The Best Website Template Providers

Friday, April 23rd

2021 Website Template Provider Reviews

Template Monster

• Cost: Individual Templates starting from $14
• $12.50 per month for the website builder
• $17 per month membership billed yearly
• $19 per month membership billed monthly
• $590 one-time fee for lifetime access

With TemplateMonster, you can access a wide range of pre-built designs (templates) for your website. Whether you're looking for a simple landing page design or a whole theme for WordPress, or a template for Joomla, you'll find what you're looking for among their thousands of options.

On the website, you can access a full-featured website builder for just $12.50 per month that draws upon their vast library of themes to create fully-hosted and managed websites. You don't have to use code, but instead, you can just drag and drop blocks of user interface elements into your design. The hosting provides SEO and SSL security, a personalized domain and email, and unlimited bandwidth and storage.

The search facility within TemplateMonster is fantastic. You can easily find products within the following categories.

Platforms. Over 50 Platforms including:

• Website Templates
• WordPress Themes
• Shopify Themes
• BigCommerce Themes
• Admin Templates
• Animated Banners
• Icon Sets
• Opencart Extensions

Topics. Over 15 Topics including:

• Business & Services
• Fashion & Beauty
• Food & Restaurant
• Medical Templates
• Home & Family
• Computers & Internet
• Entertainment & Games
• Animals & Pets

Features. Over 40 Features including:

• Responsive
• Search Engine Friendly
• Premium
• Mobile Layout Included
• Testimonials
• Appointment Booking
• Events Calendar
• Scheduling & Booking

If you have your own hosting and CMS, you can choose from thousands of themes and templates for WordPress/WooCommerce, including Elementor page builder themes and WordPress plugins. If you're into Joomla, Moto, or Drupal CMS's, there are over 3,000 themes for those as well.

For eCommerce, you'll have access to themes for Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, MotoCMS, VirtueMart, ZenCart, X-Cart, and BigCommerce.

Sites that don't run on a CMS, but are instead static websites, aren't left out in the cold. TemplateMonster has over 15,000 static website templates, including HTML5, Bootstrap, newsletter, and specialty templates.

Beyond website themes and templates, you can also purchase presentation designs, a full range of graphics such as logos, resumes, certificates, product mockups, and icon sets. There are also various plugins for WordPress, PrestaShop, JavaScript, and Magento.

On TemplateMonster, you can click a Live Demo button on each template preview so that you can load it as if it were a real site. That way you can see if it fully meets your needs.

Due to licensing constraints, some images aren't provided in various download packages from TemplateMonster. However, free images are available through their "Monstroid2" service. And, you'll need to provide your own custom scripts and database functionality for features like booking, registration, and comment submission forms.

TemplateMonster has provided for the increasingly-important factor of website accessibility for people who have disabilities. They have a custom view of responsive and accessible website templates.

Pre-sales chat support is available 24/7. To obtain post-sales support, you can use the same chat bubble on every page to select that support option, then enter an order ID and choose a product to begin your support session. If you have a billing question, choose the Billing support option, enter your name and email address and (optionally) a transaction ID to begin a billing chat.

If you find yourself in frequent need of all of these products and services, you can buy a monthly membership for $17 per month billed annually or $19 per month billed monthly. For just $590, you get lifetime access to all the assets you care to download.

TemplateMonster offers refunds in the event of a non-delivery of the product due to mailing issues, major defects, or product not being as described. The service-based refunds are given only if services are canceled by the buyer prior to the project start, there's delayed service delivery, or the service was not as described.

TemplateMonster's selection and pricing is great, and their chat support is a welcome feature. IF you're searching for a template to build your website from, this is the place to start. Template Monster earns our highest rating.

Creative Market

• Cost: From $2 to $500

Creative Market teams with independent creators to bring you modern designs of templates, web themes, photos, graphics, fonts, add-ons, and 3D assets. The site is organized to show individual assets by multiple shops, but also provides a view of the shops as their own entities where you can browse just their inventories. It's a nice way of highlighting each independent creator.

