Retro and vintage website templates are the one design niche where looking right and loading fast pull against each other. The period look comes from display typefaces, paper and grain textures, hand-drawn elements and full-bleed photography, and every one of those is weight.
So that is the thing to judge these five on. A retro template that takes four seconds to paint on a phone has not delivered the aesthetic. It has delivered a blank screen, followed by the aesthetic.
What makes a retro template heavy, and what to do about it
Three things, in the order they cost you:
- Display and script fonts. Period lettering is the whole look, and custom fonts hold text back until they load. Self-host the files rather than calling a third-party service, and load only the weights you use. Two is usually enough; these templates often ship six.
- Texture and grain overlays. Paper grain, halftone dots and film noise are usually large images tiled across full-width sections. A small tiling texture costs almost nothing. A full-width one costs a lot. Check which the demo uses.
- Full-bleed hero photography. Vintage-styled photos are the single largest file on most of these demos. Serve them at the size they display at, in a modern format, and let the theme lazy-load anything below the fold.
None of that is exotic, and it is the difference between a template that keeps its charm on a phone and one that does not. If speed is the main worry, our collection of the fastest WordPress themes comes at the problem from the other end.
5 vintage and retro website templates for WordPress
Each template below ships a complete demo you can import. As you read, note how heavily each leans on fonts, textures and full-width imagery, because that is what you will be tuning once it is installed.
1. VintWood
VintWood definitely has a design that’s not only retro but also very stylish.
With two different pre-built website demos, VintWood works well for creating an online portfolio or studio site as well as launching an online presence for a party or club night. However, as this theme also has a full set of blog templates and ecommerce layouts, you can also use VintWood to create a retro blog or a vintage online store. In fact, with so many stylish blog templates to choose from, VintWood makes adding a blog to your website very straightforward.
If you check out the VintWood demos, you’ll see that all of the page elements have been designed in the retro style. This approach extends to the menu items, background graphics, and footer areas, ensuring your website has a consistent look throughout. However, if you need to make any changes to your website when using this theme, the powerful WPBakery Page Builder plugin is included at no extra charge.
Despite having a retro design, the feature list of this theme is fully modern and up to date. Among the reasons to choose this theme are the premium slideshow builder tool that can be used to add a slider to your website, the powerful set of theme options that make it possible to customize almost every aspect of your website, and the library of over 20 templates for all the pages your site is likely to need. Some examples of these templates include the services, pricing, and team member layouts that can help you add these useful pieces of content to your site in just a few clicks.
VintWood has enough templates and features to make it suitable for creating almost any type of retro website with WordPress.
2. Retrolie
Retrolie has a large library of retro-styled vintage homepage layouts for you to work with.
Due to the styling of this theme, Retrolie could appeal to those offering vintage-related services, such as design work, restorations, retro photography, or classic decoration. Content creators, such as bloggers should find this theme and its library of layouts interesting too. However, as this is a versatile theme if you want your website to have a retro look, no matter what the purpose of your site, you should definitely check out the Retrolie demo to get a better idea of what this template can do.
While the theme demo does look great, it’s just a suggested way to use Retrolie. Thanks to the inclusion of the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin, it doesn’t take much effort to customize this theme or use it as the foundation for your own unique retro website design. Making other changes to your site isn’t a problem either with Retrolie. Simply open up the theme options and controls from inside your WordPress dashboard to start changing colors, fonts, and other settings.
If you want to sell products from your website, such as physical items or digital downloads, Retrolie has all the ecommerce templates you should need. Just activate the free WooCommerce plugin on your site, and you should have a basic online shop up and running, complete with a retro design. As everything about this theme is mobile-friendly, your customers can make purchases on smartphones just as easily as they can on laptops and other large-screen devices.
Retrolie does a good job of combining a modern set of features with a retro design.
3. Wild Book
Wild Book is another retro WordPress theme for bloggers that has a stylish vintage design.
The key characteristic of the Wild Book theme is probably its large sidebar area that’s used to display the main menu and links to other parts of your website. By default, the width of the sidebar area probably takes up about 30 percent of the available space, however, the presets make it easy to increase or decrease the width of this part of your site to get your blog looking exactly how you want it.
