Which WordPress theme or builder do you use/recommend?

[jagan]

One question: Are Bricks Builder and Kadence mutually exclusive since they are both themes?

[d19dotca]

@jagan Yes as you can only use one theme at a time.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn @d19dotca tagging you both for the WP wizards that you are! I'm building a new WP/Woo site and intend on using the Kadence theme, but their blocks & Pro addons fall short for my use case. I stumbled upon Greenshift and was wondering if you have any experience with it. I can't find anything "bad" about them which is a good thing but also a bit suspicious lol. The reason why I'm looking at GS is because of their 3D model & 360 product viewers. Thoughts?

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Good question. Sorry, never heard of it. Website looks nice enough (your link doesn't work).

My test for all decisions is; can I repeat this ten times with ten percent of the effort by the tenth time? KandenceWP is the best WordPress theme for speed and seo from my tests.

I'm not a fan of any website animation, at all, and for many reasons, so wrong person to ask on that.

3D does interest me greatly, though, so definitely going to look more into that, and I don't see anything that would suggest why it would cause any issues, since it will only load code that's actually used with Gutenburg.

(Stay away from Elementor in WP, crazy clever people, but I suspect they might eventually migrate to being a standalone platform, as Gutenburg is now becoming all it promised to be — and full-site editing will, too since the 2023 standard theme is perhaps going to become the most popular ever, for good reasons.)

I don't want a theme to do everything, just to do the basics perfectly, which keeps it lighter, focused, and fast to work with.

Then anything else there's usually a specialist plugin for. Kadence has a fair amount of animation options, too, if you really must.

It looks like it is a plugin for the blocks and design patterns, so there's no theme to compare, and that's the whole point of Kadence and Gutenburg, you can use all sorts of blocks, and only what's used loads on the front end:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/greenshift-animation-and-page-builder-blocks/

3D does interest me, so much appreciate your introducing this — thank you! I would like to see more WordPress chat on this forum, as there's so many things it can do better than any separate FOSS apps, now.

I stake my interests and future expectations of time needs on Kadence, if that's enough endorsement. There's quite a few advantages of the Pro, so I wouldn't dismiss it on aesthetics, as it's more about enabling you without stopping you having other toys, if that makes sense.

The cloud and child theme features that also add huge value to Kadence for making many sites with it, and multiple monetisation opportunities from your growing assets and capabilities.

Whatever you do, stick 100% to Gutenburg and ACF for any dynamic data. All modern plugins should work with those. If they don't, they shouldn't be in your stacks until they do. Gutenberg is what is bringing most of the efficiency now, so anything that is working with that should be fast.

For interest, I have 118 plugins installed on my personal site, so perhaps this score qualifies me to speak on speed. I could probably still do better, when time permits

This is running on a £10/month Hetzner shared VPS , with Cloudron's WordPress Developer app (2GB of 8GB allocated to this app, but probably doesn't need half of that), just because I want to prove a point that the hosting isn't as important as the software stack, settings, plugin unloading (Freesoul), and caching (WP Optimize).

Don't overthink it, just dive in, build what your vision tells you the world needs, and fill in the gaps as you go. There's years of comparing and testing in what I end up doing, so I hope to save you some of the same, to get on with the fun stuff!

[plains.digital]

Divi for the win!
(it has flaws, but im Lifetime and heavily invested in various plugins, so it's the only answer.)

[d19dotca]

@humptydumpty I’ve heard good things about GreenShift but have not used it yet myself. I use Bricks Builder myself. If you’re on Facebook there’s some great groups called Dynamic WordPress and others that have some details on GreenShift and other similar plugins. Here’s a YouTube video from one of the guys who runs that group if you haven’t seen it yet:

and he compares it with Cwicly too at this one:

Sorry I can’t be too much more helpful about GreenShift. My experience is with Elementor (which I’ve been migrating away from for the past two years), a little bit with Oxygen Builder, and most recently with Bricks Builder which is my current favourite for the past year or two.

[marcusquinn]

@plains-digital Good luck with that. Client asked me to help with their site. Built with Divi. Literally the worst builder mess I've ever seen.

[LoudLemur]

@marcusquinn Is Kadence available under a Free licence? How useful are the paid additions they offer, eg the blocks or the ai?

[marcusquinn]

@LoudLemur Free is very good. Pro I feel is worth it. I don't think you'd regret. Don't think of a theme as visual, but more of a framework. You want to choose one that you'll get to know and it can be used for all purposes. This is that.

[dev-cb]

@marcusquinn I took a closer look at Kadence, seems solid work. Thanks for the share.

I was wondering if its possible to register customized blocks based on Kadence default blocks, so registering modified blocks within the Kadence realm, using a plugin or child theme. Do you have experience with that?

[marcusquinn]

@dev-cb You won't regret. Likely you'll never want to use another theme or way of building again! If I understand what you're thinking, I use Patterns for that. Very versatile. Their Cloud plugin also makes it easy to share design templates form one site to others.