Is your WordPress not sending email? It can be a real disaster for any website owner. Thankfully, you can easily fix the problem and get your WordPress up and running in no time flat. In this tutorial we’ll go over two of the most common reasons why your WordPress site isn’t sending emails and then we’ll give you a three step solution to resolve the issue.
The post WordPress Not Sending Email? Here’s How to Fix It appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
It’s not easy to find the best restaurant WordPress themes. I mean, there are hundreds of good themes and thousands of duds. That’s why picking the best out of the bunch can be challenging. This list contains various themes for food bloggers and businesses in the food industry. We give you a rundown of some of their notable features and ideal use cases.
All the best themes for restaurants have a few features in common such as responsive design, menus, location information, photo galleries, contact information, booking for reservations, shopping carts, and social media buttons.
Once you’ve covered all your basic needs, the choice comes down to extra features, layouts, workflow, and performance. So how do we choose which theme is the best?
First and foremost, we chose themes that meet WordPress coding standards. Secondly, we consider the theme’s overall design – including typography, layout, features, and usability. There are two basic use cases for today’s themes:
Here’s our list of some of the best restaurant WordPress themes available today. Whether you’re a home baker, a food blogger, or a restaurant owner, we’ve got a WordPress theme for you!
Rosa LT is a Pixel Grade Theme, one of the best restaurant WordPress themes available. RosaLT is a contemporary theme with built-in animations and special scrolling effects. Rosa LT has been reimagined as a sequel to support the Gutenberg Block Editor. It comes with a library of custom blocks that support the needs of restaurants, cafes, and bistro owners.
Features:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $75 per year
Listable is one of the best WordPress directory themes available. However, if you want to build a database focused on restaurants, this is your theme. Like Rosa LT, Listable is another Pixel Grade theme. It is a powerful, flexible theme that uses drag-and-drop building to create a feature-rich restaurant-based directory. You can create custom tags, attributes, and listings categories to build your very own Yelp or OpenTable on WordPress.
Features:
Pricing:Â Paid plans start from $85 per year
You won’t have to look far to find some of the best restaurant WordPress themes if you are an Elegant Themes member. Our food and drink category has over 40 layout packs designed for any restaurant, including coffee shops, vegan restaurants, bakeries, and everything in between. Using Divi’s easy one-click demo import feature, you can quickly pick your chosen theme, load it, and begin adding your personal touch. To take things a step further, Divi also offers some fantastic header and footer packs that will give your beautiful new restaurant website a finished look.
Features:
If you prefer to let your creative juices flow, you can use Divi’s Theme Builder to create the restaurant website of your dreams. Plus, using the Divi Marketplace, you can extend the functionality of your restaurant theme with extensions, layouts, and child themes.
For example, the Divi Restaurant Menu Layouts pack provides four unique menu layouts to create beautiful restaurant menus easily. With these layouts, you can build your menus in a fraction of the time it would take to build a menu yourself.
Pricing: Paid plans from $89 per year
This restaurant theme is clean and professional. Delicio isn’t packed with features, but it’s lean. You have everything you need to take reservations, create menus, add a custom Google Map, and sell products from your website with WooCommerce. Delicio may be just the right fit for your next restaurant website.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $69
Foodica is not only well-designed, but it also comes with some attractive features. This recipe website theme comes with all the fixings – including recipe card shortcodes, a shopping cart page, contact forms, and much more. If you are serious about recipes, this theme may suit you.
Features:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $69
Korina is a modern restaurant theme from CSS Igniter. The theme gives visitors easy access to your menu through the GutenBee Food Menu custom block. Elementor is also a significant part of Korina. You can control page layouts, menus, and more with drag-and-drop capabilities. You can use Elementor’s pricelist widgets and custom Korina widgets to build a beautiful website for your restaurant.
Features:
Pricing:Â Paid plans start at $49 per year
Carbone is a restaurant theme that works well for your cafe or bar. It comes in two styles the default style and the new Igloo style. Carbone can integrate with your ordering system, so you can use any restaurant plugin to add different functions to your site. Alternatively, you can create your online ordering system with WooCommerce. Carbone also has beautiful menu pages to showcase your food and drinks through CSS Igniter’s GutenBee plugin.
