Thrive Theme Builder Review 2023

We’re going to take a look at a new theme building tool for WordPress called thrive theme builder. It’s kind of a tongue twister. If you tried to say that 10 times thrive theme builder, and it comes from thrive themes, the makers of thrive architect. Thrive leads and a bunch of other plugins that have the word thrive in the front of it, not to be confused with thrive cart, which is totally different entirely.

So they just released a theme building tool and it works hand in hand with their page building tool, thrive architect. In fact, if you don’t own thrive architect and you buy thrive theme builder, it comes with a light version of their builder, thrive architect light. That’s what they’ve decided to name it.

So what we’re going to try to do in this video is take a look at all the features of this. We’re going to test it out and share some thoughts on it, and try to figure out who this is for and maybe how it stacks up to tools that are already on the market. So let’s get started. Open up a new tab in your web browser and visit WP crafter.com/thrive theme builder.

All in one word. It’s going to take us to the sales page that gives you all of the information about this new theme building tool right here. So let’s take a look and see what we can find here. It’s the next generation visual builder for WordPress. Finally here, all right, and here it actually says. Uh, that little bit about coming with thrive architect light.

And so here’s the first kind of statement about this theme builder is they’re, they’re trying to present this, this picture of building a website with existing tools on the market are time consuming, overwhelming and all of that kind of stuff. I want you to keep that in mind as we actually go through thrive theme builder.

So you can answer. For yourself if this seems easier than what’s out there or more hard because this is making the statement that everything else out there is more complicated, hard to use, expensive, intimidating, an all of that, and they have the solution. So right here it says you can launch your website in under 15 minutes and we’re going to put that to the test for sure.

There is a nice feature in there where you can update your branding everywhere. So this means there’s a lot of aspects to it that have a centralized control, changing colors, adding little snippets of text throughout the theme. I’ll be demonstrating that for sure. Then we have this claim right here that it’s professionally designed with conversions in mind.

I find that professionally designed is a very subjective term and it’s going to depend on your own preferences. So I know I have a definite opinion about the designs in this builder, and then we have mobile responsive. Hundreds of design and site building elements included. Now it’s important to note that they’re talking about basic things here.

I initially saw this and thought, wow, there’s going to be all this predesigned stuff for me, so it’s going to be easier to work with, but that’s not necessarily the case. This is in regards to what it says right here. I cons fonts, fancy dividers and page blocks, content elements. So there are some stuff in there for sure, and we’ll make sure to take a look at it.

I will say one of the strengths of all the thrive products is right here, and that is they do integrate with just about everything. And you can see when you’re looking at the list of things, it integrates with how long this thing’s been around because it integrates with things that really aren’t even around anymore or commonly used.

Okay, let’s pick up the pace here. There’s a bunch of people already using this. We see there’s predesigned sections, some templates, and all of that. Get up and running fast. I’ll go through this process here in a moment. Uh, it has a really interesting onboarding. I think that you’re going to love it. I like it a lot, how they do everything step by step, but we overall have to see.

Does it make the entire process of building a website easier, or is it just another way of doing it? All right, so let’s scroll through here and let’s just actually go down to the bottom and see what this is going to cost. Here’s a button that will take me to the bottom. Okay, so now, I’m sorry if you’re watching this in the future, but they launched this, and for the first 10 days, there’s.

A discount. It’s not a big discount. Okay? So it’s only, um, like $30 or so. So it’s not the end of the world if you miss this discount. So there’s two ways to get this. You could buy a license just for it. And what I like about the way they. Sell their stuff is they give you lifetime updates, but they give you a year of support.

So when you see these prices right here where it’s 97 and 67 67 is going to be for a single site license. But what’s nice about that is you’re going to be able to get updates forever. You’re not going to get support forever. You can renew the support after a year and for 97 you’re going to be able to use this on five different websites.

Now, alternatively, you can become a member and a membership is going to cost 19 per month, but you don’t pay monthly. You actually pay annually, so you’re going to get access to. This and a, their entire suite of tools. So that includes thrive architect, thrive leads, the whole suite of tools, the quiz builder, all of it.

