In this round-up, we look at the best WordPress review themes. Review sites are popular among affiliate marketers, and can prove effective in boosting commissions. They’re also a reader favorite, and a great way to encourage user engagement and increase site traffic overall.
All of the review themes on this list provide advanced reviews & ratings systems that go beyond just a simple star rating. Most allow reviews to be broken down into components, and allow site admins to choose between multiple rating styles (stars, percentages, points).
For more magazine and blog themes, be sure to check out our other related collections:
- The 5 Best Amazon Affiliate WordPress Themes For 2020
- Best WordPress Magazine and News Themes
- Best WordPress Blog Themes
- Best Gaming Magazine Themes
- Best Tech Magazine Themes
We selected these themes by hand, based on design quality and depth of functionality.
Reviews
Chances are, if you arrived here from Google, this is the sort of theme you’re looking for. Although many of the themes on our list are magazine-first products with reviewing features, the Reviews theme is laser focused on service & product reviews.
Editors can create reviews with custom grade criteria, and users and engage and participate by leaving their own reviews based on the same custom criteria. The theme is also effectively monetized–call to action buttons are provided, and site admins can provide a list of stores where reviewed products are available for purchase.
Secondary features like social sharing/login, advanced searching (with AJAX product suggestion), and mega menus add to the UX. The flat design is clean, minimal, and performance optimized. Reviews is SEO ready, easy to tweak and customize, and easy to install using the included demo content. Highly recommended.
More Info/DownloadSNews
SNews is a magazine theme with a strong focus on its reviewing functionality. It comes with an impressive rating & review system featuring a lovely, eye-grabbing design and search engine optimized coding. It’s built responsive on a solid Twitter Bootstrap base, and it’s optimized for high-resolution and mobile devices. So it’s guaranteed to look and work great regardless of where and/or how you view it.
Alright, maybe not on an old-ass flip phone. Let’s be reasonable.
SNews is high-performance (speed optimized) and sensibly structured, providing a superior and enjoyable user experience. There’s lots of options to play with, and demo content is include for a quick setup process. We suggest clicking through to the product page for a closer look for the full rundown of features & tech specs.
More Info/DownloadClick Mag
On a purely aesthetic level, Click Mag is our favorite theme on our list. The design is contemporary, sleek, and minimal without sacrificing any character. It’s marketed as a viral theme, and appears on a couple of our other WordPress roundups. Its review features are powered by the Reviewer plugin, via an intuitive, stylish implementation.
There’s plenty of other features that might come in handy for aspiring publishers and marketers, too. WooCommerce support is baked in, allowing you to setup an online shop. bbPress integration will give you the option of putting together a forum and building a community. Not a bad way to encourage user engagement and return visits.
The theme is optimized for search engines and retina-ready for display on high resolution devices. It’s one of the best selling magazine themes of the past year. Definitely a good choice.
More Info/DownloadReHub
ReHub is a WordPress review theme that works great for affiliate sites, coupon sites, and even directories. It includes support for a number of popular third party plugins, like WooCommerce, ECWID, bbPress, Easy Digital Downloads, and affiliate links builder. There’s a lot of different directions you can go with ReHub, but its primary aim is to help make you money online.
ReHub also provides support for product comparison pages and top reviews pages, with three different designs to choose from. The theme is speed optimized, well supported and regularly updated. After 526 sales, the developer still maintains an impressive five star rating.
More Info/DownloadMargot
Margot is a responsive review theme with a sleek, colorful grid based layout. Site admins can choose between boxed and wide layout styles. Categories can be color coded. The reviews system allows authors to break down each into components, as well displaying an overall average (you know, like IGN or something). Margot is retina-ready, translation-ready and SEO friendly. It was built on the Bootstrap framework.
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Explicit
Explicit is a bold, aggressively styled magazine review theme that would lend itself well to gaming and entertainment reviews. Along with the powerful review system that allows for four different review styles, Explicit packs in a lot of other great features. An AJAX mega menu, category specific colors and icons, and infinite loading are just a few. The review system allows for both an author score and user score. It’s worth looking at the product detail page for a breakdown of everything the theme offers.
More Info/DownloadEngine
Engine is a drag & drop magazine theme developed by IndustrialThemes, the same team that developed the Explicit theme, above. It’s got all the same great features too, like mega menus and a complex review and ratings system (including product comparison capability). The theme’s design is reminiscent of the popular online magazine Mashable. Engine also supports BuddyPress, bbPress and WooCommerce, for community building and e-commerce.
More Info/DownloadFlavor
Another entry from IndustrialThemes? You’d almost think this team knows what they’re doing when it comes to WordPress review themes. The clean, professional design of Flavor makes it another theme that’s well matched for movie, TV, game and tech reviews. Featuring user-friendly AJAX sorting and filtering, an awards and badge system, a Like and views counter, and a powerful options panel. Compatible with BuddyPress and WooCommerce. Bundled with Slider Revolution.
