LEARN ABOUT CRAKREVENUE'S WORDPRESS PLUGIN
A couple of years ago, we shared our favorite adult themes to help you create outstanding WordPress blogs.
We quickly realized that affiliates love to know which themes they can use as a source of income in this competitive vertical.
One year later, we had done it again, and it was still a hit with you — our readers.
In 2018, we’ve decided to repeat this experiment and see how the market changed since our last foray into the world of adult themes for WordPress.
If you were looking for a reason to start promoting adult offers or just want to give your website a new coat of paint, this is the stuff for you!
For the sake of this article, we’ve reviewed each theme according to the following criteria:
- Fastness: just how quickly does the theme load?
- Responsiveness: does the theme work on all devices?
- Features: what are they and how do they add value to the product?
- Price: is it well suited for the product?
- Global Appreciation: based on our overall experience and feelings with the theme
We then attributed each theme our very own
rating on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best).
We also focused our efforts on tube themes rather than blogs this time.
Adult Themes #1: RetroTube by WP-Script ($49)
WP-Script has been in the business of adult Wordpress themes for a while.
With more than 4,000 active members and 18,000+ websites created, you just know there’s a very valuable product in there.
The classic RetroTube theme with its newly available niche looks is the real deal.
Fastness: We were very impressed by the theme’s loading speed. Results in pages display almost instantly with their respective thumbs.
Features: RetroTube gives you a free HTML5 video player that works great out of the box. You can also fetch videos from the most popular tube sites if you wish by adding the WPS Mass Embedder plugin (not included). The admin area allows you to add your tracking URLs — and we all know how important tracking is!
We also love how RetroTube allows you to watermark each and every video automatically, a great feature for brand awareness. There are other nice options like the ability to toggle member uploads with a single click, manage ad slots, video preview on mouse over, blogs, photo galleries and more. RetroTube is PACKED with features that all work well together.
Responsiveness: Design fits well on desktop, tablet and mobile. However, we noticed the page weight brings the speed down by quite a margin depending on your setup.
Price: It’s pretty fair at $49 USD. You also get free lifetime updates (not just one year), which adds a lot of value. Be on the lookout for promotions: you can sometimes get RetroTube for 50% off its normal price!
Global Appreciation: We really like how clean RetroTube is. Its design reminds us of Xvideos — simple and to the point. Advertising spots are optimized, there are a lot of great features and the theme looks slick. Also, the addition of niched themes is incredible. We can't wait for more designs!
If we had to nitpick, the theme might be a bit hard to use for newcomers if you don’t use the import plugin ($). In terms of improvements, we’d like to suggest adding an autocomplete live search.
RetroTube feels like the ultimate package. If you add premium plugins to the mix, then you’re set for a while (although plugins will cost you more than the theme itself!).
Adult Themes #2: ZingTube by XWPThemes (On sale: $42.99)
Mainstream version of the ZingTube theme
Fastness: the theme fully loads in less than 4 seconds, which is great. The overall performance of ZingTube is great.
Features: We would have liked multiple thumbnails (on mouse over) for the videos, because right now it doesn’t incite many clicks with the play icon.
Responsiveness: The theme is fully responsive with Boostrap 3 technology.
Price: It’s pretty fair considering what’s included. Regular price is steep at $79.99. Thankfully the theme is often on sale, and you should remember it includes an import plugin — a feature you’ll pay a premium for elsewhere.
Global Appreciation: ZingTube feels like a total steal even if it’s the priciest theme in our selection. It’s easy to use for new webmasters, the import tool is very useful to populate your site with videos and you can use the theme on an unlimited number of websites. Usually, you must pay a premium for this feature, but not here!
Only thing that worried us a bit before writing our review is how the theme’s last update dates back to December 2016. This might stop some customers from pulling the trigger altogether.
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Adult Themes #3: EasyTube by AdultWPThemes ($39)
Mainstream version of the EasyTube theme
Fastness: Theme loads in under 2 seconds, so it's pretty fast. Under 1.5MB (average: 2.8MB), the total page size helps a lot to make EasyTube a quick experience for viewers. Only downside is on mobile (see below).
Features: EasyTube takes a page from social media and allows users to like or dislike its content. This is great for engagement. There's even a feature taken straight from Google with the "I feel lucky" button (link to a random video).
Affiliates will also be pleased to know there's a dedicated Performers page, making it a breeze to categorize videos with porn stars. EasyTube has a community feel to it, and that may be its most defining feature.
