If you're looking for a way to quickly and easily create modern, feature-filled, professional looking websites that engage your visitors and turn them into subscribers and customers, but you don't want the hassle of dealing with coding or graphic designs yourself, and can't afford to pay for a website developer, then Thrive Themes Suite may be the answer for you.
In this comprehensive Thrive Themes Suite review you'll learn all about Thrive Themes plugins, themes and Thrive Themes Membership... and how they can help you turn your online business ideas into functioning websites.
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I came across Thrive Themes Suite a few years go. I was searching for a WordPress theme that not only looked good straight out of the box, but one that I could easily customize to get exactly what I was picturing in my head. I exhaustedly searched high and low... I purchased and tried many themes and theme builders, but none of them quite fit the bill... most were a nightmare to work with.
Then I found Thrive Themes... and what I got with Thrive Themes Suite was precisely what I was looking for, and so much more.
Let's get into the review...
Review Summary
Features
Thrive Themes has a full suite of products for building websites, editing content, capturing leads, creating scarcity campaigns, split testing, creating online quizzes and much more.
Their products are feature-filled, with tons of elements to add to your content and many predesigned templates.
The products also integrate well with many other popular online tools, applications and platforms.
Ease of Use
I find Thrive Themes products are intuitive, easy to use and work fast... it's the closest thing to true WYSIWYG I have ever experienced.
And there is no need to know coding or have design skills.
Customer Support
The support is good. There are lots of tutorial video tutorials, a knowledge base, as well as a forum where you'll get your questions answered quickly and effectively.
Cost / Value
Thrive Themes Suite is affordable and competitive. Thrive Suite Membership is best value for money I have come across to date.
Overall Rating: 5/5
Conclusion:
- Thrive Themes Suite offers a full range of feature-filled, easy to use, intuitive, and competitively priced conversion-focused WordPress plugins and themes.
- With their suite of top-notch products, together with great customer support, and the wealth of knowledge within Thrive University and the Thrive Blog, Thrive Themes Suite is a highly recommended and affordable option for anyone wanting to start, build and grow an online business.
- Thrive Themes Suite takes the ability of quickly and easily building beautiful and professional, conversion-focused websites out of the hands of website coders and designers and places it directly into the hands of the business owners, internet marketers, affiliate marketers, solopreneurs, and such.
What Is Thrive Themes Suite
Thrive Themes describes itself as "the most advanced, yet, simple-to-use WordPress suite of website tools" with a focus on conversion optimization that ultimately improves the revenue of your online business.
Founded in 2013 by marketing expert Shane Melaugh and tech fanatic Paul McCarthy, today Thrive Themes has about 16 products and over 100,000 happy customers. You can learn more about Thrive themes - their history, mission, values and their journey up till now, on their About Us page.... there's a nice photo of the Thrive Themes team as well.
The Thrive Themes Ecosystem, as I describe it, consists of WordPress plugins and themes, customer support, the Thrive Themes blog, Thrive University and Thrive Themes Membership.
Now, let's move along with the Thrive Themes review and learn a bit more about each part of their ecosystem.
Thrive Themes Plugins and Themes
Thrive Themes previously offered about 10 WordPress themes, but since the launch of their highly anticipated Thrive Theme Builder, those themes are no longer offered, since with Thrive Theme Builder you can effectively build any theme you can imagine.
Additionally, they currently offer several conversion-focused plugins that will help you in building, maintaining and growing your online business.
Before we get into each of the products, I'd like to note that there are a few characteristics and features that are standard across all of their products:
Let's now take a quick look at each of the plugins and themes that Thrive Themes currently offers.
Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Theme Builder is a visual theme builder for WordPress. This means that it builds themes for your websites... you can build, edit and customize every aspect of your WordPress websites. And it's all done in an intuitive visual, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG manner.
Theme Builder comes equipped with a pre-installed companion theme called Shapeshift and a site setup wizard that walks you through a series of steps so you can get your website live in under 15 minutes.