So that’s why you see this already being used on 11,000 websites, and that’s because they’ve released this some time ago to their members. Now you can buy it on its own. When you buy the product, you’re first taken right here to access it. And the way they do this is you download this thrive product manager plugin, and once you install it on your website, it connects into their website and you can download all the products that you have access to.

Fun fact. You can see right here that I have been paying them for a membership for over five years. I became a customer 2015 February of 2015 so literally over five years, and you can see I pay for this stuff out of my own pocket. And just in case you wondered if people give me this stuff for free, I pay for it myself.

Okay. Here I am on a fresh WordPress installation. I’m going to go to plugins, go to add new, I’m going to choose upload plugin, and I’ve already downloaded it, so I’m going to add it. Now. I’m going to click on install now. Then I’ll activate the plugin and now it’s installed and we can see I have a brand new menu item right here that says product manager, and I like how they do this.

It makes it really convenient because. Whatever I have access to on their site, I can go in there. I’m going to connect my site to theirs and I’ll be able to download all of their stuff in the future. So I’m going to click right here where it says product manager. And then right here is the screen to log into my account.

So I’ll go ahead and do that. And then it takes me to this screen. It says success. My account has successfully been connected. Now since I have. Access to all of these. I’m not going to install any of these. I’m going to go through the experience as if I only own thrive theme builder and I don’t own thrive architect so we could see exactly what’s included.

So I’m going to scroll down and here it is under thrive theme builder themes, and it says shapeshift. I know they have some weird. Way of naming things. It’s kind of confusing where they say they’re making it more simple, but I think in some regards they’re making things more confusing. So we got thrive theme builder, but we’re really installing something called shapeshift.

So I’ll click this little checkbox here that says license, and then down here a click where it says licensed selected products. Now it showed two in brackets because it’s going to download it, install thrive theme builder in this thing called shapeshift. Really, I think they should have just. Called it thrive theme builder and have that be it, but there’s this other layer called shapeshift, which is bringing in the styles for the thrive theme builder.

All right? It’s all done and ready to use. Now I’m going to click right here. It says, go to the theme builder dashboard and then it pops up the theme builder wizard. Now. I wanted to say that thrive theme builder has a really good onboarding experience that takes you through each step in the process of getting it working on your website, and I think they really nailed this.

There aren’t other tools out there that really have an onboarding process like this that makes sure everyone hits. Every single step along the way of using a theme builder for their website. So thrive theme builder is definitely going to get a thumbs up for this onboarding process. Let’s go take a look at it.

So what we see here is the first series of steps. We’re going to go through these eight steps and it’s going to take us through them. Step-by-step, and then we’re going to take a look at these other categories of the setup process. A first start by clicking on get started. The first step is to choose our logo or upload our logo.

So it’s showing this by default, but you would click right here and then you would drag and drop a new logo to be uploaded. I’ll click on choose and continue and we’ll stick with their default logo. The next step is to choose your brand color. You know, I totally goofed a moment ago. I meant to tell you that when you’re going through this setup process, there’s some stuff that you want to have ready to go.

Now, we can go through this after we go through it once we can go back and go through it again and make adjustments, but it’s going to be good if you have your logo handy. If you have your colors styles handy, we’re going to make some choices of templates for the way we want the website to look, but we’re also going to choose some fonts.

So if you have that kind of an idea of what you want for those settings and you have all that stuff ready. This process is going to go faster, but we’ll just go through the process together. So right here you would choose your brand color. I can choose this right here, and you can put in your hex code.

That’s typically what you want. It’s called the color code. Let’s just choose something different from the default. I’ll go with this purple right here and click apply. One quick tip with anything using thrive. They have these options like this, and naturally for me, I would just choose the color and click out of it.

You actually have to click apply or that is not saved. So I’m going to click right here. It says, choose and continue to go to the next step. Now in this step, we’re going to choose the. Header template that we want to start out with. So let me click right here to not show this. Now it’s interesting, so you can see it right here, but I can use my left and right arrows to show a different header template so I can do my right arrow.

I just clicked on it and it’s showing me a different one. I personally don’t like this whole left right. Things. So I can click right here in the dropdown and it’s going to show me a list of all of them. And I prefer this way of looking at the different headers that are available to be able to click lead, choose one.

