Theme Suggestion - Thrive Themes?

[Akamai]

I know BuSo Lightning is a really good, lightweight built for speed that kills type of theme. I can really see myself, and have seen that it'll probably be on my go to list for affiliate type sites.

My wife works for a dentist and she handles their feeble online and soon to be social media marketing attempts. First up is a redesign, theme change and the Thrive set of plugins really looks nice while being flexible. She initially wanted one of those theme monster type but I told her it'll be a real killer in the long run when you want to run highly targeted ads on FB to customized landings and so forth. She understood.

But now I'm wondering about Thrive's ability to be a fast loading, low-bloat theme. I don't know squat about coding and what all that would entail to make a smart decision. But I figure Thrive is popular enough, hopefully some of you may be able to lend an opinion. Are the two able to be combined as I understand Thrive runs on plug-ins? So Lightning would be the base theme with some added Thrive plugins for customization - remember coding by hand isn't an option and there's no budget for it, unfortunately. This is a small dentist office, money has to be on ads mostly.

 

[Nat]

Just make sure you don't get hooked on Thrive subscription and then find out you wanna change and all your content is stuck in their editor. As far as a theme goes, I would want to be as independent as possible.

I think Thrive makes a theme and plugins, not just plugins? Anyway, most all plugins will work with another theme. From experience, you can use Lightning and Leads together.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't recommend Lightning (I made it, by the way) to anyone who can't customize it's appearance without the use of plugins.

The reason is, if you're going to bloat it with plugins, you might as well use a theme that already does and looks like you want it to. What you're really doing is creating security issues and adding technical debt where it doesn't need to exist.

And if you can't HTML / CSS / PHP / jQuery.... Lightning isn't really a good choice unless you like the absolute minimal look of it. There are tons of "business ready" themes out there that look like business sites versus a blog / magazine like Lightning is set up for.

 

[backwoods]

If this is just a small dentist office it's not going to get a ton of traffic anyway so no need to be concerned with speed or loading issues with WP (unless you start piling on useless plugins). If this is like most DDS offices you only need a handful of pages: About Our Office, Meet the Team, Office Tour, Forms, Contact Us, Download Forms, etc.

Any of the top selling WP themes will suffice. Most of the well known WP themes have built-in landing page type options or there are many landing page plugins to choose from.

 

[turbin3]

Thrive's themes and plugins work well for small sites and sites where ease of use is highly needed. Where they start to break down is when you actually do need to custom code and highly modify things. So for this use case, Thrive would probably work well, especially since most of their stuff is very visually-oriented and quick to learn with.

As you mentioned, Akamai, yes their plugins are able to function independently. So you could use whatever theme you want, for example, and then use Thrive Leads for the lead gen side of things.

 

[Jitsiereveld]

You've gotten some great responses so far from the other members. Now I don't think I have experience with either theme you have mentioned, but I have tested and used quite a few different themes from Themeforest.com and have a couple suggestions for what to look for.

Important factors when choosing a new WP theme:

• Sales - More is usually always better, but you probably won't discover any newly developed themes this way. Not all new themes are that bad, but when you can find a similar one with hundreds or thousands of more sales it's easy to pass on trying the newer one.
• Reviews - I hope you take this into consideration with anything you purchase.
• Comments - Lots of presale questions and some support questions can be found here.
• Support (if possible to check into before you purchase, if not try to make your best judgment from the comments)
• Code - Lots of themes say they are great for SEO, but when I started out I can't tell you how many themes I've used that were coded with multiple <h1>'s and other <h#>'s just for styling widget and plugin titles. If you preview the theme on Themeforest, remove the frame that is placed there from Themeforest and you should be able to see how the source code will actually look if you purchased it and set it up exactly the same or used demo content allowing you to get a general idea of how well it was coded for SEO. If you check without removing the Envato frame, you will find extra code from them as well, so remember to remove it first.
• Plugins - There's millions of plugins out there and usually a few great ones to accomplish the same goals. One of the easiest page builder plugins that I've used is Visual Composer and I highly recommend taking that into consideration for beginners when searching for a theme as it's very easy to use. Some of the page elements even have links to YouTube tutorials if you're not sure how they work and other 3rd Party plugins are supported by it too.
• Theme Demos - Admin user demos are great, although not a lot of developers offer them with their themes. If you find some, give them a test drive to see how they have things set up and get a feel for whether or not you like it first. I wouldn't have purchased half of the themes I own if I could have tested each of them beforehand.