On the downside, the blog feature is a bit lackluster: its formatting is weird and not very pleasing to the eyes. Also, thumbnails could be more responsive.
Responsiveness: Theme works on tablet and phones. However, there are problems with page weight for mobile. Also, the lack of Etag headers thus of client-side caching adds to the loading on mobile.
Price: Pretty much what you'd expect from an adult theme, i.e. it’s fair.
Global Appreciation: EasyTube is a fantastic theme if you are looking to create an adult website with a great community. The potential for engagement is high with Buddy Press and what can only be qualified as social features.
The boxed layout might make or break this theme for some webmasters. If you don't mind, then going with this theme is a great choice.
Adult Themes #4: Play by TubeAce (FREE!)
If you’re just starting out and don’t have a budget for your Adult blog, no worries: TubeAce’s got your back!
The “Play” theme is an excellent choice to begin your journey in the adult industry.
Fastness: Being a minimalistic theme helps Play immensely in this department. The pages are lightweight for the most part. Unfortunately, the theme serves scaled images for the most part, which knocks it down a notch as far as PageRank is concerned. The solution would be to create your own thumbnails or import videos that use optimized thumbs.
Features: The Play theme comes with a wide array of customization options. You can change everything to match the visual style you aim for: content and sidebars layout, navigation bar options, background color, etc. While such options are often available with WordPress themes, we liked how well-organized they are displayed in the theme's admin area.
You can also choose to let users review videos and sort them by ratings. The theme is compatible with WooCommerce if you want to sell your own products, which is a plus.
Responsiveness: The Play theme is mobile-friendly thanks to a very simple interface built on Bootstrap. The videos are perfectly displayed on all devices. It doesn't look as sharp on portable devices, but that's an acceptable tradeoff in our opinion. Page weight is a bit high for mobile.
Price: Can’t really complain here, you get a functioning adult theme ... for free!
Global Appreciation: Play is a very nice alternative to a premium theme. Its minimalistic nature means you can focus on content. We are not fans of the default search bar placement (top right), but powerful customization tools combined with the WordPress architecture means you can change everything you want. If you are looking to mass upload videos, prepare to fork out $59.95 for the plugin.
A word of caution: support for this theme is almost non-existent. In fact, you can read what the users thought of this theme in our 2014 article. It works great for a basic website, but prepare to have to fix problems on your own unless you also happen to buy the script (but there are better choices around, such as the WP-Tube-Plugin...).
Adult Themes #5: PornX by Vicetemple ($99)
Vicetemple provides several services in various niches of the adult industry. With well over 1,400 clients from all over the world, you know they mean business.
Let’s see how their contender, PornX, measures up.
Fastness: During our testing, the theme and all of its media loaded almost instantly. That hasn’t changed after several cache clears.
Features: PornX offers complete visual customization, so one website that uses it can look drastically different from another. It includes an HTML5 video player, supports videos, images and GIFs, has the video trailer feature, and includes an advanced search option and a featured carousel.
In addition, the theme provides full ad support, features an SEO-friendly design, supports user uploads, and includes both page templates and nine existing demos. It also comes bundled with over $200 in premium plugins, such as Broken Video Finder, Video Player, Mass Grabber, and more.
Responsiveness: PornX runs just as well on desktop, phones, and tablets. We haven’t noticed any issues, which is a big plus.
Price: This is where things get a little less than ideal. Priced at $99, PornX is easily the most expensive theme on our list. However, since it provides a whole lot of value and comes with lifetime updates, you’ll likely get your money’s worth if you can foot that bill.
Global Appreciation: Despite its higher cost, we ended up liking PornX quite a bit. As we mentioned above, you get a huge bang for your buck, and with a proverbial buck of this size, that bang’s going to be massive.
Final Words
We hope finding your quest to find the best adult themes for your WordPress tube sites has been made easier with the help of our choices above.
Keep in mind that you get what you pay for, which doesn’t mean you have to ruin yourself either. As we’ve seen, sometimes you’ll manage with a free theme. The more features you need, the higher the cost. And that's not always taking into account hosting and other related fees.
Set some clear goals for yourself before looking for a theme. This way, it’ll be way easier when it comes to choosing the perfect theme with the features you need.
Unique themes are just the beginning. What really drives traffic - thus sales - to your website and/or brand is content.
Of course ... it helps to be aware of upcoming challenges in the adult affiliate business as a whole.
Do you know of some quality adult themes for WordPress that we didn’t list? Feel free to share your findings in the comments section below.
Don’t agree with our list? We also love constructive criticism!