So for me, I really liked the look. I don’t like the color, but I like the look of this one. I could always change the color. So I’ll click on this. And it’s showing me what this looks like, and it’s already pulling in a shade of that color that I chose just a moment ago. And so I’ll stick with this. I’ll click on choose and continue.

And so now I’m at the footer step, so we’re going to follow the same process. I can hit left or right, or I can click right here to see all of the different footer styles and scroll through and pick one for this. I want something simple, so I’ll just choose this one right here. That’s a social. And now I get to preview it, so I’ll click on choose and continue to continue on.

This is kind of where I like what they’re doing in their thinking out of the box with this onboarding process. So they just made sure I got my logo and my colors in my head or in my footer, but now they’re letting me choose what I want to show for my homepage, and literally these are the options. So right here, I can choose from one of their designs.

That’s what I’m going to end up choosing. But right here I can choose one of my own existing pages, but this is a brand new website and I don’t have any pages already created. And the last option right here is to display a list of my blog posts. But what I like is if I’m new to WordPress, this is going to make all those settings for me.

So a lot of people struggle with, how do I make a page on my homepage, or how do I make my blog. List of posts, my homepage and all of that kind of stuff. These are things that everyday users struggle with. So I’m going to choose right here where it says choose from the ready-made home pages so we can see what options they have available.

So right off the bat, it’s showing me what the template looks like with the header I chose and the footer I chose. You can see right here is the header I chose. And when I scroll all the way to the bottom, there’s the footer I chose down there. And you can see it’s already using the color that I chose.

So I chose that kind of a purpleish color, and that’s where we got the color of the header and it’s using it right here for the buttons. So I like how it’s all kind of linked together. Like this. So just like the headers and the footers, I can use my left and right arrow, or I can click this dropdown here and I can see all of the currently available pages.

Now, as you can see at the time of making this video, if there’s only five available, I’m going to go ahead and choose this one right here. I really wish they would have launched this though, with more templates available for me to choose from. So on this one you can see it’s also using the color I chose right here in this bit of text, and as I scroll down, it’s pulled into the icons and other parts and other elements.

You could see it right here and in this call to action area right here, I’m going to choose this template now is where we get into the meat and potatoes. Of a theme builder. And so a theme builder is going to allow you to create the style for blog posts on your website. And so right here I’m able to choose a style for blog posts, and this one is nice.

It has a very large image. Now it pulls from the featured image, which not everyone uses featured images. So this might not be for everyone. So I’m going to go here and let’s see all the different styles that they have. They seem to have more styles available for blog posts, which is good. Uh, I think for me, I will pick this one cause I like a more narrow layout that isn’t cluttered.

And a lot of these layouts here feel very cluttered and unfocused for me. So I’m going to go ahead and choose this one. So this is what a blog post would look like. It would take my featured image right there, and here’s where my content would go in this narrow box, here’s what some social icons would look like, and then there’s also a related post options.

And of course my comments, this is good for me. I’ll click choose and continue. And now it’s giving me the option to choose what I want my blog page to look like. So typically on a blog page, you’re going to have a list of the blog posts on your website, and you’re going to display those in some form of a grid.

And just like all the other prior steps, there’s multiple options available here. I personally prefer a grid that looks more along the lines of this right here. So I’m going to choose that. Now, keep in mind, this is a brand new website. Site and I have no blog posts on it. So normally we would go here and we would see a grid of my posts, but this is brand new and this is just what we have to work with.

I’ll go ahead and click on choose and continue. And lastly, there’s an option here to choose what I want a default page to look like. So if I go to create a new, say contact page, it will inherit this style. And so you can see I’ve got the content here in the middle, and I’ve got the title of the page and this area here.

And my. Footer. Let’s see what other options they have available for us. And after looking at these, I think I like this default one right here. Now what’s nice is on a individual page basis, you can toggle this area here where the title is to show or not show, and this same area here, we can toggle that to show or not show.

Let’s move forward. I’ll click on choose and continue. Now’s where we have a little bit of a break in the smoothness of this process. So right here it’s asking me to choose a menu to put in a header or a menu to put in the footer. But the problem is it’s a brand new site. I don’t have any menus created.