Themeforest lets you search for themes using keywords which can usually help you get started with a theme that includes the functionality you want, as well as decent demo content that you can go through and swap out with your own content if you don't want to create every page from scratch and just get going. Sometimes I will just do this for inspiration and an idea of a different way to set up a page.

DO NOT use the demo and try to avoid letting any of it get indexed. My first directory site, I forgot to check that box and Google was indexing Lorem Ipsum-type posts and listings. I've also seen some sites that have basically recolored a theme without changing very much content at all, justifying it as duplicate content according to Copyscape since it nearly matches the demo site. You might want to check the box in WordPress settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site until you're ready with your own content. Just remember to uncheck when it's ready so Google can start indexing your pages.

If you haven't check out the Crash Course yet, @Ryuzaki covers a lot of suggested plugins, tips, and trick on Day 4 - Setting Up Your Website and it would definitely be worth reading over it, again even if you have already.

P.S. If you're worried about speed and bloat now, just remember that it's WordPress so you can easily change themes if you really need to. You just might have to go through and check your pages for broken shortcodes and any overriding styles making things look funny. And a general rule of thumb if you do see any [shortcodes on=site]You can usually figure out which plugin they belong to and fix it right away.[just saying] *An example of what a sentence wrapped in shortcode might look like broken

 

[doublethinker]

I agree with @Jitsiereveld except on a small point with sales. Some theme creators have a much bigger budget for marketing than they do actual development. A good indicator is if those themes claim to "catch all and do everything" themes that really are more for landing pages and a couple of generic use cases.

I know cos I was one of the "it's so pricey and sold so much it had to be good" type of consumer until I learned that that was an actual pricing strategy arbitrary to the value of the product and more to how it wants to be perceived.

I observed that newspaper theme is annoyingly popular, though- I suppose for good reason.

Why not go a step further, though? Do a scrape of your industry and find out statistically which theme is used the most among your top-tier competitors.

 

[Tucky]

Also check to see how often the theme is getting updated. Personally I prefer not to use themes that were created in 2013 even if they are still being updated. To me that seems like they could be adding a load of bloat over the years. But make sure the theme has been updated recently, that gives a good indication the developer is still listening to its customers and implementing improvements.

 

[Jitsiereveld]

Great point @doublethinker, I can totally agree with you that some themes have more sales because of how well the developers were able to market it and how great of a deal they might have run on it for a period of time.

One thing that I've been doing now, because of being in a rush to find a theme for a client project, is to check out the bad reviews more than just the overall amount of them and good ones that can be faked. This stupid theme is designed with two <headers> so they can use CSS to hide one when you would like to have a transparent navigation on a page opposed to just one that is coded correctly. Plus waiting 5 days for a response to a support ticket can be detrimental to making sure this project launches on time.

 

[Nicholas]

Just want to chime in here that I've used ThriveThemes for a couple years now and after using it for multiple sites (especially clients), I've come to view it as a good quick-and-dirty way of getting a custom design relatively fast, at the price of some bloat, inefficient code generated, and control.

If you need a quick buildout, you can just take one of the themes (they aren't very good, imho, but have enough for you to take matters into your own hands) and with the visual builder, work your way around a thoroughly customized design without the overhead.

You can't have it both ways, so if you want ease of use and all its sales/marketing features, just be prepared to expend bloat and control in the process.

 

[turbin3]

Where Thrive could work well is for developers building for small business. In short, lots of small business are often "set it and forget it" with web design, and honestly don't need much that's highly custom. Thrive does do a good job with being fairly consistent and structured with their code, classes, etc., especially in comparison to the random trash available on Themeforest. How this could work well for a developer selling these services, is in developing common sets of CSS to perform various design efforts.

For example, figure out the CSS for a few of their themes, to accomplish a few different design styles for structural components. Now for your clients, you have at least some copy/pasteable CSS to quickly customize design. Couple that with a few of their plugins, and they do have the potential to get small business up and running fast, while having a decent set of marketing tools. May not be perfect, but probably an improvement over some of the 10+ yr old WP stuff or default 20-whatever theme a lot of small businesses have going on.

 

[cgpx]

Where Thrive could work well is for developers building for small business.

Agreed. When I was doing research some time back, it came down to Thrive or Beaver Builder. I ended up going with BB, and I've been happy with it for this purpose.

Just be smart about your plugins, dial in your caching and you can get either to be pretty quick.