The WordPress market is constantly replenished with high-quality templates, while most of them (90%) are developed in the West and therefore focused on English-language projects. Such templates are great for creating Russian sites, but you need to spend enough time on translation and adaptation of the WordPress theme.
In this review, I want to tell you about Russian WordPress templates made by tough guys from the Russian web development studio. These products were originally sharpened for Russian-language sites, so they are much easier to configure than Western counterparts.
5 best Russian WordPress templates for blog, magazine, culinary site, viral content and any Russian language project.
1. Reboot – the new flagship
A great template that is suitable for both a blog and a multi-page website with landing page output. My blog actualthemes.com is made on this template. And if you want to learn how to create sites on this template, you can study the documentation or see a separate review of the Reboot template.
Many built-in functions are already in the template:
- Feedback form
- Content
- Number of views
- Basement Widgets
- Widgets in the header
- Social Media Buttons
- Rating
2. Root – a template for the blog
Eco-friendly universal WordPress template for creating a media site or blog.
Monetization is facilitated by 6 ad units with the option of delayed publication. The template supports the q2w3 plugin, which means that the advertising banner can be fixed if desired, and it will not disappear when scrolling. With Root, you have the right to choose in which parts of the article teaser ads will appear. In the mobile version, it is allowed to use separate settings.
For the convenience of promoting through social networks in Root, built-in “Share” buttons are available. For the standard version of the site, these are buttons of 6 popular social media, for the mobile – buttons of three chat applications.
Other features:
- The publication format allows the use of a wide title picture.
- Sidebar that can connect and disconnect separately for each section.
- Three design options for displaying a list of posts.
- Widget with previews of posts for the sidebar.
- Separate blocks for placing analytics code and counters in the admin panel.
- Adding a link to the content source after the text.
An additional advantage of the template is the support for the SEO plugin of Yoast. Styles of the navigation element – breadcrumbs and priority rubrics are included in the theme.
So far, Root has 3 demos. Root Template Overview
3. JournalX – Theme for the magazine
WordPress theme for news portal, online magazine, websites with media content. The main feature of the template is endless scrolling with automatic loading of content both in the lists of posts on the main and in the archive, and on a separate publication page.
In the case of directories, 5 grid options are available for displaying post cards made on grid layout and css. The loaded content is easily lined up on the selected grid. Upon reaching the bottom of the page with the full text of the post, the text of the next article is loaded. Looking through posts one by one, the user stays on the page longer.
Information blocks with stylish icons will help to attract the reader’s attention – they break the text, making it more readable.
Other trending elements that have found application in the theme: pop-up search, a floating sidebar on the internal pages, the “Related Materials” block, a record viewing counter, social buttons for reposts.
Under advertising in JournalX 8 positions are allocated. Presented 1 demo site.
4. CookIt – culinary website template
Culinary WordPress template for cool recipes and food blog sites.
An important function of this wodpress theme is to make the process of adding recipes as comfortable as possible. The admin panel has special fields for the names of ingredients, their quantity and units. You can swap the lines of ingredients by dragging them and add separators between them (“For the test”, “For the cream”, etc.). For each step of the recipe there is a separate field that can be accompanied by a picture, the order of steps can also be changed by dragging and dropping.
In the preview cards and on the recipe page, there are such elements as: the number of persons for which the dish is designed, the approximate cooking time, the number of comments and views. You can add videos to the recipe page, as well as use the option to select the number of servings, which will proportionally increase the number of ingredients.
Users will be able to send the recipe for printing using a special button, share it on social networks through the buttons of the built-in widget, rate the recipe on a 5-point scale and leave comments.
Blocks are added to the sidebar, such as Popular materials and Recipes of the week. For the recording pages, 2 options for displaying the header image are prepared: standard and with a large picture.
The theme uses its own widgets. Placement of banners is possible in 7 predefined ad units.
Along with the Russian WordPress theme at your disposal is a quality demo site, ready for customization. This is a site with copyright recipes, but it easily adapts to the blog.
For recipes, as well as for the whole site, the micro-markup schema.org is used, which has a very beneficial effect on how search engines see your culinary site.
5. Yelly – website template for viral content
Russian WordPress template for projects with viral content, i.e., fascinating materials that users actively share on social networks. Due to the involvement of users, such a site receives excellent traffic.
The task of the template is to help you monetize this traffic through a thoughtful advertising management system, offering:
- 12 ready-made spots for placing banners, the number of which during the last update included 5 new positions (on the main, under the header, in the archive section, after each of the first three paragraphs and in the middle of the article). The main ad unit is designed for the popular image size of 728 × 90.
- Flexible output settings: different banners can be placed in the mobile and desktop versions of the site.
- The ability to make the banner “sticky” when scrolling through the use of the q2w3 widget, with which the theme is fully compatible.
Yelly allows you to add to the site such useful options as a menu that is fixed when scrolling, displaying short quotes under article headings, blocks with cards of the best and random publications.
Interaction with social networks:
- Support for facebook widgets, including for the Share and Like buttons, and also for replacing standard comments with facebook comments.
- A set of custom buttons for reposting to popular social networks.
- Social buttons that pop up when you hover over pictures and at the end of youtube videos.
- UTM tags for facebook links to help identify traffic sources.
The web template has been set more than 150 times, the attendance of some projects reaches 20,000 people per day. Available 1 demo site.
“Why even spend money on templates if the Internet is full of free options?” – a question may arise. Free templates have many disadvantages, let’s look at the main ones.
