Thrive Themes Review And Pricing - Is It Worth It?
In this Thrive Themes review we'll look at the current state of this wordpress-based, website and landing page platform, the pros and cons, if it lives up to the hype and whether it's worth the price.
For those looking for the short answer, it's yes, absolutely. In fact, I think it' the best on the market, but let's start with a summary to kick things off.
Thrive Themes Review Summary
The marketing force behind Thrive Themes is a man named Shane Melaugh. Together with his Thrive partner Paul McCarthy they created Thrive in 2013. The product is used by over 113,000 people across the globe. You can Read more about Shane Melaugh here.
PRODUCT SPECS
290 landing page templates and 16 integrated, conversion-focused products/plugins.
Training And Support
Plenty of tutorial videos, forums and support. Online university and regular course updates.
Affiliate Program
Affiliate program paying 35% base commission on sales of the suite or individual products.
Ease Of Use
Highly functional website, landing page and theme builder with extremely intuitive interface.
Reliability
Constant product updates keep the system "alive" with rare, if ever, down time.
Price
The best value-for-money website building platform on the market today.
4.5/5
Thrive Themes gets a 4.5 out of 5 star rating, where the only reason for not getting 5 is that the new support process and the online chat support system can get blocked by cookies which results in you having to clear cache or turn off ad blockers before it will work. Mildly frustrating.
What Is Thrive Themes?
Thrive Themes is a suite of conversion-based programs (plugins), built for wordpress, that enable you to build websites, create landing pages, run memberships, collect leads and test content, just to name a few of the processes.
Originally, Thrive comprised of a relatively basic page builder, a bunch of pre-made themes and a number of conversion plugins that could help you to collect emails. In other words, it wasn't anything particularly spectacular in comparison to a number of other systems of its time except for the fact that the plugins all integrated with each other.
This made life easier than havinga page builder platform, but then having to add a split testing platform.
Even though it was fairly rudementary, it still had the edge on the competition because they had built the first WYSIWYG editor (called Thrive Visual Editor) in the marketplace, making page building a dream for non-coders. This technological edge ia somethingthey haven't lost over time.
Since that auspicious beginning, Thrive Themes has developed into a complete Theme builder platform (it's moved completely away from supplying pre-made themes) and is now more versatile, flexible and powerful than ever before. It has added more plugins to its range and each one still integrates with the others.
It's implementation and training features have improved dramatically and it is by far the easiest to use website building and conversion software on the market today.
Here's an image of the Theme Builder wizard that you see when you first start creating a site and that you can come back to at any time to change site-wide settings.
Should I Buy The Thrive Themes Suite?
To answer that question you have to know what the "suite" comprises. Also, you don't have to buy the full suite of Thrive products. Each product is a standalone plugin that can be added to any wordpress based website.
It just makes sense to get the whole thing, especially if you're going to be building more than one wesbite over time.
However, if it's just a lead capture plugin you need, complete with multiple forms and A/B testing, then you can just use Thrive Leads. Or Maybe you want to test headlines on your blog posts to see which ones converts traffic the best. In that case, you can get Thrive Headline Optimizer and just use that.
The Thrive Themes Suite
Thrive Themes now has 9 direct conversion-based plugins with 3 ancillary/management plugins. Also with the system comes a further 9 operational elements that make site building enjoyable while providing the extra functionality to help your websites run properly as well as fast. This is essential especially with Google's latest Core Web Vitals updates.
Thrive's 9 Main Plugins
The theme builder is the heart of the system. It's designed in a global manner so that you can create your own website in whatever style you want, either baseing it from one of the 2 main themes (Shapeshift or Ommi) or by building it from scratch using templates and/or blocks.
Thrive Architect is the main page builder program. After building your theme and setting the global aspects of your site (like colours, headers and footers etc), you use Architect to build out new pages in the same fashion that you did with the theme builder. All thrive plugins function the same so by learning one, you learn them all.
Once you've built your site and pages the next step is to start capturing leads. This plugin is brilliant. You can create multiple lead capture forms that can be placed anywhere on the site, triggered in any fashion you like and best of all, you can set up A/B testing to optimize the form's perfoemance. I have a slide-in form for example that outpeforms all other forms by 4 to 1. I would never have known that without Thrive Leads.
Now that your lead capture is organised, you can apply the same A/B testing features to your actual pages. Thrive Optimize lets you set up page-based A/B testing faster than any other platform/plugin so that you can quickly improve the performance of your entire site, not just your forms. Over time, this is a gold mine.
By now your site is active and you've probably got a few blog posts in place so you want to capture the comments coming through. Thrive Comments does that, but also lets you gamify the process by awarding badges, up voting and down voting and turning "normal" comments into much more powerful proofing for your site's content. Invaluable.
Thrive Quiz Builder is simply out of sight. I love this plugin. It's super powerful because quizzes create user engagement (plus collect very important data) like nothing else on the planet. This quiz builder is intuitive, versatile and all the data can be fed through your autoresponders by way of tagging to help you segment audiences down to the minutest niche. It's also heaps of fun to user and play with.