Features:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $49 per year
Restaurantz is a free restaurant theme with the Site Origin Page Builder plugin. This means you can quickly build your restaurant website with a solid drag-and-drop builder. The theme also supports Food Menu by Jetpack, so you can easily showcase your menu options to your customers. It also has pre-built layouts for the homepage, about, and contact pages.
Features:
Pricing:Â Free, Paid plans start at $59 per year
Bakes and Cakes is a free, responsive WordPress theme for bakers and bakeries. The theme has 16 homepage sections, allowing you to mix and match various widgets to build your custom homepage. It is integrated with a reservation system, has pricing tables, and is SEO optimized. It is also compatible with WPML and Polylang to handle multilingual sites. Lastly, Bakes and Cakes works with WooCommerce, meaning you can quickly sell your products and services on your website.
Features:
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start from $59
Grand Restaurant WordPress is one of the best restaurant WordPress themes from the Themeforest marketplace. It comes with 18 pre-built website templates for cafes, pizzerias, and other types of restaurants. It integrates with Elementor, making it easy to quickly build a website for your restaurant in a short period. Features you can enjoy with this theme include table booking management, online food ordering, appointment booking, and much more without using an external plugin.
Features:
Pricing: $134 per year
Get Grand Restaurant WordPress
| Themes | Price | Free Option | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | Rosa LT | $75/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 🥈 | Listable | $85/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 🥉 | Divi | $89/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 4 | Delicio | $69/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 5 | Foodica | $69/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 6 | Korina | $49/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 7 | Carbone | $49/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 8 | Restaurantz | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 9 | Bakes and Cakes | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 10 | Grand Restaurant WordPress | $134/year | ⌠| Visit |
Each theme has its unique strengths and weaknesses. For a beautiful and modern restaurant theme, Rosa LT is king. Use this theme to build an eye-catching website focusing on animations and functionality. Another Pixel Grade theme, check out Listable if you need to build the next Yelp for your city. Lastly, Divi is the theme that puts the power of customization in your hands. And if you’re looking for some help along the way, Divi has more than 40 complete website kits geared towards restaurants, food, and drink, that you can use immediately.
The one you choose will ultimately depend on your needs. Before we finish this post, we can’t forget to plug our post on 13 Divi Child Themes Perfect for Restaurants – where you will find links to some great Divi themes. Also, check out 14 Examples of Divi Restaurant Websites for inspiration.
Do you have a favorite WordPress restaurant theme? Feel free to share your experiences and comments below.
Article thumbnail image by vectortatu / shutterstock.comÂ
The post 10 Best Restaurant WordPress Themes in 2023 (Reviewed) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
WordPress 6.2.2 was released early this morning as a rapid follow-up to 6.2.1, which introduced a bug that broke shortcode support in block templates. Version 6.2.1 was also an important security release, but due to the catastrophic breakage for those using shortcodes in block templates, some users were implementing insecure workarounds or simply downgrading to 6.2 to keep critical functionality working on their websites.
WordPress contributors worked quickly over the weekend to ensure that users can now update to 6.2.2 with their shortcodes intact. The release post identified the removal of shorcode support in the previous release as “a regression” and a bug. This is an important recognition, as shortcodes are still a tool that users frequently rely on to insert functionality from plugins that haven’t made it available as a block, as well as a necessity for things that won’t work without inline shortcodes.
Version 6.2.2 is also a security release, as core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers said that the issue patched in 6.2.1 “needed further hardening” in this update.
Users are advised to update immediately and automatic updates are rolling out. Many reported having turned automatic background updates off for core after 6.2.1 broke their websites. Users who did so will need to manually update as soon as possible.
The WordPress 6.3 development cycle has begun and work is already underway on an ambitious list of features that will debut in the upcoming major release. It will cap off Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, with an emphasis on polishing customization features and making them easier to use.
WordPress 6.3 Editor Triage co-lead Anne McCarthy published a roadmap to 6.3 this week, which summarizes what users can expect:
This release aims to make it easier for users to edit pages, manage navigation, and adjust styles all directly in the Site Editor. It also seeks to provide detailed, relevant information when exploring different parts of the site, such as showing the number of posts per page when viewing relevant blog templates.
In addition to polishing and wrapping up phase 2, McCarthy’s post outlines the new features that are coming. Here are a few of the highlights:
This is a tentative glimpse at some of the user-facing features that may be coming in WordPress 6.3, but the roadmap includes many more items, screenshots, and quick demos.