And it doesn’t actually give me an option to create a menu. So if I go right here to the dropdown, uh, my only option is to choose a menu or choose that I will choose later. So unfortunately, right here is a missed opportunity to further make it smooth for people that are using this theme to offer an option to actually create a menu.

So what’s going to happen is I can’t move forward on this step. I’m going to have to move. Forward without going through it. I’m going to have to create a menu and then I’m going to have to come back here and set the menu here in these different locations. So for both I’ll choose. I will choose later and I’ll click right here where it says activate menus on my site.

Now this is nice. There’s an option to preview the site. Let me open that up in a new tab. And then right here, and I actually like this. I can click right here and it’s going to pull up a video. Let me pause it with what to do next. And I like how, I’m never wondering what to do next just yet. So let’s get rid of that.

Let’s take a look at the front end of the site. And so far it looks good. I’m going to have to figure out how to get my menu in there. Uh, but it, using the color that I chose, it’s using the layouts that I chose. Of course, I’m going to have to go in there and customize everything to make it look how I want it, but it’s not that bad.

Now, if you did watch that video, it’s going to walk you through going through these steps right here. So I’m going to go through them myself. I’ll click right here where it says branding, and this is going to be some options similar to what we just went through, which is the theme colors right here, which is the logo.

But the only difference here, the logo, the option has expanded a little bit and we’re given the chance to upload. Okay. A logo for when the background is dark. So we have the dark version and we have the light version of our logo, and then here at the bottom we have the option to upload a favorite con.

That’s those little icons when someone is seeing your website listed on Google, or when they have a tab open in their web browser to your website, that little tiny icon, it’s called the favorite con, and that’s where you would add it using thrive theme builder. The next option I like a lot and it’s topography.

So we go here and it’s going to show us an example of our topography. Now, what’s really odd right now is it’s actually showing me two different currently active topographies. This is probably a bug in the system. So in all my prior testing, it was only showing one currently active. For some reason, it’s showing me two are currently active.

So here’s what’s actually cool about this. On this top one, I’m going to go here where there’s the edit icon. I’m going to click on that. It opens in a new tab. It’s going to show me all of my typography here on the right, and when I click on an individual topography element, so this is the heading one element.

I can go here and set it up. I can change my font, and it’s supposed to propagate across our website. So here is the H one, and I’m going to click right here and I’ll change this to the very popular Poppins. So right here I started typing in Poppins, and I’ll select it right here, and you can see the font instantly changes to Poppins.

And I have. Opportunity here to change the size and the thickness of the font. So for me, I’m going to choose, uh, let’s go 700 right there. So you saw it got a little bit thicker. I’ll click apply and I’ve already gone and changed one of the font options. Now there’s other settings for it. If I wanted it to be all caps or by default, be centered or have some alignment and some additional formatting.

And then here is the actual fund size as well. What’s nice is there’s also a line spacing option here where it’s very visual. So if I wanted there to be less line height, that’s the space underneath here. I can click right here and I can tighten it up right here. I actually liked the visual nature of that.

So I’m going to go ahead and change all of these here to Poppins in a moment, and we have the paragraph text right here so we can set that font. Then we have the font for lists. We have the settings for a hyperlink for a block quote and play in text, and then pre formatted texts, which I don’t use, so I’m going to go ahead and change some of these.

Okay. I’ve changed all of my headings to Poppins and I’ve changed all of this regular text here to lotto. This is important because we’re going to experiment with some of their templates and we’re going to see if their templates actually do inherent the font styles that I just chose, or do I have to go through the tedious task of changing it on all their predesigned templates.

So I’m going to click on save work. Now, this is actually a weird spot right here. I want to exit out of this, but there’s no exit button I can do is save work. But then when I go into this arrow here, I can save and preview. I want to save, but I don’t really care about previewing cause I’m already previewing it and then I can exit without saving.

There’s no exit while saving or just. Exit. It’s just a safe work. And then I get a confirmation. So it’s kind of weird, but I just figured I’m going to close the tab and then it’s going to take me back here. So you can see it’s already updated. My currently active, I don’t know why there’s a second one here.

Uh, that is definitely odd. Okay, let’s move forward to click on templates. And this is where we’re going to see a list of all the templates that we just. Chose when we were going through that onboarding experience. Here’s the one for pages. Here’s the one for blog posts right here, and there’s a variation of the blog posts.

