Themes For WooCommerce

At first sight you might think that most WordPress themes would work with WooCommerce, and to some extent it is true. And for those themes that don’t support WooCommerce, there is a snippet of code you can add to make the theme work.

But ‘working’ and working well and looking good are not the same. Some themes impose rules baked into their code that dictates how images will be presented. And that might not suit you at all. Be aware of that. The themes here should be OK.

The Themes

Just a not that I’ll add more themes to this post as I try more of them.

Slush by ZigzagPress (Genesis child theme)

Minimalist. light theme with good use of white space. Nothing wrong with it, but for my taste it lacks presence in the header area.

Uku from ElmaStudio

A lovely theme with nice typography and use of white space, elegant. It only allows three products images across in the archive pages, but using the WooCommerce Product Archive Customiser by James Koster (in the WordPress Repository) it will render four across.

However, it then needs some CSS to deal with the display on mobile. A future version of Uku might have more archive column options built in.

Ascend from Kadence Themes

Lots of options with a couple plugins from Kadence, but I found it very slow to respond in the Customiser. It has more options than I got around to using. I might try it again at some point to see what it can do.

Sullivan by Anders Norén

Perfectly OK from a functional point of view, but not enough visual attraction built in to attract me to it.

Generate Press by Tom Usborne

The free version is too plain for my taste. The premium version (very good value for what it offers) has a number of pre-built options in the site library, including an ever-growing number of WooCommerce options.

It also has some video walk-throughs for customising the site with the premium options.

I tried the premium version and like it so much that I am now using it for my sites, including this one. And I am also using it for my WooCommerce sites. The options for WooCommerce built into the back end are a joy.

For example, with one click you can show the Add To Cart buttons on the catalogue pages, or turn them off. That’s just one example: there are many option built in. And yet for all that the theme is lightweight and fast.

It makes it easy to do the things a shop owner might want to do to get their shop the way they want.

WooCommerce sites are naturally going to be heavier in terms of images than a blog that is purely text. Yet with all that, I am still getting 96% (that’s excellent in anyone’s book) for the page speed.