There are literally thousands of premium responsive WordPress themes available.
But finding one that’s perfect always seems to be more of a challenge than it needs to be.
When searching for a theme, I expect it to be responsive for mobile and tablet, SEO friendly, fast (well coded), and easy to modify and scale. While some free WordPress themes do fit this bill, I’ve found that it’s usually worth investing in a good premium theme to get everything you want without compromise.
[source: Venture Harbour] Here’s a pretty exhaustive list (part 1 of 2) of some of the best premium responsive WordPress themes available. All of them are built with responsive design.
Krypton
Krypton is a beautiful theme that I’ve used as a template for several projects now. Everything about this theme has been designed with such attention to detail — from the loading of the HTML5 charts, to the user experience of the blog post summaries. Overall, I think this is probably one of the nicest themes around.
Vellum
Vellum is a very versatile starting point for virtually any site. The demo (with about 20 variations) shows just how many directions you can take with this theme. Vellum includes a tonne of great features including parallax backgrounds, UberMenu mega menus, Visual Composer content builder, and much more. Great for anything from spas, to musician Websites, to wedding sites and beyond.
King Size
King Size is an amazing photo gallery theme aimed towards photographers. The theme offers five different layout styles, and supports both photo and video content in the background slider.
Avada
Avada is one of the most popular premium WordPress themes. It’s a very clean theme with a full-width content slider and a neat layout structure. Unlike some of the more modern themes in this post, this one is a little bit less ╘out there’.
Naba
Naba is a great theme principally designed with design / creative agency Websites in mind.
Sputnik
Sputnik is a fairly minimal theme based on flat UI design and pastel colours. The theme has three homepage templates, build in contact form, and various layout and alignment options.
Flyte
Flyte is a fully responsive theme with touch screen functionality and gesture recognition. The theme includes both light and dark versions, and is endlessly customisable.
Enfold
Enfold is a clean responsive and retina ready theme with multiple designs, layouts, and colour options. It’s optimised for SEO straight out of the box, and has lots of shortcodes for customisation.
Striking
Striking Multiplex & Ecommerce is one of the most comprehensive WordPress themes with eCommerce support and functionality. The demo site for this theme contains 125 pages, which gives you an idea of just how much of the work is done for you with this theme.
U-Design
A mobile ready theme with over 600 fonts, unlimited colour variations, and easy customisability. This theme’s integrated with WooCommerce and a translation plugin, making it easy to translate your content into different languages.
Chocolate WP
A great photo gallery theme with fluid masonry layout and a 3D slideshow. This theme would be great for photographers, model agencies, luxury retailers, or anything else where the photos do the talking.
Dandelion
A simple WordPress theme with three different templates and unlimited skins. The theme is powered by Pexeto Panel, making it a suitable platform for those with little coding knowledge.
Modernize
Modernize is a WooCommerce enabled theme with layer slider integration, boxed/full layout options, and a variety of blog layouts.
inFocus
inFocus is a fully responsive theme with over 100+ custom shortcodes, a short code generator, and great customisation functionality. The design is quite minimal, and has been built with SEO & speed performance in mind.
Salient
Salient is another favourite of mine. This is probably one of the slickest WordPress themes with video background support. It’s WooCommerce ready, optimised for SEO, fast loading times, and has stunning icon design.
Core Minimalist
Core Minimalist is what it says on the tin; a minimalistic responsive theme built around a photo gallery. The theme supports video portfolios, and includes both light and dark skins.
inCreate
InCreate is a responsive multipurpose theme with multi-language support (WPML), Woocommerce shop integration, Slider Revolution, 600+ Google Fonts, 700+ Vector Icons, and a variety of skins and layout options to choose from.
Metronic Admin Dashboard
Metronic is a frontend admin dashboard theme. I’ve used this theme before to build the UI for an email marketing service, and it’s a great starting place. It also has a corporate UI and eCommerce UI, both of which look very nice.
Vertikal
Vertikal is a clean responsive design theme with 11 different pre-made skins and an easy-to-use drag and drop page builder.
Bigbang
Bigbang is another WordPress theme designed with agencies in mind. It includes a clients pages, about us page, 6 portfolio post formats, 6 blog page layouts, and 6 different single post page layouts.
Moose
Moose is a flat responsive and retina ready theme with parallax effects. It’s built with Twitter Bootstrap 3 and features 50+ HTML5 pages, WPML integration, Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, Fancybox, and much more.
Netstudio
NetStudio is an attract theme that comes set up with Visual Composer, meaning you can change the design with touching a single line of code.
Mini
Built with mobile first techniques, Mini is a great WordPress theme for corporate, creative, and eCommerce businesses looking to show off a portfolio. This theme runs extremely fast, thanks to the highly optimised code.
ChurcHope
ChurcHope is a WordPress theme designed for churches, although it can really be used for anything. It includes event countdowns, upcoming events listings, a calendar, and event details pages templates.
Sterling
Sterling is a simple no-frills theme with bulletproof code and great SEO. Sterling comes with 18 different page templates, a built-in contact form, and much more.
Slowave
SloWave is a flat design WordPress theme built on the Twitter Bootstrap framework, and includes Live Composer. Also included with SloWave is a one-page version of the theme.
