10 WordPress Themes Built with React JS

React (sometimes referred as React.js or React JS) is a JavaScript library for managing the display of data on the front-end and building user interfaces. It was created by Facebook and is currently being used by Netflix, Airbnb, and many others companies.

Along with other JavaScript libraries and frameworks, React has enabled developers to create app-like websites and improve the user’s experience on our sites.

In the WordPress ecosystem, the merge of the REST API into core has made it easier to build new integrations such as WordPress themes made entirely in JavaScript. This approach to theme-building definitely opens a world of new possibilities and extends what can be done with WordPress.

In this post, we’ll take a look at 10 WordPress themes built with React JS. A lot of them are on Github and still in development, but we found a few with live demos. They are just the start of what is possible with React in the context of theming.

10 WordPress themes built with React JS

HsBlog – Magazine & News WordPress Theme and iOS & Android Blog App

HsBlog is a News, Magazine, and Blog WordPress theme. It was born after over a year of our hard work, everything from Code to Design is meticulously cared for. 

The theme offers up to 200+ pre-built demos, You can pick-up one of the demos and import it using the One-Click-Demo-Install system.

Moreover, HsBlog Package is not only a WordPress, it also supports HsBlog Apps. This means you have All-in-one website platforms once purchased HsBlog.

You can see a live demo here.

Highlight Features:

1. Installing & Importing HsBlog WordPress Theme
2. HsBlog Web Builder
3. HsBlog Gutenberg
4. HsBlog App
5. Dark Mode (Apps and Web)
6. Compatible With Contact Form 7
7. Single Application
8. Recently Viewed
9. Mega Menu
10. Google reCaptcha V3
11. Social Login
12. Theme Options
13. Favorite Posts

And Much More …

React

Suitable for all types of business, React is a practical solution for a modern and clean website. It provides you with multiple responsive layouts to choose from. With a user-friendly interface, the theme has ready-to-use color schemes to suit any design style and modify colors with ease.

React comes with Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, Go Portfolio, and its own Quform. It is also compatible with plugins such as WooCommerce, W3 Total Cache, and WPML. Among other features, the theme includes some performance tools to help speed things up as well. You can see a live preview here.

PressGrid

PressGrid is a modern frontend publishing and multi blogging theme, which means that everyone can post on the site.

With unlimited color options for posts and a responsive layout, it allows post reactions and has a social login section for users to publish from their Twitter or Facebook account. PressGrid also supports different multimedia post formats such as video, audio, link, quote and status (Twitter, Instagram). See the live preview here.

4. BeesWax

This is a photography WordPress theme built entirely on React. It is mainly focused on performance. To speed up the navigation, it uses pre-caching and download the content your visitors might access before they even access it.

Almost everything in BeesWax is customizable. It comes with a simple front-end user interface that you can adapt to your needs with just a few clicks. You can also visualize your changes in real-time without having to keep refreshing the page. Check out a live demo here.

5. Anadama

Anadama is a React-based recipe theme for WordPress. It was designed as a simple blog to display recipes in a vintage book style. It has no comments or widgets, just a list of post titles on the homepage and a pop-up card with the recipe content.

Anadama-React was a small project to see how React JS could fit into a WordPress theme. If you want to check it out, the Github repo has instructions to set it up yourself.

6. Foxhound

The developer of Anadama, Kelly Dwan, also built this “experimental” text-focused blog theme for WordPress in React JS. This was the first REST-API-powered theme on wordpress.org.

As per her author, the theme looks best with “Front page displays” set to latest posts, but it does support a static page and blog posts on another page. It displays featured images on single posts and pages, but not on archive/list views. To learn more about Foxhound, check out the project on Github.

7. WReact

This is a WordPress starter theme with React JS integrated. It’s meant for you to learn React inside WordPress or to create your own theme. Visit the Github repository here.

8. Vladimir

Vladimir is another WordPress starter theme with React and Redux bundled inside. As per his author, it “should be used:

To learn how to include React and Redux in your WordPress site
To quickly start building themes which include React and Redux
As a starting point for your custom WordPress + React + Redux web applications”.

You can go to the Github repo or read a tutorial on his blog.

9. Black Hawk

In this React-based WordPress theme all the data is fetched using WordPress REST API and rendered using React. It uses Bootstrap for styling its views and components. Learn more on Github.

10. A React+Redux WordPress theme

This is the last WordPress theme built with ReactJS in our selection. Its features include dynamic menus (main menu + footer menu), category archive pages, search, tags, Bootstrap 4, threaded-comments, etc. You can check out the project on Github or see the live theme on the author’s personal site.

Final thoughts

Some of these themes are small projects in development and others were just an experiment. But they all are a great way to learn about how React can be used with the REST API to create better and faster experiences with WordPress.

Building WordPress themes with JavaScript tools like React JS and the REST API has also important benefits in terms of performance, design, and productivity.

As mentioned above, it opens a world of possibilities including storing and pre-fetching content, animations within themes, and the ability to create offline experiences using Service Workers. These advances are receiving a lot of of attention from developers who are improving their performance and expanding their functionality.

We believe that this JavaScript-based approach will accelerate things in the WordPress ecosystem in 2020. Maybe it’s time to start getting familiar with it!