Two headers are offered, one which is transparent and the other which is solid. A notable feature in the Masterstudy theme is the review module which lets students write reviews and ratings about a course after they’ve completed it. The teaching staff page reveals information about the teachers, including contact information and skills.
Four skin presets are included with the theme, which provide a nice starting point for customization. Manage an events page to promote upcoming networking events and use the blog to share updates about new courses. It’s worth noting that the Visual Composer plugin is included for free. This allows you to easily create unique layouts for any of your pages without having to touch a single line of code.
Education Academy
The Education Academy theme is a great choice for high schools and universities since it has a responsive layout and a beautiful filter module that allows students to easily find courses they’re most interested in. The slider allows you to add text overlays and buttons which serve as calls to action to send students to course pages, while the search bar is ideal for those who have a certain course in mind. This is a highly widgetized theme, with options for recent blog posts, contact fields, featured teachers, latest tweets, and media embedding.
The Education Academy theme has a few page templates for a contact page, archives, and sitemaps. On top of that, the school can highlight contact information at the very top of the website, with one-click settings for people who bring up the website on touch-enabled devices. Finally, a full-featured blog is integrated into the Education Academy theme, helping your school boost search engine rankings and offer free content to students.
Education WordPress Theme
Want a comprehensive education WordPress theme with a powerful design and all the tools to successfully launch your education related website? Try the Education WordPress theme from Thimpress. It brings many useful features including the ability to sell courses directly from your website, build an online learning community or forum, and manage your educational events.
Students will be able to create accounts on your site and access courses, follow news, events, and more. Besides, there’s a drag-and-drop course builder, a testimonials module for social proof, unlimited color schemes and fonts for branding, translation tools to easily reach an international audience, and lots of layout styles to choose from.
Buntington
Check out the Buntington theme for a clean and modern online school presence. It comes with the Visual Page Builder plugin to make it easier for all developers to customize the layout of the pages. The theme includes an upcoming events module to feature future events and encourage students to sign up. The sliders and galleries add visual elements to the website and the shortcodes help those who have no development experience at all. They are also useful for developers who just want to speed up the design process.
Make online course available to students and offer downloadable documents that you can link to each of your courses. The handy theme options help with uploading a logo, changing colors, and modifying typography, while the ability to switch your sidebar position is a nice way to stand out from the crowd. Along with a site demo, custom widgets, and localization features, the Buntington theme has everything you need for a strong online presence. Oh, and don’t forget that this theme provides a direct integration with Google Maps which is great way to show your physical location and provides directions to your school.
Smarty
The Smarty WordPress theme offers an elegant and somewhat modern take on what you would expect for any type of elementary, secondary school or college. The theme has contact information towards the top of the website which is visible even on mobile devices thanks to the responsive design of the theme. The theme also includes a variety of header styles to create a different look in order to stand out from the competition and find the look that fits your brand the best. Various color skins make it easy to customize the colors while the footer combinations allow you to add additional information to your website with ease. You can use them to list contact information or links to other parts of your site.
The teacher profiles are one of the most useful parts of the Smarty theme since you can include their education and skills to be displayed on the front end. The teacher profiles also have functionality for managing courses and putting course materials online for students to download. The events module lists all of the upcoming events that your school is going to have. You can feature any assemblies, teacher conferences or musicals to encourage both students and parent to participate and attend. Along with that, you can implement a donations page for collecting monetary contributions to the organization. Not all schools are going to use the donation functionality, but it could certainly come in handy for many schools. Along with WooCommerce and media support, the features that come with the Smarty theme are sure to impress.
Epicurean Theme
Emily Johns
March 7, 2016 at 5:50 amHi Aigars,
Thanks a lot for this intense article.
Please I want to create a website for a school where teachers can send assignments to students and students can connect with each other, etc. Simple put, I want it to be like the school on the web. Please which of the listed themes can best give these functionalities and how can it be done.
Thanks
Sarah Bishop
September 9, 2016 at 6:15 pmHi Emily,
There are so many options for an online school, but I would check out MasterStudy or eLearning. Both offer features you might be looking for.