One here. If there’s a video for that blog post, if I want the video to kind of be in the header section, the same goes for audio. They’re already going to automatically add a four Oh four page, which is very important, and that’s where a lot of the other theme builders get it wrong. If you’re new to this whole concept and you forget a certain thing, like adding a four Oh four page, which is kind of a technical thing anyway.

You might just have a website that doesn’t function properly, and unfortunately I see that a lot. Then here’s that blog index page, and then here’s the page for all archive pages. So when someone does a search on your website, this is what the page will look like right here. Now, this is an area of your website that you’re probably going to want to come back to, and that’s because this is where you’re going to create new templates, and you can have multiple templates and select them on a page by page or post by post basis.

So you would come here, click on add new. And you would go through these steps here. I’ll save this for a future video next day, or doing some interesting thing. I’m not so sure how I feel about it. And it’s right here where it says site speed. So this is three different categories. One is minification and caching, and what this means is it’s going to.

Suggested two different, actually, we’ll let just click on it. It’s going to suggest two different caching plugins that are free, and then it’s going to configure them for you. The only thing is I don’t really like either of these at all. Um, and the, for example, w three total cash. It’s garbage. I mean, it was great five years ago, but it’s going to be PR.

I think this is going to be a problem for them making this option be here. It’s going to create a support nightmare for them. Guaranteed and WP fastest cache. I don’t like that one either. And I actually don’t like either of these at all. So I kind of, that’s why I don’t know how I feel about this. I think the new user, um, is gonna just use one of these and it might end up causing them.

Problems, uh, and they’re not going to know what to do. Uh, but I do like that they’re making this option here, but I wish they would choose to work with a more modern caching plugin and not either of these, and especially one that maybe they can control. So the same goes for image optimization. I click right here and it’s given me the option of usually an optimal optimal, which is good, but I don’t use it.

And there’s other options that are more popular and more widely used. Such as image of Phi or short pixel. A lot of people use short pixel. It’s probably one of the most popular options. Uh, but this is making the suggestion of optimal. And that’s fine. I don’t know if they have some deal with optimal while that, why that one is being suggested here.

And then there’s an option here for amp that’s accelerated mobile pages. This is kind of experimental. Uh, use it at your own risk. So that was the onboarding process of how to install and get this all started. And maybe it did take me about 15 minutes, probably 20 minutes, cause I was explaining it. So maybe the claim of 15 minutes up and running works.

But of course there’s a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done now in designing things. So let’s go ahead and take a look at what that is like. And let’s also take a look at using dynamic fields or custom fields or dynamic data. Who knows? Everybody calls it something different. One of the powers of using, or the powerful ways of using a theme builder is to pull in data from custom fields.

It’s super easy to do. I’m going to make it custom field right now so that we could just test this together. So I’m going to plugins add new. I’m going to do a search for advanced custom fields. When I enter that in, here’s the one I want. I’ll click install. Now I click on activate. I see it’s installed.

It adds a new menu option right here that says custom fields. Then I’m going to click on add new to create a new field group. I’ll give this a name. I named it Adam’s custom fields. So this is going to be a field group. I need to create the actual field though, and that is by clicking add field right here.

The first step is to give it a label, and then the. Field name is going to automatically be generated. So I put in a field label and here it auto-generated the field name. I can choose the field type right here. I’m going to leave that as text. Everything else here seems fine. Now what I need to do is on location, I need to choose what.

Type of contents going to have this custom field option be available. So for me, I’m going to choose page right here and everything else looks good to me. I’ll go ahead and click on publish. If I wanted additional fields, I can continue adding custom fields. So now when I click on a page, there’s going to be this custom field where I can put a piece of information in.

Since we’re on the topic of custom fields, I want to click back into thrive dashboard and then scroll down a bit. They have this option here called smart site. Well, there’s lots of additional options here. This is where you’re going to make your analytics and scripts for like Google analytics or Google tag manager.

Uh, but I wanted to take in your API connections. That’s important. That’s your connection to email marketing services and things of that nature. Uh, but they have this feature called the smart site. Essentially. Let me just click on it and show you what this is. This is where you would put in bits of information that can be used anywhere on your site.