“As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.3,” McCarthy said.
Gutenberg Lead Architect MatÃas Ventura will be leading WordPress 6.3. Beta 1 is expected in a little more than a month on June 27, 2023, with RC 1 on July 18, and the general release scheduled for August 8.
When choosing the fastest WordPress hosting provider for your website, speed is a crucial factor to consider. A slow website can negatively impact your website’s performance in several ways. Firstly, a slow-loading website could lead to losing potential customers, a risk no business owner wants to take. High bounce rates, as measured by website metrics, often indicate a slow-loading website.
Additionally, a slow website can hurt your search engine rankings. Google uses core web vitals such as speed index, time to first byte (TTFL), and more to evaluate the quality of websites and determine their placement on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Because of these factors, ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial to avoid these common problems. In this post, we’ll provide you with our top three fastest WordPress hosting providers so you can decide which company to choose. Let’s dive in.
When it comes to WordPress hosting speed, several factors come into play. Firstly, the hardware running the hosting service must be top-notch. This usually includes ample amounts of RAM, high-end central processing units (CPUs), solid-state drives (SSD), or advanced technologies such as LiteSpeed, all of which work together to create a blazing-fast hosting experience.
Additionally, it’s crucial to consider whether the host employs a content delivery network (CDN), which can speed up content delivery to your site’s visitors by storing multiple copies of your files in the cloud. Lastly, the fastest web hosts typically offer speed-enhancing features such as object caching, CSS, HTML, and javascript minification, and load balancing.
Aside from the three fastest WordPress hosts featured in this post, we tested a dozen other providers. While they all performed relatively well in our tests, their results weren’t as impressive as our top three.
Some of the other hosts we tested were:
For this post, we focused on the top three rather than all, primarily because we wanted to showcase scores for the highest-rated, most popular web hosts. Plus, having too many choices can be overwhelming.
To evaluate the speed of each host, we employed the WordPress Hosting Benchmark plugin. This tool, executed from within PHP, allowed us to determine the processing time of each host’s server by measuring CPU and memory speed, data retrieval time from the filesystem and database, and testing the object cache and network speed. However, we opted not to enable the object caching metric, as the author of the plugin has experienced mixed results. That said, we spoke directly with the plugin’s developer, who assured us that he’s aware of the issues with object caching and plans to address these issues in upcoming updates.
Additionally, we relied on the WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks website, which conducts a comprehensive assessment of each host’s setup. This assessment includes load testing, uptime monitoring, K6 static testing to evaluate server caching by repeatedly testing the home page, a web page test to measure how long it takes to load the home page from 12 different global locations, and the WPPerformanceTester, which measures how many WordPress queries and PHP database operations a site can handle per second.
Aside from the two benchmarking tools we used, we also considered a couple of other factors, including the number of positive reviews and the number of features you get with their WordPress hosting plans. So, without delay, let’s dive into our top picks for the fastest WordPress hosting your hard-earned money can buy.
Coming into the top spot on our list of fastest WordPress hosts is SiteGround. Overall, the scores were quite impressive. This is primarily due to how SiteGround’s servers are configured.
Some of the more notable performance features of SiteGround are:
SiteGround offers a premium Google Cloud hosting setup customized to optimize website speed. This unique setup utilizes custom implementations of PHP and MySQL, resulting in an impressive average time to first byte (TTFL) that is 30% faster than its competitors. To further enhance site speed, every website hosted on SiteGround comes equipped with SG Optimizer, a robust site caching plugin that provides dynamic caching to store your content on the Nginx server’s memory, enabling faster access. SiteGround also offers file-based caching, which generates static HTML versions of your site that are displayed to users. Additionally, the Memcached object caching feature stores frequently executed database queries and reuse them to speed up your site.
To top it all off, SiteGround offers minification of CSS, javascript, and HTML, customizable settings to fit your preferences, Brotli compression – a faster alternative to Gzip, and a free Cloudflare CDN.
These features are evident in our testing, providing some impressive scores. Let’s dive into SiteGround’s test results so you can see for yourself.
SiteGround has impressive performance numbers, with a P95 response time of just 126ms and no HTTP failures, even when subjected to a high peak RPS of 303.75 requests per second based on 351,276 requests, good enough for the top spot on our list.
