#1 Porto
Created by p-themes in December of 2014 this theme is top selling theme in Themeforest with over 22k sales and counting. New updates are released regularly that include not only bug fix or compatibility development but also new features and other improvements.
I believe that this theme is very popular because it offers over 30 different demos which makes it hard to not find one that suits your needs.
Installation
Installing Porto theme for Magento is pretty straightforward, except for the patches uploading step. Besides the main theme file there are a significant number of patches (more than 8 different ones) that need to be installed. I think the developers should have simplified this quite a bit because it is confusing to determine which patches to install and which to not.
After the upload step, installing the theme is just like any other magento extension, where you need to run a few commands in the command line.
Then just go to the admin and import the static blocks, pages and demo data for the demo you want to use (you will need to activate the theme to have access to this admin section). The theme is multisite ready, which means you can chose to which store view or website you want to make this installation.
Clear the cache and enjoy!
Customer Experience
Porto theme offers a lot of usual features that help to improve the customer experience while navigation at the website. These include a newsletter popup, banner and product slider, ajax quickview and add to cart (with a scrolling effect to the top after adding a product to the cart to display the mini cart popup), infinity scroll and ajax catalog filter with multiple option filter.
Design
Porto theme is one of the best themes in term of design versatility. It has skins created by eCommerce specialists for virtually any type of business, with more than 30 demos to choose from.
Also there are over 25 types of headers (that can be chosen via a dropdown in the admin) and a highly customizable footer with 4 different sections that can be turned on/off from the admin.
The product and category pages are also easily configured in the admin with more that 9 types for category pages available and a dropdown to choose the number of product columns. As for the product page, there are more than half of dozen major variations that can also be tweaked on several aspects, depending on the type chosen.
It is also possible to create custom static or attribute product tabs for the product page directly from the admin which is very handy if you need to show common or additional product related information on the product page.l
Ease of Use
Although the developers claim that on porto is easy to configure everything with absolutely no coding skill required I don’t think that this is actually true.
Yes, there is lot you can do on the admin with the need to go into “coding” but when it comes to actually putting content into the theme’s blocks you definitely need to know your HTML (and even some javascript).
The creation of a product slider is an example of this. There are no widgets for this and if you do not read the documentation you can’t even do it. This is done by copying raw HTML and javascript into the static blocks! This is a very low level approach for such a highly used feature.
Same goes for all the other theme block that are available. Either you use the demo HTML or you can’t get your content to show in the design that it should.
The megamenu feature is also very rudimentary. There is no visual assistant to do it and you will need to dive into HTML to make it happen, even for the simplest change.
Having said this, if you do know your “code” then you can easily customize every design to met your particular needs.
In terms of color pallete you have a wide range of options directly in the admin. There is also the possibility of adding custom css on the admin directly without the need to extend your theme through a custom css file.
A big pro is also the high number of 3rd party extensions that integrate out of the box with this theme’s design, namely Webkul Marketplace and CM Multivendor extension, IWD and Mageplaza Onestep Checkout and MagenFan Blog.
For more themes have a look at Themeforest and TemplateMonster.