Introduction:
The first thing someone notices when they land on your blog/site is your WordPress theme. While most people will not realize it’s a theme, they will subconsciously judge the appearance of your site in seconds.
People always judge a book by its cover. You could have the most informative and engaging content on your site, but if the appearance of your site is cluttered, clunky or messy, you can bet that your visitors will click off your page and go to another site.
Not only will you loose that visitor but your site’s bounce rate will be high and it’ll affect your posts’ rankings in the search engine. Which again will get you less visitors to begin with. That’s just how it is.
This is why it’s imperative that you choose a reliable and attractive WordPress theme for your site. It should be customizable, mobile-responsive, free of bugs, and load fast. These are just some of the requirements.
· Looks & Functionality
If you blindly went searching for WordPress themes, you’d be overwhelmed by the sheer variety of choices you have. Many themes will look great, but that doesn’t mean they work great.
A theme is about more than just aesthetics. The design should help to convert visitors into clients or customers. And equally important is what is under the hood: It shouldn’t be bloated with code and needs to be supported too. You MUST get your themes from a reputable vendor for several reasons:
You need to ensure the theme’s authors will maintain it in the future, that they will provide updates over time so that the theme keeps up and working with the ever changing WordPress developments. Free themes include branding in the footer that might undermine your brand. And of course, the code of free themes might have malware in them.
One of the most popular brands of WordPress themes used on thousands of sites is Thrive Themes. In fact, I am using it on several business websites myself since the early days. Let’s see why they’re so popular…
Thrive Themes Pros
· The suite of tools
Thrive Themes is the brand… but the theme itself is called the Thrive Theme Builder – which has 2 companion themes: ‘Shapeshifter’ and ‘Omni’
In this review, we’ll assume that you’re using Shapeshifter.
Unlike Studiopress Themes you can’t buy the Thrive Theme Builder separately. It comes with the Thrive Suite.
What is truly unique about this theme is that it was designed with marketers in mind. So the suite is an all-in-one package with several tools that will take your site to the next level.
We’ll look at those later. But for now, just know that one of this theme’s strongest points is the suite of tools that comes with it.
· Shapeshifter theme
As far as WordPress themes goes, the Shapeshifter theme is solid. It’s lightweight, loads fast and is customizable. However, out of the box you might not find it as beautiful as the themes in Elegant Themes or StudioPress.
That said, you can customize it to your liking. It’s a drag and drop theme builder. With the templates included, there are over 480 million combinations that can be created with the Shapeshifter theme.
While it doesn’t look as visually appealing out of the box like an Elegant WordPress theme, you can easily model the other themes’ appearance with the Shapeshifter theme. That probably explains its cool name. Shapeshift your blog to look like any popular blog on the market.
· Thrive Themes & E-Commerce
The theme is suitable for e-commerce too and works well with Woocommerce. So if you don’t want to use Shopify, Thrive Themes is a good alternative.
This theme also has a very unique feature that most other themes don’t have. When you select a color for your pages, Thrive Themes has a feature where a color scheme is recommended to match your chosen color.
When you choose these colors, your blog will automatically look better. It’s very important to get this right. In fact, Thrive Themes has pre-made color palettes for you to choose from. So that’s even easier.
· Let’s talk about the tools
Now let’s see why this theme is so unique. Firstly, it comes with a page builder.
Remember we said that this theme was designed for marketers. Exactly. With the Thrive Suite, your theme will come with a page builder and tons of layout templates that are designed to convert. I.e. there are more than 250 pre-designed premm landing pages!
So you can build landing pages, sales pages, thank you pages and much more. Now, if you were to use a theme from StudioPress, you’d still need to buy a page builder to build your sales pages, etc.
What’s worse is that you might actually want to buy the Thrive Suite!
While Thrive Architect (page builder) will work with most themes, you do not need to buy a theme if you’re happy with the Shapeshifter theme. So, this will save you money. Furthermore, all the Thrive Suite tools (which are WordPress Plugins) are designed to work very well with the Shapeshifter theme.
- Want pop ups on your site? – Just use Thrive Leads.
- Need to get testimonials? – There is Thrive Ovation for that
- Want to add quizzes? – Use Thrive Quiz Builder that is included
- Need a learning management system? – Thrive Apprentice is your answer
These are just some of the tools in the Thrive Suite… and you get them ALL with the Thrive Theme Builder – for one flat price. This is unbelievable value here.
The Cons
Paying one lump sum for the entire Thrive Suite may make marketers on a tight budget feel uneasy. It’s slightly pricey… but if you think of how much you’ll save by not buying a theme and tools separately, Thrive Suite is actually cheaper.
Other than the pricing, there’s really no downside to this fantastic theme and bundle.
Should You Get It?
100% yes. If you’re an online marketer who wants a theme that works well and you’d rather have all your tools such as opt in plugin, page builder, etc. in one place, Thrive Themes is for you.
It’s value for money and is considered one of the best page builders/ themes on the market. With a 30-day money back guarantee, there’s no risk for you here.
Thrive Themes Discounts
If you are waiting for a Thrive Themes Black Friday Special or similar discounts – don’t. They don’t offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday discounts. In fact, they’ve never done a seasonal sale at Thrive Themes and I suspect they never will. Which is a marketing lesson in itself… They cite 3 compelling reasons:
- Thrive Suite doesn’t lose value over time.
In contrast, they are adding new features, themes, templates and tools into Thrive Suite every 3 weeks, so its value and price only increases with time. - Seasonal discounts aren’t fair to the existing customers who bought at full price.
“Remaining consistent with our pricing each day — even while every other business around the world is slashing their prices for Black Friday — feels like the ethical thing to do in our opinion.”
And if you think about it, if a businesses drastically discounts their prices for seasonal sales like Black Friday, don’t you get the feeling they over-charging you on all the other days of the year? - Their pricing provides already great value.
That’s right, for less than $20 a month, Thrive Suite gives you an entire business building toolkit. Many competing products in that space charge much more for waaay less functionality.
So if you you want to buy Thrive Suite, today is the cheapest price you can get it for. As long as you keep your subscription active, that price is locked in and you are guaranteed to never see a price increase.
Give it a try and you’ll be glad you did.