The K6 static test pushed SiteGround further with 442,044 requests. Yet, it still delivered a fantastic P95 response time of only 67ms and no HTTP failures.
SiteGround’s uptime is close to perfect, hovering around 99.99%. However, its WebPageTest results were mixed. If you access a site hosted on SiteGround from the United States, London, or Germany, you’ll see a full page load in under one second. But SiteGround struggled in other locations, such as Cape Town, Singapore, and Tokyo, with an average load time of 1.5 seconds. While not terrible, this is slower than Pressable.
Regarding the WPPerformanceTester, SiteGround scored a slightly better PHP Bench result than Pressable, with a score of 10.006. However, it didn’t perform as well as Pressable in the WordPress Bench test, with a score of 1295.3.
For our testing with the plugin, we used a simple setup with the Twenty Twenty-Three theme and no active plugins. We created 20 blog posts and 5 pages using the FakerPress plugin to simulate a simple informational website.
After conducting five tests with the benchmarking plugin, it’s evident that SiteGround is built on a speedy infrastructure. In fact, it outperformed all other hosting providers on our list when importing large quantities of data into the database and matched them evenly in all other categories. As a result, when we combined the scores from the benchmarking website and plugin, SiteGround emerged as the undisputed champion on our list of fastest WordPress hosts.
âž¡ï¸ Read Our Complete SiteGround Hosting Review.
The second host on our list, Pressable, had the second-best overall score of our top three on the WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks website. This is no surprise considering the performance features available through them:
While most web hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, Pressable takes it up a notch by providing an impressive 100% uptime guarantee. It also utilizes an automatic failover process that switches to a backup server or network in case of any issues. Additionally, Pressable offers managed hosting that’s tailored specifically for WordPress. Since WordPress is built upon PHP, hosting requires a different setup than standard HTML hosting. Pressable’s cloud-based server, robust performance monitoring, and optimized WordPress hosting make it an excellent choice for hosting your WordPress site.
Let’s break down the results from both of our testing platforms so you can gain insight into how fast Pressable really is.
Pressable performed exceptionally well during a LoadStorm test, which simulated uncached users hitting the website, logging in, and browsing. The test generated 425,398 requests over just over thirty minutes, with peak requests per second of nearly 360, yet there were zero HTTP failures. Pressable also achieved an impressive P95 response time of just 321ms, demonstrating its ability to simultaneously handle a high volume of visitors.
Pressable aced the K6 static test, which involved repeatedly requesting the website’s home page for 15 minutes. It handled 447,740 requests without any HTTP failures, with a peak RPS of 986 and an incredible response time of only 19ms. Overall, Pressable performed impressively, showcasing its robustness and ability to handle any challenge.
We conducted a performance test on Pressable to evaluate its ability to handle WordPress functions. The test included stress-testing PHP, MySQL, and WordPress databases to determine the queries per second. Pressable demonstrated an impressive PHP bench score of 10.0006 and a robust WordPress bench score of over 1349. This test showcased Pressable’s ability to handle tons of queries efficiently, making it a viable option.
We also evaluated Pressable’s uptime and conducted a web page test, which fully loads the home page and measures the loading time from different global locations. Pressable received a perfect uptime score of 100 and loaded the home page in less than a second, regardless of the location.
To further examine Pressable’s performance, we conducted several tests. Firstly, we installed the benchmark plugin to assess its CPU and memory performance, filesystem response, and database. Additionally, we conducted a network download speed test.
Overall, Pressable performed exceptionally well. Its network speed test showed an impressive 1.7-second response time. Simple queries on the database were speedy as well. However, importing extensive data took 4.2 seconds, which could be improved. Despite this, Pressable scored 8.2 out of 10, showcasing its strong performance.
âž¡ï¸ Read Our Complete Pressable Hosting Review.
Cloudways rounds out our top three fastest hosting providers. While it scores highly in most categories, we did observe some struggles when over 300 virtual users accessed the site simultaneously. However, it’s worth noting that WPHostingBenchmarks conducted their tests on Cloudways’ lowest-tiered plan, which may explain this issue. Additionally, their test server had only 1GB of RAM, which is generally insufficient to support a WordPress website. To address this, we further tested the next highest-tiered plan to level the playing field.