In just 10 steps, the wizard helps you add your logo, choose the right header, footer, and the layouts of your homepage, blog posts, and other pages, and more.
After you go through the wizard you will have a your core site created... the pages created with Thrive Theme Builder and Shapeshift look quite beautiful and professional right out the gate.
You then just need to make adjustments to suit your particular wants, and then add content.
And with Thrive Themes Global Settings and Smart Colors you can easily set theme-wide color palettes that dynamically update across your entire website with one click. As Thrive Themes puts it - You choose the colors that match your brand and Smart Colors algorithmically updates your entire brand before your eyes.
You can learn more about Thrive Theme Builder here.
Thrive Architect
Thrive Architect is a visual drag-and-drop WYSIWYG WordPress page builder and content editor. It has a simple and efficient user interface (UI), consisting of 3 main sections...
Thrive Architect Simple 3 Section User Interface
- The Elements Sidebar, located on the right hand side of the UI. It's from here you can select from anyone of the 45+ elements (such as text, images, icons, tables, videos, audios, call to action buttons, countdown timers, lead generation forms, etc.) to add to your page or post. This is sidebar is also used to load pre-designed page templates.
- The Options Sidebar, located on the left hand side, where you'll be able to do more detailed formatting of your elements and apply various options to the elements that you dragged across to your middle pane.
- The Middle Pane where the main editing takes place and where you see your content take form.
Thrive Architect is fast and it's intuitive. You can read my full Thrive Architect Review here. And you can also learn more about Thrive Architect on Thrive Themes site.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is an all-in-one conversion-focused lead generation and opt-in form plugin for WordPress. You'll be able to create and customize opt-in forms and run A/B tests to efficiently grow your subscriber lists.
With Thrive Leads you can utilize 10 types of opt-in forms and quickly edit the forms with the simple drag-and-drop editor.
You'll also be able to split tests your forms and automatically increase your conversion rates as well as get a massive conversion boost by showing relevant, highly targeted offers to your visitors based on posts, categories, tags and more.
Thrive Leads gives you simple overview reports on the most important metrics so you see how your opt-in forms are performing over time and where your most valuable traffic is coming from. Learn More about Thrive Leads.
Thrive Quiz Builder
Thrive Quiz Builder allows you to create fully customized online quizzes that lets you gain valuable insights about your visitors, build a segmented email list and drive website engagement.
Creating the types of online quizzes that Thrive Quiz Builder creates would normally take hours of coding... with Thrive Quiz Builder, it just takes minutes.
Thrive Apprentice
Thrive Apprentice is an online course creation and management tool. And it's one of the most customizable WordPress course builder on the market. With full, drag-and-drop visual editing capabilities across every course page and element, you have complete design freedom over your online courses and brand.
Why would an affiliate marketer bother about creating courses? Well, you can boost your subscribers by quickly creating free online courses as lead magnets
This is the same plugin that I use to create the courses in my Affiliate Classroom and what Thrive Themes uses to create their courses in Thrive University. Learn more about Thrive Apprentice.
Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is a comments manager that's much more powerful that the default WordPress comment system.
You'll be able to increase engagement through several innovative features like upvoting and downvoting, gamified comment incentives and an impressive number of after-comment-actions. Learn more about Thrive Comments.
Thrive Optimize
Thrive Optimize makes A/B split testing for pages simple, quick and non-techie.
Split testing allows you to "split" your traffic between different versions of a page so you can test which one performs better in terms of conversions. And it's the only true way to find out what works better and improve your conversions... don't rely on you think would work better just from the looks of things.
Traditionally, A/B split testing was a complicated and/or expensive task. Thrive Optimize solves these problems, by making it both easy and inexpensive.
With Thrive Optimize it really just takes a few minutes to set up a split test. And, you can choose to let the software automatically choose the best variation of the page, once enough data is gathered.
Thrive Ultimatum
Thrive Ultimatum is a scarcity marketing tool for WordPress. And if you don't know as yet, scarcity marketing is proven to significantly increase conversions.
