15 Beautiful Horizontal Scrolling WordPress Themes
Many designers and other creative individuals use horizontal scrolling WordPress themes to differentiate their online presence from the others with conventional navigation setup.
Horizontal scrolling in web design is not a commonplace phenomenon. Right now its use can be seen in the portfolios of some of some artists who see their website as a demonstration of their creative abilities. Since it is not a mainstream practice in web design, those who embrace horizontal scrolling are living the impression that someday it will gain widespread use and familiarity from the audience. Basically, horizontal scrolling is not applicable in all types of websites. They are commonly used in galleries and portfolios and not in text rich websites such as blogs. Indeed, from usability perspective, horizontal scrolling may not be the easiest to use but it reeks of creativity and innovation that artists love. It is daring, artsy and definitely out of the box. Here are the horizontal scrolling WordPress themes that you can use to start that creative website you have been longing to have.
Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you visit those links and purchase the product you find, I will earn a commission without additional cost on your part. Before making any purchase I encourage you to evaluate the products or services on your own. This post is not meant to endorse or to recommend particular items.
Acid – Unique Horizontal Blog and Portfolio Theme
Acid is a love child of Metro and One-Page Designs that you already adore. To take that even further, Acid is loaded with the following features: One-Page Horizontal Layout, Responsive Design, Unique Portfolio Layout, Unlimited Color Options, Mini Parallax, Unlimited Scroll and more.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Fluxus – Portfolio Theme for Photographers
Fluxus is a magazine inspired WordPress theme. It features a portfolio horizontal layout, which allows you to showcase your work side by side. Just like we are used to see it in print. It focuses on big images, minimal design, beautiful typography, so that your art is free to stand out.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Activate – Creative and Responsive WordPress Theme
Activate from is a modern and sleek WordPress theme designed to look and feel like an interactive magazine with a twist. It is a jQuery and Ajax powered theme, resulting in an uninterrupted user experience that can only be understood by feeling it in action. The theme utilizes a unique horizontal scrolling layout that is sure to catch the attention of anyone that uses it. It is the perfect theme to showcase your detailed portfolio, business, or anything creative!
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Alpha – Horizontal WordPress HTML 5 Portfolio Theme with Instagram Feed
Alpha is a uniquely designed wordpress theme that is fully-horizontal with scrollable columns. It is packed with features like instagram feedunlimited color customizations, unlimited columns and a stylish portfolio. Alpha goes far beyond traditional portfolio templates, and attempts to showcase the whole person, not just their work. By combining real-time social lives with portfolio and blog, you can see more of what that person is about. Alpha is designed to be a story, not just a website…an expression, not just a portfolio.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio
Core is the Minimalist Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features such as custom post type, image uploader and etc.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Reversal – Horizontal One Page WordPress Theme
Reversal is a clean, minimal and elegant one page portfolio WordPress Theme suitable for any kind of creative and business use. The theme features optional one page structure with cool side-to-side page scrolling transitions. The theme is fully responsive and has been optimized for tablet and mobile platforms. Reversal also employs compression of all CSS/JavaScript ensuring lightning fast page loading times, so your visitors are not kept waiting.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Diablo – Eye-candy Minimal Responsive WP Theme
Diablo is an eye-candy minimal and responsive WordPress theme build to power personal blogs / magazines, concerts or night clubs, complex photography or images related sites. The theme comes with several eye-candy loading effects and lets you choose several parallax-scrolling effects for your posts. Also, you can choose between the vertical and horizontal layouts and opt for infinite scrolling or pagination.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Sideways Portfolio Website WordPress Theme
Sideways is a portfolio theme that offers both horizontal and grid layouts. It incorporates eye catching full screen background images that scale to fit all resolutions and window sizes as well as strong and elegant typography and design.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Parkour – Unique Horizontal Layout With Options
Parkour is a unique, horizontally built, fully responsive theme for WordPress. Parkour has all of the standard features of a WordPress Blog, but also includes a lot of options and features.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Crea WP
Crea WP is a flash-like WordPress premium theme. It utilizes the power of HTML5 to bring you stunning animated transitions between pages, awesome parallax backgrounds and 2 unique sliders (fade- and carousel-mode).
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
The Curator: Premier WP Timeline Theme for Artists
The Curator is a premier timeline theme for WordPress. This theme was built for artists and/or museums that want to display their work with a chronological focus. Even if you’re not an artist and just want to show historical content in a timeline, this theme is for you.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Shelf WordPress Theme
Shelf makes it simple to post any type of content: videos, quotes, links, images, and audio files. Each format has a unique style, tailored to the media you post. This makes for an extremely streamlined and enjoyable reading experience. Your fans will have a blast watching video, listening to music, and reading articles on your website.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Studio Zen Fullscreen Portfolio WordPress Theme
Studio Zen is a powerful theme for photographers and creative artists. It features Fullscreen slideshows with audio. Video fullscreen playback for Vimeo, Flash, Youtube and HTML5 videos. Fullscreen Focus view toggle clears other elements for best view of fullscreen slideshows.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Stuff
Stuff is a horizontal-oriented WordPress theme created mostly for portfolios and blogs.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Urban Free WordPress Theme
Urban is a free WordPress theme from Paul Bennett, based around the idea of having posts displayed in a timeline. It features a scrolling timeline, inline loading of posts, pages, images and Youtube videos, realtime search that displays results as you type, tracking of your recently viewed pages, and other footer modules including twitter updates and last.fm recently played tracks.
– COMPLETE INFO & DEMO
Written by Sonny M. Day
Sonny is a freelance web developer who specializes in creating WordPress websites for clients. Aside from his passion for coding, he also writes interesting topics about graphic and web design, photography, social media and anything creative. He has also appreciates humor, eco-adventures, and anything along that line.
Dear Sonny, I’m an illustrator looking to do a wordpress site on my own. I did a search back in August of 2013 on great horizontal scrolling wordpress templates and came across Highlight. The one you reference in the blog. I bought the template and after buying come to find that the creator no longer supports the template. But I carried on, even though that’s disturbing. He did mention that he’d still do updates…?
Well put my stuff up with the Highlight template at the end of August with no support and by the end of november the template, which has had no update has been destroyed by spyware. It has overloaded my web server 3 times in CPU minutes shutting it down each time. All the data shows is that spyware robots have infiltrated the template and forcing me to give up on it. I think you have an obligation to let people know on this blog what is at stake when it comes to the Highlight template and it’s lack of support and updates. It’s outright criminal that he’s getting $40 and no support.
Sincerely,
Roberto Parada
Hi Roberto,
I’m sorry to hear about the theme you are referring to. As is appears, you are complaining about Highlight from Shaken and Stirred Web. Basically, this is a third party theme and as such, we do not have control as to its maintenance or in this instant case, support. We appreciate your gesture of informing us about the apparent lack of support from the concerned theme provider thus making other readers of our website aware and so become guided.
As a rule, we do not warrant or guarantee that products and services offered by third party websites are free from any flaw or defect. We are laying this expressly on our affiliate disclaimer and in our Terms of Use.
In the case at hand, it is our submission that the responsibility of checking the quality of products and services before any purchase lies on the visitors of our site. Further, I agree that deriving money without offering support on a theme is unfair and it is a sufficient ground for further action as the purchaser of the theme may see fit. On our side, we have updated the above post and we have removed the theme subject of your complaint. We always want quality themes to be the only ones included in our theme showcases and so the removal of any theme containing serious infirmity is warranted. Thank you so much for making us informed.