And if you ever wanted to change that information, you could just come right here. So the perfect example is if you have. An address that you use in 10 different locations on your website, and then you move or your office moves. This is an easy way to change it here and have it be changed everywhere on your website so you could fill out this information.

And as I scroll down, there’s also for social information down here, and that would be used for your social links. But what’s neat is you can also create. Custom fields, so I can click on, add a field right here, select a field group, and it would go in one of these groups. Or you can create a new one. I’ll just name this Adams.

I’ll click on save group, and then right here you would choose a field type. I’ll choose texts, and then right here for field name, I’ll put current year favorite websites. And then I’ll put in what I want to be displayed. I entered WP crafter.com I’ll click on save, and now when I scroll down, I have that new group down there and we could see the name of the field favorite website and the actual value of it, and I can click this little edit icon to change that later on.

I’m going to show you how to use this or display this information in just a moment. Are you still with me? I know this is a lot of information to unpack, but I hope you’re able to see or gauge whether this tool seems easy to use, are difficult to use, and whether it might be the right tool for you. So let’s continue on.

So now that we’ve gone through all that, let’s go back to. The front end of our website and take a quick look. And so far it’s looking exactly the same. So what I’m going to do is try to edit some of this, and I’m going to click right here. It says edit with thrive architect. Now thrive architect is the page building tool that they.

Created, uh, probably about two year and a half ago or so. So let’s take a look at what is included in thrive theme builder from the thrive architect standpoint, because it’s the light version of the page builder. It’s not the full blown version of it. So when I first log in, I get this little pop up. Let me just click.

I got it and get going. So using thrive architect is going to be just pretty much like any other page building tool out there. You hover, you click, and you start typing text and you can change anything that you want. Uh, you can drag and drop. Uh, if I want to add additional modules or elements, there’s a little plus right here I can click on and I can drag and drop them in.

And all the elements that you see here are included in thrive architect light. But you can see down here and notice that you’re using the light version and there’s more goodies in the full version of thrive architect. So what we see listed here is. The full version is going to get you 30 more elements.

It’s going to get you 150 landing page templates. Just, you know, this does not include any of the thrive architect landing page templates or sets none of them. So those aren’t included with the theme. And it kind of. Makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense in another sense because you would want the templates in the theme, but it’s held back in the page builder, but it is what it is.

Um, and so you get all that stuff unlocked if you’re using the full version of thrive architect. But this comes with what it comes with. Now thrive architect itself is just like any other page building tool. So you saw when I was clicking, I could start editing text and then up here we have the options to format our text.

On the left we have different styling options for layout and positioning. One of the things that I really like about thrive architect is, and they were the first to, to make this, they made this kind of a breadcrumbs feature. You can see it up here where I’m hovering. My mouse so you can see exactly where you are in the element list or hierarchy.

So I clicked on this bit of text and you can see it’s in a column, which is in a group of columns, which is in a content box and all the way back down to the background section. So if I want to say edit something else, uh, so I wanted to instead edit this column right here, or this column. You can see it’s selecting different stuff or this entire box.

I can. Easily get to it through this bread crumbs feature, and then the settings option here on the chain on the left changes as well. One thing you’re going to notice about thrive products is they use different terminology. For example, decorations, no other tool uses a phrase called decorations, so you’re instantly not going to know what that means.

So these are all pretty standard options here. If you’ve used any page builder before, now I want to show you using some dynamic content. So you can see right here, I can click actually anywhere. So here’s a little headline and I’m going to. Click right here. And when you click in any texts, you get this bar a for formatting up here.

And I believe you can actually move this wherever you want, and you can even pin it someplace. I’m going to leave it right there. So you have this new icon right here, and I’ll do the dropdown, and this is what they’re referring to as dynamic text. So then I select a source. So here are my options, so I can insert the date and time I can insert.

All of this information right here. Global fields was that setting I showed you called smart site settings or something like that. I don’t know why they don’t just call it the same here. There’s kind of a disconnection there. So let’s just choose one of those, cause I know I created one, so I’m gonna choose that.