More Info/DownloadWine Masonry
The Wine Masonry theme offers review and ratings support via the Tqyeem Ratings and Review plugin. It’s a fully featured news and magazine theme built on a solid HTML5/CSS3 codebase. Cool features like infinite scrolling are built-in, and an extensive admin panel gives you a lot of control on the backend. Upload logos, favicons, tweak colors and more. We’re not sure what the connection with wine is.
More Info/DownloadValenti
We liked Valenti well enough to feature it the earlier Siteturner round-up 11+ Best WordPress Fashion Blog and Magazine Themes for 2014. This is a retina-ready, responsive theme that provides robust reviewing capability and a variety of other magazine theme must-haves. A drag & drop homepage builder and an advanced options panel make this theme easy to customize. Valenti also supports bbPress, BuddyPress and WPML.
More Info/DownloadBou
The Bou WordPress magazine and review theme not only provides an excellent ratings and reviews solution, but many other magazine-centric extras. Live search, SEO optimization, and a tag & category map are just a few of the noteworthy features. Six custom widgets are built-in, as well as a selection of useful shortcodes. Bou is easy to setup, use and customize.
More Info/DownloadDizzyMag
We like the minimalistic, content first approach of DizzyMag, a theme designed with monetization in mind. The ratings & reviews system is nicely optimized for maximizing affiliate commissions, and special attention has been paid to advertising. DizzyMag provides an impressive multimedia portfolio, and WooCommerce is also supported. The theme is fully responsive, as you’d expect, and retina-ready. You’ll find lots of options in the admin, and the theme is SEO optimized.
More Info/DownloadPuzzles
The fun looking Puzzles theme includes a top-notch ratings system for creating and displaying author & user reviews. Admins can choose from three different ratings systems – five stars, ten stars, or percentage grades. The theme comes with nine pre-made color schemes (with more customization options in the backend), and supports WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and bbPress.
More Info/DownloadImplicit
Implicit is another theme by IndustrialThemes. These guys really excel at designing WordPress themes that look awesome, and avoid trendy, homogenized aesthetics common to WordPress theme design. Of course, the features are endless, and the review system is just about as good as it gets. Mega menu, infinite scrolling, awards & badges, ad management…
More Info/DownloadEntrance
At Siteturner, we love whitespace and flat design. Although it may not be for everyone, Entrance is our favorite design on the list. The content-first philosophy of Entrance eliminates unnecessary distractions, speeds things up and makes for a great user experience overall. The review system is superb, and the theme is responsive and retina-ready.
More Info/DownloadMinimosity
Like the Entrance theme, above, the strength of Minimosity’s design is in its simplicity. Don’t let the minimalistic design fool you, though. There’s a long list of features on this one, including excellent review capabilities. It’s responsive and retina-ready, and highly customizable in just a few clicks.
More Info/DownloadSmartMag
SmartMag is a modern, clean and premium WordPress review theme that’s both responsive and retina-ready. It’s perfect for blogs, magainzes, newspapers as well as review sites. The reviews system gives authors a choice between star, point or percentage ratings.
The theme excels at front-end usability, and the provided drag & drop page builder makes it easy to create and alter your homepage. SmartMag is SEO optimized and supports WooCommerce and bbPress. The popular Revolution Slider plugin is bundled in for free.
More Info/DownloadScene
Scene offers simple, elegant design with classy typography and a smart, reader-freindly use of space. The reviews system allows for custom parameters, and users can contribute their own ratings. Scene provides ad management capability, a lot of nice extras like a page builder, and WooCommerce support.
More Info/DownloadSplash
Splash is a great theme that is built for reviews. It has a nice magazine like design, and it’s easy to navigate. This theme is built for mobile, so you won’t have any trouble passing Google’s new mobile first requirements. It also looks great on desktops and tablets.
The theme has a built in review system, which is a smaller version of WP Review Pro — so you’re guaranteed to have an easy upgrade path. And it’s extremely extensible.
More Info/Download
And don’t forget the plugin that makes it all work…
Unfortunately, WordPress is not built for reviews, and so it’s lacking some functionality that you’re gonna need. While many of the themes above have some review functionality included, you will probably find yourself needing more. To make up for that missing functionality, you’ll need a plugin like WP Review Pro.
WP Review Pro is used by hundreds of thousands of sites to do reviews and ratings for products. Want your product ratings to show up on Google search results pages? This plugin does that. Want your reviews/ratings to show in Facebook, Google Places (and even Yelp, where applicable)? This plugin does that.
Once you install this plugin (with your cool new theme from above) your review site will be ready for your content!
More Info/Download
That’s it for our collection of the best WordPress review themes. Comments and suggestions are always welcome!
Great list, thank you