Cons of free templates
The main disadvantage of free templates is their vulnerability. If you download free themes not from the official site, but from numerous directory sites, or find premium themes in the public domain, it’s worth considering who posted them and why.
When downloading free themes from similar resources, you may encounter problems such as:
- Spam links, one of the tools of the “black” seo. These are “hidden” links that merge with the background or are placed in a 1px block. They are added by code from php WordPress files at the time of page loading. Thus, someone promotes their projects, spinning up indicators, and your site in the end is likely to fall under the filters of search engines.
- Malicious Scripts that provide attackers with access to manage your site: web shells and backdoors.
- Critical level vulnerabilities in the timthumb.php script. The task of this script often used by developers is to scale images. The problem is that its old version (up to 2.8.13 inclusive) due to existing vulnerabilities allows the launch of arbitrary code on the pages of the site and uploading files to the hosting.
- Template not adapted for SEO. No matter how much you publish quality content, no one will see it.
- Few settings. You want to add information to the basement, header or other part of the site, but on a free template you can only do this in code.
If you have any questions when working with the template, as well as for implementing non-standard functionality, you still have to involve programmers. You can rely on the WordPress community, but getting help on all issues is not guaranteed.
Benefits of wpshop templates
The store offers quality themes, worked out to the smallest detail. Their main advantages:
- Adaptability and focus on mobile first (mobile version is a priority). Layout and styles of themes correspond to modern web standards and guarantee comfortable work with the site on screens of any resolution. This is very important for a growing audience of mobile users, as well as for owners of computers with a large monitor. All images, videos and blocks are absolutely adaptive.
- Comprehensive SEO Optimization, semantic code with schema.org micro-markup. When developing the site, all important points and effective practices were taken into account that will help the project quickly rise to the top of search engine results. For example, such points as: the correct placement and use of headings, the use of alternative headings, displaying the section description only on the first page, the absence of unnecessary internal links and the exclusion of external ones were taken into account. You save up to 300$ on SEO audit of each site.
- Flexibility of settings. Depending on the type of site, some of the functions presented may not be relevant, and you can simply turn them off.
- Clean and fast code. For templates, heavy frameworks and libraries are not used that can affect the site’s performance.
- Quality typography. Proven fonts, honed line spacing, text formatting, use of a reader-friendly width of the text block.
- Inline feedback form.
- Ready places for advertising. There are several positions for the placement of advertising banners. In addition, you can control the display of ads by disabling it in certain sections or replacing an alternative in the mobile version.
- Technical support. Comprehensive documentation is provided for exploring the theme configuration. Your question asked through the ticket system will not be left without attention, and will be considered in priority order.
- Free updates. Throughout the existence and support of the theme, all updates are available for free.
- Continuous theme improvement. Based on the feedback received and user suggestions, the developers complement the theme with requested options, expanding the existing functionality.
- Useful elements for content design:
- Spoilers for hiding parts of the text.
- Three types of information blocks.
- Retina emoticons in the comments.
- The presence of the “Up” button.
- Custom styles for tables and lists, suitable for the overall design.
- HTML site map.
If you want to get the most out of your website, then pay attention to the Clearfy Pro plugin, which is also in the arsenal of developers.
Clearfy Pro Plugin
The wpshop store features not only themes, but also the premium Clearfy Pro plugin for WordPress. It is designed in accordance with the concept of “maximum performance, comprehensive optimization, minimum load.”
This plugin performs seo site preparation and conducts a security audit, as a result of which there are improvements on 49+ points.
On the page with the description of the plugin, you can check your site for errors for free.
What Clearfy Pro does:
- Cleans the site: removes technical pages, redundant code, unnecessary styles, outdated connected files. As a result, clean code remains, pages weigh less.
- Pumps SEO: puts the necessary headers and attributes, closes external links, generates a robots.txt file, minimizes html code, hides the pagination page from indexing, when using an SSL certificate, it sets a redirect to https.
- Corrects the shortcomings of the Yoast SEO plugin: removes unnecessary comments and tags, eliminates duplicate names in breadcrumbs and allows you to replace them with the value of the meta title tag.
- Eliminates duplicate pages and tags.
- Protects the site: hides the administrator’s login, version of WP, version of scripts and styles, extra data from the text of authorization errors, a link to X-Pingback to prevent spam attacks.
- Protects content: blocks selection of text, context menu and hot keys, adds a link to the source when copying.
- Helps set up a redirect and hide affiliate links.
- Replaces the Russian names of downloaded files and permalinks to the Latin alphabet using transliteration.
- Displays notifications about the use of cookies on the site.
- Keeps a log of fixed 404 errors.
- Disables the avatar generator for Gravatar commentators.
- Disables RSS, sending notifications about installing WordPress updates, unused widgets.
- Hides the “Site” field from the comment form.
- Disables saving editions of records or reduces their number to the last 3-5, freeing up space in the database.
- Removes links to documentation, wordpress.org, and community forums from the administration panel.
- Allows you to copy existing settings for using the plugin on another site.
- Removes the top admin panel when viewing the site as an authorized user.
The considered WordPress templates made in Russia can be purchased under several license options: for one domain, for three, and for any number of domains. The plugin is available under two licenses – for 1 domain and for an unlimited number of domains. Clearfy Pro Plugin Overview
I hope this review helped you in choosing a suitable template for launching a Russian-language project. If you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them in the comments. It would also be interesting to know which template you have chosen for yourself.
