6 Best Free WordPress Themes for Affiliate Marketing Websites
When you’re building an affiliate marketing revenue stream, you want your site to rank well in search results, display your affiliate content in an appealing way, and encourage your visitors to click those affiliate links.
A well-built WordPress theme can help you meet these affiliate marketing goals, and you don’t have to spend a lot to get one.
Best Free WordPress Themes for Affiliate Marketing
Here are half a dozen free WordPress themes that work for deal, review, and magazine-style affiliate marketing websites.
1. Advance Ecommerce Store
Advance Ecommerce Store from ThemeShopy is a good option if you feature affiliate deals, coupon codes, and/or products on your site.
The theme’s look is traditional e-commerce, so you can group your featured items into categories, share coupon codes at the top of the homepage, and display hot deals in the single-image slider above the fold. In the sidebar, you can set up your hottest deals or bestsellers, include testimonials, and display your latest posts.
Advance Ecommerce Store is SEO-friendly, fast-loading, and responsive. The free version lets you link up to four social media accounts. The paid version ($39) adds unlimited social media links, expanded customization options, WooCommerce compatibility, and third-party plugin support.
2. aReview
aReview from aThemes is built for affiliate marketers who write product and media reviews.
The theme’s auto-scrolling banner slider displays four featured images at a time on a laptop (one at a time on a phone) so it’s useful for sites that have a lot of content to display. Below the fold, a series of post excerpts and featured images includes buy now and read more buttons, while the adjacent sidebar (on laptop screens) lets visitors jump to top-reviewed products, social media, and more.
The built-in theme customizer tool makes it a snap to change aReview’s colors, front page, and page layouts to match your brand’s look. The customizer also lets you set up an optional review carousel. Google Fonts access is included, too—something many themes only offer in their paid version. Updates and bug fixes are included with the free version of aReview.
There’s no paid upgrade version of aReview, which is unusual, although aThemes does offer pro versions of some of its other themes.
3. Fastest
Fastest from WPVKP helps your affiliate site get found in search results with schema markup and other SEO-friendly features. It’s also very lightweight to help your pages load fast so visitors will stick around and explore.
You can customize Fastest’s colors and background images and use the ad display tools to create banner and sidebar ads. Fastest’s design leads with an image grid header followed by recent posts, so it’s a good choice if you already have a lot of content for your site.
Like aReview, Fastest is available only as a free version with no paid upgrade option.
4. Juliet
Juliet from Lyra Themes gives affiliate bloggers a beautiful platform that draws in visitors with its image-heavy design. It’s also mobile friendly, fast-loading, and WooCommerce compatible so you have the option to build your own store.
On a laptop, Juliet displays a full-width image header followed by a 4-column row of featured images from different blog categories. On smartphones, everything’s presented in a single column. The free version of Juliet gives you options for customizing logos, banner overlay colors, background colors and images, and other design elements.
Juliet Pro ($35 plus $8/month for support and updates) adds header, slider, and video display options. It also supports widgets like WP Instagram, MailChimp Subscription Form, and JetPack Social Media Sharing Icons to help you grow your audience through social media and email campaigns.
5. Lifestyle Magazine
Lifestyle Magazine from The Bootstrap Themes shows off your affiliate marketing site’s content with an image grid above the fold (single image on phones) so your visitors will find something to pique their interest as soon as they arrive.
It’s fast and SEO-friendly so you can get found more easily by shoppers who are searching for products and reviews, and it’s WooCommerce compatible so you can sell your own products easily.
The free version of Lifestyle Magazine comes with a single option for layout, header, and banner slider, but it also gives you drag-and-drop section editing tools, header image and banner options, and social media tools. The pro version ($49) gives you access to all Google Fonts, unlimited color choices, ad management and ad-blocker bypass tools, and more options for your layout, header, and slider.
6. ReviewZine
ReviewZine from ThemeIsle is designed to be easy for non-technical site owners to use, customize, and display AdSense ads without knowing how to code. The theme includes an options panel where you can make changes to ReviewZine’s layout, colors, social media links, and your logo quickly and easily.
On a laptop, ReviewZine displays a header logo and banner ad, a three-image slider banner with featured images and post headlines, a column with your latest news, and a sidebar with recent posts and room for ads. On a smartphone, ReviewZine’s slider features a single image and headline, followed by a single column of posts and news.
ReviewZine’s banner slider is designed to earn you more affiliate conversions by displaying more of your review content to homepage visitors. This theme also includes a ratings chart template you can use to create and display detailed product reviews. There’s no paid upgrade version of ReviewZine, and you can also get ReviewZine’s parent theme, IsleMag, for free.
Picking Your WordPress Affiliate Marketing Theme
As you’re looking at possible themes, think about how they’ll work with your content. Check out the site demos the publishers offer and be sure to view the demos on more than one type of device. This is especially important if you know that most of your site traffic does or will come from mobile users, because there’s less “real estate” on a mobile homepage to wow new visitors, so you want to make sure your best content will show up and look good there.
Before you commit to a theme, download the ones you like best and try them out in live preview mode so you can see exactly what they’ll look like with your content. Once you make a decision and install your new theme, monitor your metrics for traffic, bounce rate, time spent on the site, and conversions to see if your theme is helping you grow your affiliate marketing business or if you need to make adjustments.
For more tips on growing your affiliate sales, check out our blogs on the essential tools for affiliate marketers and the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketing.
Casey Kelly-Barton is an Austin-based freelance B2B content marketing writer. Her specialty areas include SMB marketing and growth, data security, IoT, and fraud prevention