Ever needed to prompt your buyers/subscribers to "get on with it"?. Thrive Ultimatum lets you create countdown timers for evergreen or specific items to help improve your opt-in or buyer percentages. This is an under-utilized function in my opinion and you'll see just how good it is when you start using it and seeing the results.
Everyone knows the power of testimonials but capturing them can be a painful process. Not any more. Thrive Ovation is specially designed to help you capture the testimonial and then display it on your site wherever you want. A fully customisable interface means you can modify the look and feel of the testimonials for greateer visual appeal as well.
Thrive Apprentice is HUGE. When everything else on your site is in place (or even right from the beginning) you can implement Thrive Apprentice to start building out any course you want to create or sell. You can build it, manage it, execute it and more with this plugin. Thrive has just recently revamped this plugin to make it even more user-friendly and powerful. There is no membership plugin better than Thrive Apprentice. Period.
Thrive's 3 Ancillary Plugins
The next set of plugins I'll outline in this Thrive Themes Review are what I call the ancillary, or management plugins that help you to further increase the effectiveness of Thrive Themes.
Headline Optimizer
This plugin allows you to set multiple titles for a blog post to test which one gets the most traffic. You just create the titles and let the plugin tell you the winner. Simply superb.
Clever Widgets
This plugin puts your widgets on steroids and lets you set when and how they will appear on your site. This take site customization to a new level and builds a better user experience.
Product Manager
Right from the beginning it's helpful to have something that helps you set up your entire site and all the plugins. That's the Product Manager. It's the first thing you'll download and use.
The three plugins above are an example of how Thrive has a "forward thinking" mentality when it comes to their suite of programs. You could easily do without these three management plugins but having them simply makes life more effective and efficient for the Thrive user.
The Product Manager for example has evolved over time from being a simple repository for all the other plugins to now being a full-blown installation system that takes all the hassle out of setting up Thrive on your wordpress installation.
You download it and run it and bam, Thrive is installed and instructions are awaiting you to follow.
The final elements discussed in this Thrive Themes Review is the backend setup. Once you install Thrive, you can then access a number of applications/tools to help with further setup, or for additional management of your system.
Thrive Themes Backend Applications
User Access Manager
An app that helps you to manage users for your site.
Global Elements
The editing tool you use the change any global site elements such as header and footers.
API Connections
You use this to set up all external software connections such as autoresponders etc.
Retina Icons
A storage area for all the icons you want to include in your site.
Analytics & Scripts
The place to add all the code needed for analytics tracking and other scripts for the site and pages.
Smart Site
Use this to set up global items like social pages, addresses and phone numbers etc for use site wide.
WordPress Login
An area to set up wordpress user logins that are branded to your company.
Project Lightspeed
The latest app for speeding up your site as per Google's Core Web Vitals updates.
Notifications Manager
An app that lets you set up notifications for users and site visitors.
Of all those listed above, my two favourites are Global Elements and Smart Site. In both cases it's a "do once, use many times" process, especially Smart Site. Instead of having to add company information to various pages, you simply select the dynamic field, for example "address" and the info is entered on the page as per whatever you've set in the Smart Site. This is a massive time saving feature.
Thrive Themes Pros And Cons
There is no such thing as a perfect system and far be-it from me to say that Thrive doesn't throw up some challenges. Overall though, I'd say the pros outweigh the cons.
Pros
Cons
Since Thrive moved from a template based structure into a theme builder based structure the incidence if site breakage due to plugin updates has become minimized.
It still happens however and it can be disconcerting when you visit your site and see that it's not loading properly. This is usually easily fixed with a quick plugin update and if that doesn't work, the support team will usually get onto it pretty quickly.
If you live outside of Europe, there can be support lag times which can be frustrating but again, it's not usually a big problem. It just might take longer to fix your site than you would like.
For e-commerce based sites that could be a bigger problem than a blog site though, so it can be frustrating. The good thing is, Thrive are continually improving all their systems.
Thrive Themes pricing Options
QUARTERLY
Billed Every 3 Months
$
149.00
YEARLY
Billed Every 12 Months
$
299.00
$599.00
Save $300*
* Promotional prices may change
Thrive Themes Review Conclusion
I have personally been using Thrive Themes for over 7 years and I always seem to come back to it when I want to build a new site either for myself or for my SEO or High Ticket Affiliate Marketing clients. I guess that says something.
In this Thrive Themes Review I have outlined the system and features, the pros and cons, the pricing and have sprinkled the review with my own thoughts and experience. I trust it has been useful to you.
The price of Thrive Themes is very competitive and when you take into account the updates and development that you receive as a member, not to mention the access to Thrive University and the courses it contains, it is well and truly a value for money platform.
Compared to the opposition, I think it's a stand out platform that just keeps getting better over time. It's not only worth it, but I thnink it's remarkably cheap for the amount of power and versatility it gives you.