And here is those three different categories. But I created one down here. I named it favorite website. I like. I can click right there. Click on insert and then it, it inserts it right there. And if I ever change it in the back end, everywhere I’ve inserted this, it’s going to automatically change. I like how I can do that in the middle of a sentence so I can continue typing here and then I can show something different.

Right here. I can show that custom field that I made. I haven’t put a value in it so I can go to custom fields and it’s actually not showing. Maybe because I haven’t entered anything in it. I will have to go back and test that out, but I really like how easy it is to insert this dynamic content anywhere that you want in the middle of a sentence and multiple pieces of dynamic content inside of a sentence.

This is something that you don’t really get with other thrive theme building tools that I’ve tried. Now, another nice thing here is wherever you are using thrive theme builder or thrive architect, if you see your header, you can click on it here and then right here you can click on edit header, and now you’re editing that header and you’re making edits and you have this notice down here that says you’re editing the header and you can see this.

The color here has changed to let you know you’re editing the header. It might sound like something simple, but most of the theme building tools didn’t have a feature like this. Of course, they’re now starting to add them before you’d have to get out of where you are and find the exact file or whatever to start editing that header and footer, and it was this really disconnected experience.

Here’s that menu that I didn’t actually set. What I would have done. I should have created a menu already. I’m going to click on a menu item, and then up here I’m going to choose where it says custom menu, and then once I go and create the menu, I’ll be able to choose it right here. So that’s how you would set that custom menu.

So once you’re done editing your header, you could go here and click on done, and you are done. Now on any page that you are on, on your website, you’ll see right here when you’re inside of the editor, it says page, and then there’s the settings wheel. When you click on this. You can choose the visibility of certain parts of your website.

So right here you have your main options. If I didn’t want to show the header, I can go there and my header is gone. The same applies to the footer right here. And then we also have some different settings for this particular page. So far so good. Now let’s jump back in and take a look at some of the things that I think are not so intuitive for people that want to use thrive theme builder.

So let’s take a look at adding elements to our site. So over here on the right, we would choose this plus option right here, and we can drag and drop our element in. So let’s first take a look at the pinned element here that says new the content block. I’m going to just drag and drop that. I’ll just put it, let’s just put it right there.

And this is going to pop up. And this is some pre created sections. And then right here it says content marketing pack, and there’s a dropdown. I could only assume that there’s a plan to have additional packs of predesigned sections. Now, a lot of these, I don’t really find applicable for a page. Well, here’s, you know, here’s like a testimonial.

And as we scroll down, we see some review looking stuff. I think they might’ve made this with the intention of it being used inside of blog posts where you might want to step list like this and you might want some other things that you see here. Actually, we have some team options right here. But other than that, this is actually pretty limited in my opinion.

Let’s go ahead and choose one of them. So since I’m on a homepage, you might want a team section. So let’s go ahead and choose one. I’ll just choose this one right here that says about us. So this actually looks kind of nice. I don’t know why this color is blue and it’s not the color that I chose, the color that’s being used elsewhere.

Uh, I think it might be related to that duplicate topography option that I showed you, which might be a bug that I discovered while making this. Since this is new, I could totally give them a pass on that. Now we do have a nice variety of modules here, foundational sections, all of that content boxes. A lot of these you’re going to be familiar using.

If you’ve used a page builder before. For now. One thing that it kind of thinks that it’s not included in this, you need the full license of thrive architect is a lot of these modules, when you go to use them, they have predesigned examples of it and you are not able to use those predesigned examples. So let me go ahead and give you an example of what I’m trying to talk about here.

So let’s take the testimonial element. I’ll drag and drop it right there, and this immediately pops up and I’m thinking, wow, these are some nice designs I might want to use, but if you try to use any of these, you have to upgrade. So I really think that this should, or some form of this should have been included.

So basically you just have to start from scratch. So basically you’re very limited on the options. So these all are upgrade, but I think I’ve found one here, the first one, which I can click on and it looks like it’s going to allow me to use that. So you only get that one option and this is their way of getting you to upgrade.

Another strong example of that is when you scroll down, there’s this option called style box. And if I go there, we get this, and I don’t think any of these I can use. These are different box styles. Yep. I’m not able to even use this at all. It looks like, so everything is, I think on this. Everything you have to pay for, so you can’t even use it even though it’s showing there, cause I can’t insert a style box there.

