On Blackshaw Hill, near the village, sits a Neolithic cup-and-ring marked stone carved with three spirals, an unusual variant of a familiar prehistoric motif whose meaning has been argued about for centuries. Iron Age fortifications turned up when the house called The Fort went in on Ardrossan Road in Seamill. The village name itself is generally believed to commemorate the Celtic Saint Brigid of Kildare, often known as St Bride, and local legend has her landing here around 500 AD to found a church, supposedly in front of where the Seamill Hydro now stands. The 'West' was added in the eighteenth century to distinguish this Kilbride from the larger settlement in South Lanarkshire. There has been a hamlet here since 82 AD, when the Roman general Agricola is said to have stationed thirty thousand troops in the area now called Gateside, and Roman finds have been turning up in Ayrshire museums ever since. William Wallace's uncle Crauford had an estate at Corsbie north of the village, still in use as the Crosby caravan park, and Robert the Bruce later granted the Barony of Kilbride to the Boyds of Kilmarnock.

Like much of Ayrshire, West Kilbride was a weaving village in the eighteenth century. Cottage looms made cloth for the Glasgow and Paisley markets, and the rhythm of the loom shuttle was, for generations, the dominant sound of the place. Two castles flank the village. Law Castle, a simple rectangular structure with sloping roof and tall chimneys, has been substantially restored in recent years and now functions as a holiday let. Portencross Castle stands right at the sea, four storeys high and L-shaped, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and the Firth crashing at its doorstep. In December 2005 ownership of Portencross and its grounds was given to the group Friends of Portencross Castle, who have been steadily working on its preservation since. Just up the coast, the Hunterston B nuclear power station and the Hunterston Terminal owned by Clydeport bring the twenty-first century right to West Kilbride's doorstep, and a 24 MW wind farm has run on Busbie Muir since February 2004.

West Kilbride's most recent reinvention has been as Craft Town Scotland. The village now hosts a cluster of craft shops and studios, with the Barony Craft Centre, a converted 19th-century church, as its £1.7 million showpiece since 2012. In September 2006, the project won the Department of Trade and Industry's Enterprising Britain competition. Alistair Darling, then a senior cabinet minister, came to present the award and praised the community's resourcefulness. In January 2012 the project picked up another £100,000 award from Creative Scotland. The annual Scarecrow Festival, the first in Scotland, foster community spirit while honouring the village's agricultural roots. Yuletide Night, held on the first Friday of December, closes Main Street and Glen Road to traffic so that a procession of children can follow Santa to the village hall, with stalls and fairground rides spread along the street. These are small festivals. They are also exactly the kind of community ritual a village this size needs to keep itself coherent.

West Kilbride has produced a surprising density of notable people. Nicola Benedetti, who won BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004 at the age of sixteen and has since become one of the most prominent violinists of her generation, was born here. John Boyd Orr, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949 for his work on world nutrition, spent most of his childhood in the village. The mathematician Robert Simson, whose work on Greek geometry earned him a memorial plate in the village describing him as the Restorer of Grecian Geometry, was born in West Kilbride. Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, a controversial First World War commander, lived here. The judo gold medallist Loretta Doyle, the open-water swimmer Andy Donaldson, the concert pianist Roy Howat, and the artist Alasdair Grant Taylor all carry West Kilbride in their biographies. The village is also, according to a 2004 Ministry of Defence report cited in the source article, one of the UK's leading UFO hotspots. Make of that what you will.