How to Upload and Sell Your Web Template on Themeforest

8 min readMar 13, 2023

Introduction

This article is a complete guide on uploading and selling your web templates on Themeforest.

What is Themeforest?

ThemeForest is an online marketplace where people buy and sell digital products related to web design and development. It’s part of the Envato Market and is a sub-product of Envato.

As a web developer, you can upload your web templates, WordPress themes, or plugins to Themeforest and reach an audience of potential buyers. And Themeforest handles the payment and distribution of your products, so all you have to do is create and upload your templates there, and then wait for the sales to roll in.

How much can you earn?

According to Envato, top-selling authors on the platform can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from their sales. Of course, most sellers earn more modest incomes, but Themeforest can still be a great source of passive income. My current month's sales were $5800k+ on the platform, before taxes.

Getting started with Themeforest

To start selling on ThemeForest, you need to create an Envato account. So go to the themeforest.net website and click on the “Sign In” button, choose “Create an Envato account” from here.

Fill in your details and click on “Create Account”

Uploading your template

Now that you created your Envato account, click on the account icon in the top right corner and go to your Dashboard.

Here you can see the “Upload your first item” button, click on it.

Selecting the category

On the next step, select the category of your item, if you’re a web developer you probably need to choose either “Site Template” if your item is an HTML template, or “WordPress” if it’s a WordPress Theme. Select the category and go to the next step

Providing information about your web template

The first part is providing information about your web template.

After that, you need to provide the name of your template which should be up to 100 characters — It will be displayed as the title of your template when buyers search for it

Next, you need to write 3 key features that your template has — if you’re not sure what to write — search for web templates in your category and you’ll get some idea

HTML Description is part of the template which explains to users what your template does and the features that it has — some sellers write a very long description with images and some sellers keep it short, it’s really up to you, the only requirement is that the description must be formatted in HTML tags

Uploading your template files to Themeforest

After you provided the necessary information — the second part is uploading your template files to Themeforest.

1. First, we need to upload a Thumbnail, which is your author’s logo that users will see on the right side of the template, the size of it must be 80x80 pixels and it must be in JPEG or PNG format. So upload the file using the “Choose File(s)” button and then select that file under the Thumbnail section

2. The second part is providing the Theme Preview, which is a large picture that demonstrates how your web template looks like, the size of it must be 590x300 pixels, and make sure that the naming is as they require — 01_filename.jpg or .png, if you have multiple thumbnails, you can submit all of them and ThemeForest reviewers will choose the one that they think is better.

We have to provide a zip folder of those files. So upload that zip file and choose it under the theme preview section

3. And the third step is to finally upload the web template, which is the zip of all the files that buyers will get when they purchase your template.

The file structure is up to you. My typical template structure is — I have 3 root directories — demo, documentation, and template

the demo folder is for buyers to customize this template and choose the final version
the documentation folder explains how to apply those customizations to the main template
and the template folder is the final template which they will deploy at the end

Now, we can upload that main zip file and choose it under the “Main File(s)”

The last “Theme” section is optional, in case you’re uploading a WordPress theme, you need to upload the theme here.

Selecting the category of our item and providing additional information

Choose the category of your template, if you’re not sure under which category you should publish, search for your competitor’s templates and you can see the category that they selected

For the “High Resolution” option you should choose “Yes”, this indicates that images and assets which are used in your template are in high resolution

Select the browsers which support your template, usually, you need to select Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox, and maybe Internet Explorer 11 version

Compatible with section shows what kind of frameworks you have used, for instance, you may have built your template with Angular, React or you may have used Bootstrap, if you didn’t use any framework just check the checkbox above it

Select what kind of files are included in this template, in my case, it is only HTML CSS and JS files

The “Columns” show how many pages your web template has

For the layout, I think if you choose anything else than Responsive your template will get rejected, you should upload only responsive web designs, and you need to choose Responsive here

If you have a deployed version, which will increase the chances of your web template being accepted and also for buyers to view the demo before buying, so I highly recommend you deploy your template somewhere and provide a demo URL here

And for the tags — provide them with up to 15 tags which will make your template more discoverable for the buyers

Under the “Supporting your item” section select whether you will support your item or not, this may be disabled for you, if that’s the case you need to go to your Profile and enable the item support under the Settings section.

Set the price of your template

In the last part, you need to set the price of your template.

Regular license means the one-time purchase price of your item, the price is totally up to you, but ThemeForest will also recommend you some range if you’re not sure how to position your item

Click on the “How much of this will I earn?” button to see how much you will actually earn, usually more than 50% of sales go to Themeforest, but that’s the fee that you have to pay to sell on their platform

An extended license means that you’re allowing the item to be used in multiple end products.

Upload 🚀

Add any comments that you might have for the reviewer under the “Comments” section.

You need to also check the checkbox below it which approves that you have the right to use all the images and assets which you have used in your template.

And that’s it click on the upload button!

Conclusion

Now your template has been submitted for review on Themeforest, you can see your queued items on the right side of your Dashboard.

If it’s a small template, typically they will get back to you within a week, but it might take them up to one month to review your item after which you will get a response to your email.

The response can be of 3 types

Hard Rejection — this one means that they didn’t like your template at all — whether it was of poor quality or they already have lots of items similar to yours
Soft Rejection — this is almost accepted, this means that they just need you to do some changes in the template, which they will mention in the email
Accepted — at which point your template is already selling on ThemeForest

Thanks for reading this far, and follow for more!