Best Wordpress Theme?

Princo

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What is the best Wordpress theme to build an e-commerce website?
 
The “best” plugin is woocommerce

the best theme is one that works for your brand and performs well
 
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I don't know whether you are on Facebook, but there is a group called, "WooCommerce Community", and they have superb contributions to their group.

It all depends on what the theme provides to you as a designer. Best applied product/page builders, plugin compatibilities, etc.

There is no best theme, it all comes down to optimisation and needs.
 
Themes suck. You're better off disabling the WP theme framework. But if you really need to use a theme, you'll probably be best off using Kadence with all its WooCommerce extensions.
 
Woo is quite a heavy plugin in terms of code, most themes are also not lightweight, also has a very standardized look that loads like rubbish. Which can be altered by themes but most do not. Having said that for me the themes that really perform well with woocommerce are coincidentally my lightest themes. Astra, Divi I have also heard good things about the above-mentioned theme kadence though I do not have personal experience with it. I do also alter a lot of the woocommerce templates to get rid of junk built-in features and again that standardized look.
 
Woo is quite a heavy plugin in terms of code, most themes are also not lightweight, also has a very standardized look that loads like rubbish. Which can be altered by themes but most do not. Having said that for me the themes that really perform well with woocommerce are coincidentally my lightest themes. Astra, Divi I have also heard good things about the above-mentioned theme kadence though I do not have personal experience with it. I do also alter a lot of the woocommerce templates to get rid of junk built-in features and again that standardized look.

Kadence is not especially lightweight, and I wouldn't personally use it. But for many people it's probably the plug and play sort of solution they're looking for, with a metric ton of settings in the Theme Customiser.

Astra has a good reputation but I will never touch any product from Brainstorm Force. Divi is one of the worst things to ever grace this Earth and is firmly in meme territory in pretty much all the dev circles I run in. Elementor isn't much better.

If I had to use a theme it would be either GeneratePress or Blocksy. Both are genuinely excellent, but you need to be a developer to get the most out of them.

The heft of WooCommerce is quite easily mitigated. Custom database tables, disabling the WP heartbeat, offloading media to S3, disabling updates outside of preconfigured update times, a 4+ core cloud server from a reputable provider like AWS or UpCloud etc. does wonders for keeping things snappy in the admin area and ensuring that the site can scale.
 
In my opinion, if you aren't a developer you will be better off with a page builder like Divi. It isn't the most popular theme for nothing.

Divi has been getting a lot of stick lately about being bloated but I'm glad that they are working on conditionally loading only the files that are needed.

But if you're more technical, then I would recommend GeneratePress too.
 
In my opinion, if you aren't a developer you will be better off with a page builder like Divi. It isn't the most popular theme for nothing.

Divi has been getting a lot of stick lately about being bloated but I'm glad that they are working on conditionally loading only the files that are needed.

But if you're more technical, then I would recommend GeneratePress too.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Divi's issues extend far beyond its payload. It's not as bad as WPBakery though, so credit where it's due.

Considering how much of my business involves replacing sites built with Elementor and Divi, I suppose I shouldn't hold any animosity towards these things.
 
The heft of WooCommerce is quite easily mitigated. Custom database tables, disabling the WP heartbeat, offloading media to S3, disabling updates outside of preconfigured update times, a 4+ core cloud server from a reputable provider like AWS or UpCloud etc. does wonders for keeping things snappy in the admin area and ensuring that the site can scale.

Got any good resources on this?
 
awesome thanks.

I thought you had some cool resources for restructuring the woocommerce tables

watched this a while ago and was quite interesting, not sure if it still applies - https://www.wpintense.com/2016/08/16/scaling-woocommerce-1-million-products-talk-wordcamp-brighton/
I have a lifetime license for Scalability Pro. It's a cool plugin, but its usefulness is smaller than their sales pitch would have one believe. It's great for reducing very specific queries, but if you use a lot of ACF you should tread with caution.
 
I have a lifetime license for Scalability Pro. It's a cool plugin, but its usefulness is smaller than their sales pitch would have one believe. It's great for reducing very specific queries, but if you use a lot of ACF you should tread with caution.
Have you had any success with WooCommerce + ElasticPress?

We are looking to potentially migrate our sister company which is currently running on technology that we built 10+ years ago, and have deprecated, to WooCommerce.

They have 100's of thousands of products (basically every education ebook that exists), and obviously, we want a good experience, for users and admin's
 
Have you had any success with WooCommerce + ElasticPress?

We are looking to potentially migrate our sister company which is currently running on technology that we built 10+ years ago, and have deprecated, to WooCommerce.

They have 100's of thousands of products (basically every education ebook that exists), and obviously, we want a good experience, for users and admin's
Yes, I use ElasticPress with a self-hosted Elasticsearch installation on several of my servers. Works well.

Good luck with your project!
 
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