With Thrive Ultimatum, you can quickly and easily create various countdown timers, recurring countdowns, or evergreen campaigns that create a sense of urgency.
You'll be able to boost sales by presenting your scarcity campaigns to the right audience.
You can easily advertise your special offers all across your website. Or, if you prefer, only show the countdowns on specific pages, specific blog posts.
Thrive Ovation
Testimonials (or social proof) has been proven to be a significant conversion booster. Thrive Ovation is a testimonial plugin for WordPress.
You'll be able to gather and manage testimonials from within your website, and display them with the click of a button. Learn more about Thrive Ovation.
How To Install Thrive Themes On WordPress
Thrive Themes has made it very simple to install full range of products. Once you've logged into your Thrive Themes Member Dashboard, you'll have quick access to everything - Thrive Themes Blog, Thrive University, Members Only Content, Knowledge Base, Support Forum and more.
From this dashboard, you'll be able to also download the Thrive Product Manager plugin and install it in your WordPress backoffice. Once installed, you'll be able to install and manage all the Thrive Themes products and themes.
And thereafter, you'll access all of the installed plugins and themes and get working on your website.
Thrive Themes Landing Pages & Templates
At the time of writing this review, Thrive Themes has about 300 landing page templates for Thrive Architect. You can use these templates to create professional looking landing pages almost instantly, for every purpose imaginable. And since there all fully customizable so you can quickly and easily tweak the templates to suit your particular taste and needs.
Many of the templates are fill-in-the-blanks and tutorialized explaining what content should be included on the page.
Each of Thrive Themes other products come with their own respective templates... so for example:
Thrive Themes Integrations
Thrive Themes plugins are natively integrated with dozens of other online tools, including ecommerce platforms, shopping carts, email marketing services , mail delivery services, webinar platforms and more, including WooCommerce and Zapier.
For those tools for which Thrive Themes does not have native integration, you can simply insert html coding. Also, if you using a tools that doesn't have native integration you can make a request through Thrive Themes API Integration Request form.
Learn more about Thrive Themes Integrations here.
Thrive Themes Support and Tutorials
There are three levels of customer support, all of which are just one click away from within your member dashboard:
- Video Tutorials show you step-by-step how to install and use the various plugins and themes.
- Knowledgebase is essentially a collection of articles with advice and answers from the Thrive Themes Team related to the plugins, themes and other things related to Thrive Themes in general.
- The Support Forum allows you to ask specific questions anytime you get stuck or run into any problems with their plugins or themes (or with WordPress in general). Support is very responsive... You'd typically get a response within a day or so. I have found the support staff to be very courteous and effective. If the support team can't solve your issue in the forum, there's the option of allowing them to go into your WordPress back office and fix things up for you.
Thrive Themes offers unlimited support and unlimited updates for the plugin suite, once you're a paying customer.
Thrive University
Thrive University is a collection of online courses, guides and other content on various topics related to online marketing and starting, building and growing an online business.
There are three levels of access for the content:
- Free Content - which are free to anyone. You just need to simply create a free Thrive University account here.
- Member Exclusive Content - these are available to persons like myself that have opted for Thrive Themes Suite Membership
- Premium Content (Paid courses) - these are individual courses you'll have to pay for. Deep discounts are afforded to those that have Thrive Themes Suite Membership
Here's a quick peek inside Thrive University...
At the time of writing this review, there were about 46 courses within Thrive University, most of which are free. Here's a listing of the courses.
The courses are always well organized and easy to follow.
I have found tremendous value in these courses. I have seen other people charge a lot of money for courses similar to the caliber that you'll get in Thrive Themes University for free.
Thrive Themes Blog
The Thrive Themes Blog is also quite invaluable. You'll find hundreds of posts that can help you with your online business.
You'll get advice, insights, tutorials, tips related to internet marketing and online business as well as how to get the most out of Thrive Themes' products and service.