Qaween
Qaween is a wedding WordPress theme with an RSVP form and countdown timer. The theme has over 500+ Google Web Fonts to choose from, and has a slideshow, events page, and photo gallery.
Alyeska
Alyeska is retina enhanced and fully responsive. The theme is easily customisable and has a large range of layout and colour options to choose from. This theme also supports the Twitter Bootstrap icon set and Twitter API.
Optimas
Optimas is a cross browser compatible theme with a clean slider-based design. The theme comes with 26 different patterned background images, 12 pre-made theme skins, and many further options to customise the theme. The theme is also integrated with Mailchimp, and includes 16 fully layered PSD files.
Barnelli
Barnelli is a premium WordPress theme dedicated to restaurants that need an impressive online presence and booking system. The theme is minimalistic, and includes three different menu designs.
Centum
Centum is a minimalistic theme with both dark and light colour schemes. This one’s great for basic blogs and news sites.
Website
Website is a WordPress theme with lots of layout customisability, and includes 9 custom widgets, including Twitter Stream, Flickr Stream, Facebook Like Box, social media buttons, Contact form, Posts list, search, site info, and unwrapped text.
Argus
Argus is a really slicker on page portfolio Website suited for designers, photographers, illustrators, and creatives. The design is clean, focusing all of the attention on your work.
Rebound
Rebound is an ultra-responsive WordPress theme with parallax containers, LayerSlider, and 40+ customisable element animations. This theme also includes layered PSD files.
Vida
Vida is a creative theme that includes two separate versions — a one page design, and a multi-page design. This theme includes 6 types of page templates, 20 shortcodes, and has lots of options for customising it.
Cake
Cake is a beautiful WordPress theme with WooCommerce integration, SliderRevolution, WPML, and much more. It’s cross-browser compatible, and well optimised for SEO.
Flatsome
Flatsome is a popular eCommerce WordPress theme with shopping cart integration, wish lists, product pages with tabs, and a custom checkout design.
Callisto
Callisto is a highly customisable premium WP theme that comes integrated with Visual Composer, WooCommerce, WPML, and much more, to make it simple to build a powerful and professional looking eCommerce store.
Florida
Florida is a responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme with a strong focus on contents and readability. It’s a very simple design and includes both a magazine skin and a one page Website skin.
Smartmag
SmartMag is a modern WordPress Magazine theme with multiple blog layouts, suitable for magazines, newspapers, review sits, or blogs. One of the nice things with the SmartMag theme is the included review system, which enables readers (or the writer) to review content or products, and display the percentage / star ratings.
NewsZone
NewsZone is a flat design theme with six homepage layouts and a clean (and unbranded) frontend UI that enables writers to add, mange and edit posts without going into the standard WordPress backend. This theme has three layout options, including a full width skin, a boxed skin, and a boxed skin with margins.
Salbii
Saalbi is a clean theme with WPML compatibility, Visual Composer, and LayerSlider installed. The theme supports video backgrounds, parallax scrolling, and is responsive and retina ready.
Newave
I’ve used Newave on a few projects, and am a big fan. It’s a one page scrolling Website theme with subtle use of parallax CSS. You can choose between a video background, full-width parallax slider, full screen slider, moving image background, or a full screen image parallax design.
Faculty
Faculty is an Ajax powered WordPress theme to promote your academic resume. Of course, there are many different applications of this design beyond the academic intent (I think it would make a great admin dashboard UI), but as a personal profile theme it’s slick and to the point.
Angular
Angular is a responsive WordPress theme suitable for those who want to showcase a portfolio online. The theme also supports the bbPress forum plugin, in case you require a forum on your Website.
Zonda
Zonda is a WordPress Woocommerce theme designed for online shops. The the theme is fully responsive and retina optimised. Zonda even offer free WooCommerce installation, just in case you’re a WooCommerce newbie!
Jupiter
Jupiter is a one-page scroll WordPress theme with over 1,600 vector icons included, video background functionality, and a drag and drop page builder.
Gonzo
A basic HTML5/CSS3 responsive magazine theme with a built-in review system (supporting both stars and percentage ratings), enabling readers to rate content. This theme is built with Facebook Comments functionality set up.
Trego
A beautiful responsive theme with WPML already installed, making it easy to translate into multiple languages. This theme’s heavily integrated with WooCommerce, making it a great choice if you’re running an online eCommerce shop.
SmartStart
A very simple WordPress theme using HTML5 and CSS3 tableless design. Includes Google Maps plugin, Contact Form 7, and lots of nice little touches like being able to preview over 500 different Google Web Fonts within WordPress.
Santiago
A flat, modern, and responsive magazine theme with a widgetised home page. This means you can feature as many sections on the home page as you like by dragging and dropping them into place in the WordPress widgets editor.
Blandes
Blandes is a creative WordPress theme with hundreds of customisation options. The theme has advanced typography options with over 500 Google fonts, and support multiple header styles, blog types, and portfolios.
Lawyers
Lawyers is a premium responsive WordPress theme created specifically for law companies, attorneys, and others in the legal field. The Website is professional and slick, and is built on the Twitter Bootstrap framework.
The 7
The 7 is a responsive theme with an adaptive navigation menu and fluid grid layout. It’s fully customisable with 4 header layouts, 6 skins, 600+ fonts, and unlimited backgrounds.
