I’ve been running a marketplace on ExpertHive for a while and I’m happy with the functionality, but the default design is starting to feel dated compared to modern platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.
I want to give the site a more modern look — cleaner navbar, better typography, more whitespace, modern card styling — but I’m not sure what the best approach is:
Keep ExpertHive and customize via CSS + Customizer
Switch to a modern theme (like Astra, GeneratePress or Blocksy) and use HivePress as a plugin
Build a child theme on top of ExpertHive
Has anyone done a serious visual modernization of their HivePress site? What approach did you take and would you recommend it?
Main concern with option 2 is losing the native ExpertHive template integration — how well does HivePress actually work with third-party themes?
I’m not using ExpertHive, but I’ve managed to customised a lot of the HivePress pages in one way or another. You’ve already kind of answered your own question, and what I believe is the recommendation from HivePress themselves, too. - i.e Use CSS where possible and for larger changes create a child theme of ExpertHive.
It can be a bit confusing to figure out which files you’ll want to edit at first, but once you get a hang of it - you can follow the pattern to target pretty much anything. If something is ‘missing’ from a directory, you’ll likely find what you’re looking for in the most relevant HivePress extension.
I believe the answer depends on your coding expertise, whether you’re capable of doing customizations yourself, your available time, and budget. You can take a look at some examples on our showcase page to see that our themes can be changed drastically, if you’re familiar with coding, you can achieve significant transformations too.
Regarding third-party themes, while some themes like Astra work quite well with HivePress, CSS tweaks will likely be required because third-party themes can’t always recognize plugin elements properly, and layouts can end up looking pretty basic without additional styling work.
You can achieve quite a bit with CSS customization, cleaner navbar, better typography, more whitespace, modern card styling, all without breaking functionality. If you’re comfortable with CSS or can hire someone for custom CSS work, this could be cost-effective.
This can work, but you’ll likely spend time fixing layout issues and styling inconsistencies between the theme and HivePress elements.
This is the most flexible option if you have development skills or a budget for a developer. You get all the HivePress-specific functionality while having complete control over design. This gives you the best of both worlds but requires the most technical expertise.
You can also customize the theme with the help of AI assistants. They’re quite good at generating CSS customizations, especially if you give them specific classes and elements you need to target