Right on the home page, you'll find a large search box that you can immediately filter by category (Graphics, Templates, Fonts, Add-Ons, Web Themes, Photos, and 3D). This gives you instant access, by keyword, to just the assets and area of the site you need.

By clicking on the Templates category in the top menu, you can see the 256,000 results available on the site. This is an astonishing number of template assets in just one category on just one site. In the footer at the bottom of the site, however, it does boast that Creative Market has 3.7 million products, 6.4 million members, and 30,000 shops.

In the Web Themes category, we found a similarly high number of web themes and templates.

A very nice feature of Creative Market is their certifications. For a seller to qualify as certified, they submit their best products to a curation team which tests them against more than 20 criteria in three categories: Automated Curation, Preliminary Curation, and Category-specific Curation. These take into account high rating averages, number of screenshots, correct categorization, proper file formats, no third-party files, and a number of other things. You can click a switch icon to turn on a view of only certified products so you can browse just the items that qualify.

Support on Creative Market is handled on a per-shop basis where the buyer contacts the shop they purchased the item from or want to purchase from. Licensing and billing support are handled by Creative Market itself through the Help Center. Each product has a comments section and a rating section so you know what you're getting into before you buy, thus reducing your exposure to the need for support.

There's also a blog and a discussion area of the site for a deeper dive into conversations about shops and assets.

What we like about Creative Market is its focus on promoting their creators. However, upon reading some reviews of the Creative Market business model, we did find a complaint by a creator about the restrictive licensing, particularly with regard to extending coverage of assets in apps and games without also purchasing an extended license for each product.

Other complaints included issues with the assets not working as advertised, prices going up between browsing sessions, and problems with customer service misunderstanding the initial complaint. On average, this adds up to a 3-star experience for the vast majority of visitors.

But, unlike all the other template sites we've looked at, Creative Market is making an exceptional effort to answer every single review, positive or negative, and to turn those negative reviews into positive ones whenever the customer follows up again on the problem. This above-and-beyond level of service is truly exceptional. Because of this, along with the astounding number of assets available for purchase, Creative Market earns high marks.

Envato

• Cost: Between $2 and $10,000,001 (yes, you read that right)
• $33 per month for Envato Elements, or $16.50 per month if billed annually

ThemeForest is the WordPress theme and website template arm of the Envato visual assets network. Envato has sold more than 56 million items and its community has generated over $768 million. Many WordPress and static website designers and developers turn to ThemeForest first for their clients or for their own websites. Given the vast library of themes and templates at ThemeForest, and ThemeForest's partnership with the popular SiteGround hosting company, it's easy to see why.

It would be impossible to list all of the website platforms that ThemeForest caters to. It is easier to state that if you're using any platform at all, you'll find a ThemeForest resource for it. In addition to WordPress and HTML sites, you can download templates for email marketing, every eCommerce system, Adobe Muse and Photoshop creative assets and templates, plugins, Logo Maker, and more.

While reviewing ThemeForest, we got pleasantly lost in the...er...forest of options for website designs. There is a design for every purpose imaginable, from construction companies to banks, from dentists and lawyers to maid services and technology companies. And everything in between.

With each template, you can see a live preview or screenshots. You can add to favorites or to a collection if you're browsing for ideas.

The themes and templates are created by third-party vendors, which you can find out more about by viewing their portfolio, ratings, and reviewing the badges they've earned in ThemeForest for various accomplishments. The more badges, the better. Plus, you can see how many themes each vendor has sold and how many followers they have. By clicking the Reviews, Comments, and Support tabs, you can get a better feel for how well a vendor responds to problems. These factors can help you decide among multiple vendors.

Most templates and themes are licensed for up to 6 months of support with the option to extend that support another 6 months to a total of 12 for an additional cost.

The search feature of ThemeForest is among the most powerful we've found. It has multiple filters to get results by category, tags, price, sales, rating, date added, software version, and compatibility. Also, you can further sort by best match, best seller, newest, best rated, trending, and price. So, if you're looking for something very specific, your work is cut out for you.