Articles are posted every week and generally fall into one of the following categories:
Thrive Themes Suite Membership
Thrive Themes Suite Membership is a paid subscription to Thrive Themes that gives you access to everything that they offer plus some exclusive member-only benefits. It costs $228 per year, which equates to $19/month.
Here's what you'll get with your subscription:
Thrive Themes Membership also gives you early access to premium Thrive themes courses at deep discounts. For example, the Audience From Scratch course, which is one of the best and most actionable courses about how to build an audience of dedicated fans that can't wait to buy from you, current sells for $697, but it was offered to Thrive Themes Members for $197 before it was launched to the general public.
Thrive Themes Suite Pricing
Thrive Themes Suite has a subscription based pricing, which is currently set at $19/month (charged yearly at $228/year), which gives you access to all their plugins and themes, unlimited updates and support, access to exclusive content and Member Exclusive courses at Thrive University and member exclusive discounts on premium courses.
At $19/month, this represents a clearly affordable and competitive option, and what I consider to be the best value for money for full suite of WordPress plugins.
This price allows you to install the suite on up to 25 websites.
What Sets Thrive Themes Apart
There are many other companies that offer WordPress plugins and themes as Thrive Themes does... But what is it that sets Thrive Themes apart. Here's my take on it.
Thrive University Online Courses
Thrive University is a growing library of actionable internet marketing courses, webinars and guides. You'll Learn how to create websites, landing pages and opt-in forms that are built for maximum conversions, from the ground up and get an inside view of extremely effective tactics and tools for growing any online business.
Conversion Focused features to improve your marketing
The team at Thrive Themes is obsessed with conversions. Thrive Architect comes with several proven conversion focused elements built right in... Including infinitely customizable buttons, testimonials, countdown timers and lead generation forms that integrate with your favorite email marketing tools.
Also, the page templates are all formatted with conversion in mind. Many of these templates are tutorialized, meaning that walk you through how to write attention grabbing and engaging content without being a copywriting expert.
Thirdly, Thrive University has several free online courses on copywriting, improving conversions, creating engaging content and more.
Global Settings and Smart Colors
Smart Pages is essentially a feature within Thrive Architect that allows you to create, edit and customize pages (and an entire website) to be exactly the way you want, and get it done A LOT quicker than any other content builder out there. You can more about Smart Pages here.
Thrive Themes Suite - Real Value For Money
I have not been able to find a better value for money option any where else than that offered with Thrive Themes Suite. At just $19/month you'll be able to do so much terms of building websites for your business.
They Listen To and Take Care of Their Customers
The Thrive Themes support team obviously listens to their customers... They release new features, updates, blog posts, courses and guides on a very regular basis, based on user feedback.
Thrive Themes Alternatives
I haven't yet been able to do a detailed review of the more popular alternatives to Thrive Themes plugins. However, you can read the detailed comparisons done by Thrive Themes. Here are the direct links to the articles below...
Final Thoughts
- Discovering Thrive Themes has been a game-changer for me. I am now able to quickly and easily create websites exactly how I want them to look. It is truly a joy seeing my online business ideas being transformed into fully functioning websites.
- The Thrive Themes Blog and Thrive University will certainly provide you with actionable tips and knowledge about internet marketing and building an online business... it would be of great benefit to you no matter what level you are at.
- Thrive Themes Suite represents great value for money giving you access to the full range of Thrive Themes WordPress themes and plug-ins, constant updates, instant access to new plugins, and exclusive member-only templates and courses, for just $19/month.
- If you want a hassle-free way to build beautiful conversion-focused websites for your online business, Thrive Themes comes highly recommended.
Can I use free website to promote affiliate marketing as a newbie? Will free sites will make me money?
You sure can. WordPress itself is free, and there are many free themes that you can use.
I opted to use ThriveThemes because it allows me to create good looking websites very quickly, and customize my websites and content exactly how I them to look.
Plus the suite of plugins is the most cost effective solution I’ve found to run my online businesses.