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BuddyBoss Theme Review: A Premium Theme For Community Websites

Updated on January 12, 2022

8 Min Read
buddyboss Theme Review

Choosing the right WordPress theme is as important as building your website. The overall design and functionality of the theme you choose are important to make your business stand out from the rest. BuddyBoss, among the thousands of themes you’ll find on the internet, is one of those that can help your website look far more attractive to your visitors.

With the rise of online communities, membership sites, and eLearning sites, the BuddyBoss Theme has become increasingly popular for digital entrepreneurs and organizations. Online communities have become a necessity now more than ever, and businesses thrive when they launch a community around their brand. So how exactly can the BuddyBoss Theme help you achieve your business goals?

There are plenty of reasons why BuddyBoss is a great theme and can help you achieve your goals, so let’s look at those reasons.

BuddyBoss Performance Benchmarks

Following are the server and application configurations.

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Cloudways Server Configurations

  • Cloudways Server: Vultr – High Frequency
  • RAM: 4GB
  • SSD Disk: 128GB
  • Bandwidth Transfer: 3TB
  • Processor: 2 Core
  • Operating System: Debian 9
  • NGINX: 1.14.1
  • Varnish: 5.0.0
  • Apache: 2.4.25
  • Database: MariaDB 10.4
  • PHP-FPM: 7.4

Application Configurations

  • WordPress Version: 5.7.2
  • CDN: CloudwaysCDN
  • SSL: Lets Encrypt
  • BuddyBoss Version: 1.6.6

Installed Plugins

Loader.io Test

  • Tested Pages: 3
  • Test type: Maintain Client Load
  • Clients: 0 to 1000
  • Duration: 5 Mins

performance benchmark for buddyboss

GTmetrix Test

buddyboss gtmetrix

Membership and Community Sites

buddyboss theme social timeline feeds

BuddyBoss allows you to attract potential members and students through user-generated content and keep them on your site using powerful social features. Not only can your members and students create their own profiles and message each other, but they can join and create groups, view recent interactions through activity feeds, upload documents and media, and so much more.

Online Learning Sites

With BuddyBoss, you can create a community around your students and content. There are activity feeds, groups, and discussion forums where students can help each other, discuss challenges and solutions, brainstorm ideas, and do a lot more around the idea of learning.

With BuddyBoss, you can build an online community that sells memberships and courses, all in one place. The theme works out of the box and is fully customizable to your brand.

1. BuddyBoss for Membership Sites

The BuddyBoss Theme fully integrates with popular membership plugins such as MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, WishList Member, WooCommerce Memberships, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and Memberium. By combining the features of BuddyBoss with a membership plugin, you can easily manage and sell memberships, restrict access to content and certain pages or areas of your website, process payments, and do a lot more.

2. BuddyBoss for Online Communities

Like Facebook, you can now create and customize your own social network with BuddyBoss. Many community builders choose the BuddyBoss theme because of its beautiful and intuitive design and integrated gamification that helps boost community engagement and member retention.

3. BuddyBoss for Online Courses

The BuddyBoss Theme also stands out because of its powerful Learning Management System (LMS) capabilities. The eLearning WordPress theme integrates leading LMS (such as LearnDash and LifterLMS) as key components of its eLearning solution. BuddyBoss for Online Courses allows mentors, coaches, creators, and teachers to turn their knowledge and expertise into profitable digital courses easily. When choosing a lms hosted for a BuddyBoss LMS, it is important to consider factors such as server performance, scalability, and technical support. A good LMS hosting provider should have experience with BuddyBoss and be able to provide the necessary resources to ensure that your LMS runs smoothly and effectively.

LearnDash WordPress Theme

BuddyBoss fully integrates with LearnDash, allowing you to build a full-fledged online learning website quickly. The theme for LearnDash enables you to create and sell courses using the drag-and-drop online course builder, create quizzes, drip-feed learning content, and so much more.

BuddyBoss for LifterLMS

BuddyBoss fully supports LifterLMS. LifterLMS combined with BuddyBoss’ built-in community features contributes to higher student engagement and retention. BuddyBoss for LifterLMS allows you to create and sell courses, share your knowledge, and even launch your community. LifterLMS comes with its own built-in membership system allowing you to sell access to your courses through memberships.

BuddyBoss Platform vs BuddyBoss Theme: What’s The Difference?

The BuddyBoss Platform is a plugin that powers all the social features of your website. Meanwhile, the BuddyBoss Theme is a WordPress theme that styles all that functionality. Together, you get a beautiful theme that complements the BuddyBoss Platform. Both the BuddyBoss products are easy to install and set up and have a wide range of customization options to suit your brand.

BuddyBoss Features

Works with Major WordPress Plugins

One of the theme’s standout features is that it works with leading WordPress plugins on the market. It is fully compatible with your favorite membership plugins and learning management systems to give you even more options for the type of website you want to create.

BuddyBoss fully supports LearnDash and LifterLMS for creating and selling online courses, GamiPress for awarding points and badges based on user activity, and WooCommerce for creating a customizable eCommerce platform. BuddyBoss also recently announced the BuddyBoss App, a mobile solution that allows membership site owners, community builders, and online course creators to create and launch their own native mobile app for iOS and Android with their own branding.