In the Wild Book demo, you can see this large sidebar navigation area being used in a number of different ways. Some examples include displaying a nice photo as a background image, using a photo of yourself as the background display, or adding a snowfall animation effect to this panel to give your site a winter look. If you ever need to publish any content without the sidebar, there’s a full-width template for that, helping you to avoid distracting your readers.
Although there isn’t the type of widget-ready sidebar area that you see on many blogs, you can display widgets in the footer of your site. This gives you an easy way to display dynamic links to other parts of your site, a bio section, or an email opt-in form widget. Any widgets that have been added to your site via the plugins you’ve installed can also be added to the footer of your site with Wild Book.
As the Wild Book retro theme has been built to make good use of the latest version of the WordPress editor, you get access to some useful elements and blocks. Thanks to this, adding galleries, including carousel and masonry galleries, to your content via the WordPress editor is very straightforward. There are also nicely formatted blocks for inserting quotes and lists into your blog posts and pages.
Wild Book keeps things clean and simple while still delivering a genuinely vintage and retro design.
4. Cabin
Cabin has an impressive selection of stylish vintage website demos for a range of projects.
Cabin could be one of the most versatile options in this collection of the best retro WordPress themes, thanks to its large library of pre-built website templates. The Cabin demos don’t just look different from each other, but they also should work well for a varied range of websites. The pre-built demos include an online store template with vintage or retro styling, an online photography portfolio mode that’s ideal for showing off your work, and a business-focused design that should be able to help you promote yourself and your services online. There are other demos too, so be sure to check out the online preview of this theme.
If you can’t decide on just one demo to import, that’s ok, because this theme makes it very easy to combine the features and templates of the individual demos to create your own unique vintage website with Cabin. Those seeking a bespoke design for their website should also find Cabin a good choice due to its theme options control panel that lets you customize the global settings of your site with ease. The integrated premium page builder plugin should come in handy too.
Other features that might be of interest include animated effects that are used to catch the attention of your visitors, a fully mobile-responsive design to ensure smartphone users can easily access your website, and social media buttons that can encourage your visitors to share your content with their followers. Everything about this theme is well documented too, so if you’re new to WordPress then you should find that the easy-to-follow instructions help you get up to speed.
With so many pre-built vintage website demos to choose from, this retro theme should work well for your site.
5. Hipster
Hipster has a fully responsive design that includes plenty of customization options, including more than 30 background patterns, full screen rotating background images, and two layout styles (stretched or boxed). The retro-styled theme also comes with WooCommerce integration for online sales, is retina-ready and includes several premium sliders. The theme includes multiple post formats and staff and portfolio layouts for companies or small businesses.
FAQs about retro and vintage website templates
What makes a website template look retro or vintage?
Mostly typography and texture: display or script lettering from the period, muted or washed palettes, paper and grain overlays, and photography treated to look aged. The layout is usually conventional. The styling does the work.
Are retro WordPress themes slow?
They can be, because the look depends on custom fonts, texture overlays and large imagery. None of it is unavoidable. Self-host fonts, limit the weights, use small tiling textures rather than full-width ones, and serve images at display size.
Can I make a modern theme look vintage instead?
Yes, and for a simple site that is often the better route. A lightweight theme plus a period typeface and a muted palette gets most of the way. A dedicated retro template saves you the design decisions, which is what you are really buying.
Do retro themes work for online stores?
Several do, and the ones supporting WooCommerce will run a shop perfectly well. Check the product and checkout pages in the demo rather than just the homepage, because those are the pages a period template most often leaves plain.
What is the difference between retro and vintage styling?
In practice the terms overlap and most templates cover both. Judge on the decade the demo evokes and whether it suits your subject, rather than on which word the template uses about itself.
Choosing your retro template
Shortlist on the demo that matches the era you are after, then check font loading and texture files before you commit. Those two decide whether the design survives a phone on a slow connection, which is where most of your visitors will meet it.
For neighbouring looks, our magazine themes and personal blog themes both include designs that lean period without committing to it.