Let’s take a deeper dive into Cloudways and the performance attributes it offers:
Cloudways stands out from other hosting providers by offering customizable features you can add as needed. With options like Varnish, Redis, and Memcached, your websites can perform at lightning-fast speeds. You can choose from five cloud-based web hosts – Google, AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr – to find the best fit for your business. And you can personalize your WordPress environment by setting the RAM, bandwidth, and storage to your unique specifications.
Our tests used a Cloudways plan that included 1GB RAM, 25GB hard drive space, and 1TB bandwidth. This is equivalent to 75% of the other providers we tested. So, let’s delve into the results so you can see how Cloudways fared against other hosting providers on our list.
As previously mentioned, these results are skewed due to the lowest-priced plan being used. However, it’s still a good indication of what you can expect with Cloudways, especially if you choose their bargain basement setup. During the LoadStorm test, Cloudways struggled a bit. Unfortunately, it recorded 229 HTTP failures throughout the test, with failures popping up once the server gained more than 300 virtual users. With the 160,790 requests made, the average P95 response time was 21,119 ms, which could be better.
However, Cloudways did much better on the K6 cached testing, with zero failures out of 368,873 requests, with a P95 response time of 467ms, which is much better than the uncached LoadStorm test conducted. This goes to show how beneficial good caching can be. For the uptime test, Cloudways fared quite well, with an overall score of 100% through Uptime Robot and 99.8342% on Hetrix, which is pretty darned good.
Finally, the PHP bench results were slightly better than Pressable and SiteGround, with a score of 7.523, good enough for the top spot on our list. However, the WordPress bench scores were the worst, coming in at 1007.
When testing with the benchmarking plugin, we opted for a slightly different setup than the lowest-priced plan. For this test, we chose the next highest (recommended) minimum plan for WordPress, which consists of 2 GB RAM, 50GB hard drive storage, and 5TB of bandwidth on a DigitalOcean cloud server. With these specs, Cloudways sailed through testing with an attitude. The only score under acceptable levels was the database import metric. Still, some of our other hosts also struggled with that. Of the top three hosting providers, Cloudways scored the best on the plugin benchmarking test.
âž¡ï¸ Read Our Complete Cloudways Hosting Review.
As a result of our testing, we can confidently say that SiteGround deserves the top spot on our fastest WordPress hosting list.
| 🥇SiteGround | 🥈Pressable | 🥉Cloudways | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $14.99/month | $25/month | $12/month |
| Number of Requests | 442044 | 447740 | 368873 |
| HTTP Failures | 0 | 0 | 229 |
| LoadStorm | 126ms | 321ms | 21 119ms |
| K6 Static | 67ms | 18ms | 467ms |
| Uptime | 99.9% | 100% | 99.8% |
| PHP Bench | 9.757 | 10.006 | 7.523 |
| WordPress Bench | 1295.3 | 1349.5 | 1007 |
| Trustpilot Rating | âââââ Read SiteGround reviews |
âââââ Read Pressable reviews |
âââââ Read Cloudways reviews |
| Visit | Visit | Visit |
Our findings indicate that SiteGround outperformed the competition in multiple essential areas, including scoring the highest on the LoadStorm test, maintaining an impressive uptime record, and recording zero HTTP errors during our testing. While we acknowledge the impressive capabilities of Pressable and Cloudways, SiteGround’s exceptional performance establishes it as the clear winner in the fastest WordPress hosting category.
Are you looking for more hosting reviews? Check out our picks for the 10 best WordPress hosting options for 2023.
The post 3 Fastest WordPress Hosting Companies in 2023 (Tested) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
WordPress may soon be getting a Command Center, which would function as a quick search component for navigating to other areas of the admin, and would also be capable of running commands. The feature was introduced in Gutenberg 15.6 under the Experimental flag and currently has limited use in the Site Editor context while navigating and editing templates.
The Command Center project is intended to be expanded to the whole of wp-admin in an extensible way so plugin developers can register their own commands. This would also allow for AI-powered extensions to expedite design, content, and layout creation.
“One aspect worth highlighting is the proposed API to interact with the command center,” Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said in a post requesting feedback on the project. “The command center has been developed as an independent @wordpress/commands package. It offers APIs to render and register commands dynamically. These extension points allow plugins to inject any commands of their liking and opens the door for interactions with LLMs.”
Benguella shared a video of the prototype navigating between templates and template parts in the Site Editor:
Feedback so far had been generally positive, but contributors on the project will have the challenge of providing real examples of the Command Center’s benefits in order for some to fully realize the vision for this feature as more than just a fancy shortcut for power users.