All right. Upgrade only. So you’re going to bump into that a lot. Uh, you don’t have like a pricing table that’s in the pro version of thrive architect. What is nice, you get a contact form in here. So I can drag and drop this, and I do get a contact form. Now there’s templates here, and you can see that these are all upgrades as well.

Uh, you can do the nonsense. One, but these all require an upgrade. So, but it’s nice that the contact forms in there. That’s one less thing that you would need on your website. Now you can also click right here and it will say change template, but this is going to show us some templates that come with the theme builder and you can see a list of those right here.

Now if you continue scrolling down, these are all. Part of the pro version of thrive architect. I keep calling it the pro version or though just thrive architect, the non, the light version. So if you wanted to use any of these, you’re going to get an upgrade notice. Uh, but if you click on this set right here.

You’re able to use any of these and you can change what’s on this page to this with just the mouse click. Okay, so we just took a pretty in depth look. There’s obviously more things that can be shown. It’s quite a complex tool. I got to say that it took them a long time to build this, or in my mind, it took them a long time.

Maybe that’s just what goes into it, and I got to say that I’m not sure where this tool. Fits in today. So if you already are in the thrive ecosystem of products and you’re already a member, or you already use and like thrive architect, it’s a natural thing for you to start using because you’re going to be able to use it.

And you’re going to be able to plug in thrive architect. You already have a license and you’re just going to be good to go. But what if you’re not a thrive architect user? I’ve used all the different page builders and a different theme building tools, and I do think that thrive architect is powerful, of course.

However, it’s kind of in its own locked little ecosystem. So you’ve got other page builders that have a. Third party ecosystem that can extend it. You don’t really see that with thrive architect. It is what it is. They do things the way they do things and they do things when they do things, and you just have to pretty much accept that.

Then of course comes the issue of does it save you time? So one of the things are the reoccurring theme on the page where they’re selling thrive theme builder is that it’s going to save you time, it’s going to be easier, and all of that. Well, I think saving your time is quite subjective. So it really depends.

I think where they’re saying you’re going to save time is if you’re using their designs. But if you notice, you don’t really get a lot of it, you don’t, a lot of it’s locked behind the, uh, getting the full version of thrive architect or the normal version of thrive architect. And then design is quite subjective.

So me personally, in my personal design preferences, I’ve never really. Had any of the designs from thrive suite of products kind of resonate with me. I could be very picky design wise though. So that’s just me. And it’s a very personal thing. You might see the designs they have and say, man, this is spectacular.

I would love to have it me. I don’t say that. That doesn’t go through my mind when I’m looking at the designs that they have. So for me, that is not really a time saver. And if you’re just buying thrive theme builder. It’s not really going to be much of a time saver for you either because it’s very limited in design.

Uh, it’s nice that they have like the light version of thrive architect, but a lot of the things that would save you time, they don’t even include in it. And then there’s the aspect of, it’s being a. Smoother experience and not frustrating and not complicated. I don’t really find that the case here either.

Just the entire concept of a theme builder is a complicated thing. It’s very hard to explain custom fields and learn custom fields and explain custom post templates, you know? So I didn’t even really get deep into custom post templates in all of this stuff. One of my, one of my editing. Being template.

What am I editing? An actual page or a post. It just gets very complicated. Just so, so the whole concept of having a theme builder, I don’t find this theme builder any easier or than in any other theme builder out there. I think the setup process is smoother though. So they get points in my book for the setup process.

And also the price is kind of goes both ways as well. Right. You can buy a license with unlimited updates, a year support, which is totally cool. It’s very generous. Even have unlimited updates. But then if you’re going into the membership, the membership might be considered a little pricey because there’s a, an active site limitation.

So you can’t have, say, a hundred sites or, you know, it’s not ideal for real agencies. Um, actually it’s hard to criticize anything for price because I think a lot of the other tools on the market devalue themselves, so I don’t even actually want to go there in this conversation anyways. That is thrive theme builder.

Those are some impressions that I have after someone that’s had it licensed with them for five years for their products. I’m curious to see what you think about thrive theme builder and how it fits in with things. Let me know in the comment section down below.