These days, it’s not that easy to find high-quality, inexpensive, and original WordPress themes. You can even find theme clubs and theme frameworks that charge hundreds of dollars for just one theme. However, it shouldn’t be like that. In this review, we’ll have an in-depth look at a WordPress theme shop called Elegant Themes. They offer a nice portfolio of premium themes and plugins, including Divi, Extra, and the Divi Builder.
Elegant Themes is owned by Nick Roach. For $89 annually, you get unlimited access to 87+ premium WordPress themes, plugins, and premium support.
ElegantThemes is definitely one of the most popular WordPress theme shops out there.
For just $70 per year, you’re getting access to 87+ hand-crafted WordPress themes. Each theme comes with different styling and functionalities and you can use it on as many sites as you want. Besides, you can sign up for lifetime access for a flat fee of $249.
Elegant Themes Review: Premium Theme Club
Each Elegant Theme comes with options for customization, SEO optimization, ad integration, color and layout settings, and other configurations.
1. Theme Options
- General Settings: Lets you change the color schemes and typography of the theme. Also allows you to control your layout, featured articles, social media icons, and more. This admin page gives you control over the basic functions/features of your theme.
- Navigation Settings: Here, you can set up and configure dropdown menus and links, exclude pages from the navigation bar, and more.
- Builder Settings: You can enable/disable the Divi Builder for post, pages, projects, and other custom post types.
- Layout Settings: You can set up and configure thumbnails, comments, and post-info sections for posts and pages.
- Ad Settings: Allows you to manage un-widgetized advertisements. You also have the option to embed a Google AdSense code.
- SEO Settings: You can manage your SEO settings here. You can set SEO separately for the homepage, single post pages, and index pages. It’s compatible with popular SEO plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast and All-In-One SEO.
- Integration Tab: This is where you can add third-party scripts such as Google Analytics code or any other tracking code, that you’d normally add in footer.php.
- Updates: You can add your Elegant Themes API key here so that you can easily update your theme when a new version is available.
2. Support and Updates
A well-coded WordPress theme has no use if you don’t get regular updates/support. This may be the case with many theme shops, but not with Elegant Themes. As long as you are a member of ET, you can be sure that your theme will always be compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
While you are an Elegant Themes member, you get access to their premium support channels. Our experience of using Elegant Themes’ support service has been positive so far. If you are interested in how the company fared read our Elegant Themes support review.
3. The Price
Wouldn’t you love to get access to 80+ themes and plugins for just $89? This is definitely the most awesome benefit of using Elegant Themes. If you don’t like a theme then use another… You have so many themes to choose from, after all. You also get a 30-day money back guarantee, so joining the club is basically risk-free.
If you look at other theme shops or marketplaces such as ThemeForest or Mojo Themes, you will be lucky to get one theme or two for $89. This is one of the reasons why we love Elegant Themes.
4. The Elegant Themes Ecosystem
Elegant Themes come with fully responsive designs that adapt to varying screen sizes. If you choose to install one of ET’s responsive WordPress theme, your website will be displayed beautifully and intuitively on any type of device, be it a tablet, a smartphone, or a laptop screen.
Elegant Themes have two flagship themes: Divi and Extra. Divi was first launched in 2013, and quickly became the most frequently used WordPress theme according to BuiltWith’s statistics. It’s a multi-purpose WordPress theme you can use to build basically anything, from blogs to business sites to e-shops.
Extra was launched shortly after Divi. It’s a versatile magazine theme that allows you to build fully-responsive, professionally-looking blogs, online magazines, and publications.
Besides Divi and Extra, Elegant Themes have 85+ other themes that serve specific niches such as online portfolios, app landing pages, photography sites, and others.
Plugins
If you purchase an Elegant Themes membership you also get access to 5 plugins that complement the themes. They are as follows:
- Divi Builder – A visual drag-and-drop page builder plugin with which you can build advanced layouts without writing a single line of code. It also includes 46 content modules such as buttons, call-to-actions, galleries, counters, and others.
- Bloom – An email opt-in and lead generation plugin that provides you with 6 different display types (opt-in pop-ups, fly-ins, inline forms, below-content forms, widget area opt-ins, require opt-ins).
- Monarch – A social media sharing plugin with which you can add social sharing buttons in 5 different locations (floating sidebar, above and/or below content, on images & videos, automatic pop-ups, automatic fly-ins).
- HandHeld – It adds a mobile version that works alongside your normal Elegant Theme. It creates an improved and fast mobile experience.
- Anticipate – A maintenance mode plugin that displays a “Coming Soon” page to your visitors while you are working on your website in the background.
Originally, most of these plugins were included within the Divi theme. However, Elegant Themes decided to make them available to every customer, so now they offer them as plugins.
Shortcodes & Page Templates
Besides the aforementioned themes and plugins, Elegant Themes also provides you with shortcodes and page templates. Shortcodes help you improve your site’s functionality by letting you add slideshows, tabs, tooltips to your posts. Page templates give you access to pre-made styles such as Contact forms, sitemaps, advanced search, blog feeds, and others.
5. Elegant Themes Showcase
First, we will take a look at Divi and Extra, Elegant Themes’ two flagship themes. Then, I’ll show some of their other themes as well.
Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes on the market right now. It’s receiving rave reviews from just about everyone in the industry. This is primarily because it’s truly one of the most flexible themes you can find. If you want a unique site without any coding, Divi gives you the tools to create it.
The Divi theme is fully responsive and fluid. It makes use of flat design elements to achieve a clean look. You can use the Divi Builder to build your own layouts that later you can save into your WordPress admin. Or, you can simply get started with one of Divi’s pre-made layouts and further customize it.
The Divi Builder allows you to build every element of your page visually, with the help of a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interface. Elegant Themes also published 6 Divi theme demos so that you can see what you can achieve with the theme. Here’s my favourite, Divi Café, which could be an excellent design for any coffee shop.
You can test the Divi theme together with the Divi Builder on Elegant Themes’ live demo site. You can also check out everything you need to know about Divi in our extensive review.