Creating your WordPress pages is a breeze! The BuddyBoss Theme works with popular drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, and WPBakery. You can easily design your website pages without touching a line of code.

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The customization options are plenty, and BuddyBoss’ full integration with these page builders allows you to change colors and fonts easily, add widgets, and pick the perfect style for your website that best suits your brand.

Extra Features with Elementor

If you use Elementor as your website’s page builder, you can enjoy many custom features that are fully integrated with the BuddyBoss Theme. This makes the whole page-building process easier and more enjoyable with no coding experience.

Custom Elementor Widgets

BuddyBoss custom elementor widgets

The theme comes pre-loaded with bespoke Elementor widgets (different from the premium widgets with Elementor) that you can add to any of your content pages. Choose from fully-customizable widgets like the photo gallery widget, LearnDash courses widget, activity widget, profile completion widget, tabbed content widget, reviews widget, and more.

Plug & Play Sectionsâ„¢

You can also add pre-made, beautifully designed sections to your site pages. There are pricing sections, gallery sections, contact form sections, comparison tables, testimonials, and many more. These sections are fully customizable, and you can design the templates for your brand and add your content with ease.

The theme also allows you to personalize your members’ and students’ welcome experiences by creating a custom Member Dashboard or Learner Dashboard.

BuddyBoss theme learner dashboard

Member Dashboard

You can give your members a quick at-a-glance view of all their recent community activities and interactions and provide them with an easy way to see all the relevant information they need

Learner Dashboard

You can also display course progress, achievements, and activities to make learning more effective and enjoyable. You can also customize the dashboard by adding widgets to allow your members to view relevant and important information quickly.

Make Interactions Fun & Engaging

Using the theme’s built-in gamification features, you can encourage your members and students to interact more with your website. Members can earn points as they complete certain actions, like filling out their profiles completely, participating in forums, and more. Incentivize interactions with badges and rewards and give your members a sense of achievement.

Create exciting, entertaining, and educational content to make learning more effective and enjoyable for your students. Reward your students when they score a high grade on a quiz, let them know how well they did, and enable them to display their achievements on their profiles. You can also add points as students progress through their lessons so they can unlock more learning content. When students get excited about learning, they are more likely to retain information and complete their courses.

Gamification encourages your students to engage with your site while creating a better connection with the course material. With gamification comes the power to engage and retain your students, as each milestone completed is a certain point reached in the learner’s journey towards an end goal.

24/7 Support and an Extensive Library of Helpful Resources

BuddyBoss is dedicated to supporting the creation and growth of your community. Like any digital product you purchase, you could face some issues along the way. And solving such problems might be scary for different users. BuddyBoss provides a rich library of resources like narrated video tutorials, how-to guides, documentation, and articles to help you at every step. Moreover, every BuddyBoss customer gains access to 24/7 priority support, so if you have any clarifications, you can easily submit a ticket to their knowledgeable support team.

BuddyBoss vs SaaS Platforms

When you build your community, membership, or online course website using the BuddyBoss Theme, you have full control and freedom without being held back by a closed system like typical SaaS platforms. You can launch and scale a successful online business so much easier.

1. You have full control over your website

Being an open-source platform, WordPress gives you that control and freedom of owning the platform and gives you the flexibility of building anything you want with it. The BuddyBoss Theme is built on WordPress, an open-source platform, which means you can modify, add to, and make any changes to it. As you grow, BuddyBoss grows with you. You have the freedom to implement new tactics you learn, iterate, and improve.

2. You have the flexibility to add more features

You can extend your site’s feature set using other free and premium WordPress plugins. You can even build your own should you come across a unique scenario important for your website.

3. SaaS platforms hold you back

When you use a typical SaaS platform, you are limited to the features that come with the software, making it hard to customize how you want your site to function, and ultimately, it will be a challenge to grow. Migrations from SaaS platforms are also costly because you tend to settle with limited features for your website. Scaling your online business always comes with changes and improvements.

BuddyPress Theme Review: Pricing & Plans

BuddyBoss theme pricing plans

Over the years, BuddyBoss products have been used on tens of thousands of sites to help entrepreneurs and organizations build the perfect online community, membership site, or platform for their online courses.
BuddyBoss comes with different pricing plans based on the number of websites on which you want to use the theme.

For one site, the annual price is $228. For five sites, the annual price is $288. And for ten sites, the annual price is $328. You can view the complete pricing plans and buy the BuddyBoss Theme here.

BuddyBoss Review: Final Thoughts

The BuddyBoss Theme is designed with flexibility, allowing you to customize it for any membership site online community, and integrates perfectly with LMS plugins, Membership plugins, and page builders. Moreover, if you want to add pre-built powerful social and community features, the BuddyBoss Platform works seamlessly with the BuddyBoss Theme.

About BuddyBoss

We love helping businesses create and launch successful online communities, membership websites, and online learning platforms. Our products are used by top industry professionals and highly successful digital entrepreneurs like Adam Preiser from WPCrafter, Nathan Chan from Foundr Magazine, popular content creator Jay Shetty for his certification school, and more than 50,000 organizations all over the world.

Note: This article was published in collaboration with BuddyBoss.

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Mansoor Ahmed Khan

Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].

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