ThemeForest, as a part of the larger Envato marketplace, provides a forum where they post announcements and where buyers and sellers can converse about themes and templates.

For more specific help, you can turn to the Envato Help Center to get support in buying, licensing, and your account. However, unlike other smaller competitors, support is mostly self-serve, except for the forums. ThemeForest (and Envato by extension) does not have a 24/7 support chat. Items that you buy are more specifically supported by the vendor from which you bought them, either through the Comments tab or through other arrangements provided by that particular vendor.

Not included in item support is customization, installation, hosting, nor help from authors of included third-party assets. However, they do include updates to the item (security, new visuals, updated code, etc.)

Refunds are handled through a refund request to the author. Generally, you can get a refund for "not as described", security vulnerability, undelivered support, and items that have not been downloaded. Refund requests must comply with a variety of prior conditions to be honored. It can feel a bit overwhelming to non-technical users who will be expected to read documentation, check comments pages, search the help center, and jump through other hoops before applying for a refund.

One complaint we've experienced with ThemeForest is the number of item authors who provide less than 5-star support (more like 3-star and below). And for some of the priciest items (especially the bizarrely priced $10 million theme we found), this can be a real problem, especially if you no longer qualify for a refund. Many reviewers on reviews sites rate ThemeForest and other Envato sister sites in the 3-star range because of these issues.

ThemeForest earns average scores because of all the customer reviews that were 3-star and below due to the website template's quality, as well as the support and refund processes. If the overall quality of all themes was improved and the support and refund process was streamlined and simplified, with 24/7 chat added for those who need more immediate access to some form of help, we could rank it higher.

Dream Template

• Cost: $149 for a lifetime membership plan
• Currently $59.95 on limited time offer

DreamTemplate has over 3,000 web site templates, over 1,300 Microsoft Office templates, over 600 business documents and legal forms, more than 8,000 TrueType fonts, 2,500+ abstract logos, vector icons, and illustrations, and more than 6,000 background textures.

A problem we noticed right away with DreamTemplate is that they are touting as "benefits" that they provide Frontpage editor-ready templates. Frontpage has long been discontinued, so it's puzzling why it should still be mentioned and casts doubt upon how up-to-date these templates might be.

They also say they provide Flash templates. Flash is another discontinued software product as of 2020. Further, so many browser and mobile device makers have banned Flash from their products that Flash hasn't been relevant to anyone for almost a decade. When we attempted to download a Flash-based template, the Google Chrome browser actively blocked Flash with a warning message to the user. The same will happen with any site built using Flash as a design display mechanism. Rather than displaying the site that contains it, the site will be blocked by Chrome.

A perusal of the screenshots of their templates confirms that not only do the designs not fully conform to today's reality of mobile device responsiveness, but the designs themselves also appear outdated by nearly 10 years compared to the latest design trends.

Until DreamTemplate has updated its collection to remove the templates that cater to these outdated products, and any references to them, DreamTemplate earns a low rating.

Templates

• Cost: $229 for an annual membership
• $590 for a lifetime membership

Pricing for Templates was difficult to find. After several minutes of searching around their website, we had to use the site's chat feature to ask for the pricing details.

While the chat representative did offer us a discount, they pointed us to a pricing page on TemplateMonster. When we asked whether Templates is a reseller of TemplateMonster templates, the chat representative would not confirm that detail.

While you could indeed purchase templates from the Templates website, you'll only be getting the same templates and pricing from them as you would get from TemplateMonster directly. It's not clear what the support experience would be like buying from this secondary site, nor what the advantage would be to the user or to the seller given that the pricing structure is the same. In a way, this type of transaction seems suspect because it gives the appearance that Templates bought a lifetime subscription to TemplateMonster and then simply tries to resell the same templates.

In the case of Templates, we advise that potential customers do business with TemplateMonster instead. You won't want to risk not getting the value of the original templates (which may have been altered) or lose out on real support.