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 enables developers to create app-like websites and improve the user experience.

In the WordPress ecosystem, the merge of the REST API into core 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 10WordPress themes built with React. They are just a starting point of what is possible with React in the context of theming.

10 WordPress themes built with React

1. Frontity

Frontity.org is built with WordPress and the React framework Frontity. The source code of this project is available on GitHub.

In the post Connecting Gutenberg and Frontity, we also walk you through the process and the steps we followed to build this React theme.

To learn more about how to create a React-based WordPress theme using Frontity Framework, please visit the docs and this step-by-step tutorial.

2. 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 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.

3. 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 downloads 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 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. 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 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
• 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 in 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 React 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, 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.

If you’re looking to explore adding React to WordPress theming, there’s no doubt that you will find some challenges. And there are still some questions about SEO, plugin compatibility, or the speed of initial load (among others) which have not been answered yet.

However, building WordPress themes with JavaScript tools like React 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 2018. Maybe it’s time to start getting familiar with it!

Other useful resources

In addition to the links provided throughout this post, here are some more interesting ones to get inspired:

• Using React with WordPress – Tutorials
• The ThemeShaper JavaScript Theme Tutorial
• The REST API (and How It Could Change WordPress Forever)

Do you know any other WordPress theme built with React? Feel free to share them with us!