“Neat, but I’m unclear what practical problem this actually solves?” WordPress developer Jon Brown said.
“Currently there is a clear easy to find and use drop down at the top center of the editor. Are people really having problems using that? This seems to complicate things where users have to know the names of the items to type them in. Does the average user know to type in ‘post meta’ to edit that?
“There are couple plugins that have done this admin wide, which again while neat, seems better aimed at power users that already know what they’re looking for.”
Benguella responded that the Command Center is being developed as “a complementary UI tailored specifically for average and power users,” and that users would not be required to remember technical terms in order to use it.
Other participants in the conversation asked that contributors consider not releasing the Command Center in WordPress until it can serve contexts beyond just the Site Editor.
“Initially we’ve added the command center to both post and site editors but I expect that we’ll be adding to all WP-Admin once we’ve proved its behavior and APIs,” Benguella responded. The API is currently still in the experimental stage in Gutenberg and it’s not yet known if expansion to wp-admin would be added before or after the Command Center lands in the next version of WordPress.
“Love the concept, hate that it’s limited to the Editor,” WordPress developer Dovid Levine said.
“This would ideally be implemented holistically – either as part of a push to modernize the long-neglected dashboard or API efforts to interact with GB data outside of the Editor. We’ve seen how slow developer adoption is when done the other way (GB first/only) – and worse, how painful it is for the early adopters/advocates if/when considerations beyond the Editor are finally taken into account.”
The first milestone, powering quick search for content and templates in the editor, is outlined on GitHub where contributors can track the progress. The Command Center will also be tested in the future as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Benguella is requesting feedback on the feature and its API on the post published to the core dev blog, specifically regarding the user experience and whether the APIs detailed in the post are capable enough to address third-party use cases.
A WordPress filter is a hook that manipulates internal data before it is displayed on the browser. To create a filter, add the add_filter function in your website’s functions.php file. In WordPress development, users use this filter to modify a plugin, a theme, or specific website functionality. For example, you can change your website posts’ […]
The post What Are Filters in WordPress and How to Use WordPress add_filter appeared first on Hostinger Tutorials.
If you run a forum or membership site and want to improve visitor engagement, installing a chat room can be a great solution. Chat rooms are virtual spaces where visitors can communicate with the website owner and other participants in real time via text. For WordPress CMS users, many excellent chat room plugins let you […]
The post How to Create a WordPress Chat Room to Boost Website Engagement + Plugin Recommendations appeared first on Hostinger Tutorials.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of a website. Without it, your content will be harder for search engines to find, no matter how great the content is. Using an SEO-friendly WordPress theme can provide a critical foundation for building a site that will rank high in the SERPs. In this post, we’ll look at free and premium options for some of the best SEO WordPress themes available to download today.
An SEO-friendly WordPress theme is basically a theme that is built with SEO as a high priority. These themes usually have a code base that makes your site easily indexed by search engines. They are built with SEO best practices focusing on SEO headings, schema markup for getting featured snippets on Google, speed optimization, Google authorship, semantic HTML5 markup, mobile responsiveness, and more. They also provide easy-to-use SEO options on the backend to help you customize and improve your SEO even further. Having an SEO-friendly theme is important because it gives website owners a great foundation for growing traffic organically.
For those serious about WordPress SEO, you should still consider using an SEO plugin with your theme to implement more advanced SEO techniques. This is especially true when it comes to deeper levels of on-page SEO and link building. SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath can provide the same SEO options native to your theme and much more. So it is also important that your theme integrates well with these plugins. Plus, there are many SEO tools that can boost your website’s ranking beyond the capabilities of SEO themes and plugins.
However, a theme that is built to be SEO-friendly out of the box is still a great solution for many and will provide a great foundation for extending SEO efforts with other plugins or tools.
It can be difficult to tell how well a theme is optimized for SEO, as some features are sometimes hidden. After some research, we’ve found some of the top SEO WordPress themes you can use for your website. With both free and premiums options available, we have a theme for everyone on our list.
Schema proclaims itself as the fastest SEO WordPress theme, period. And we definitely agree that it is one of the best SEO WordPress themes available right now. To begin, Schema comes with pre-configured rich snippet support. This helps your website’s content have more prominence on the SERP on search engines like Google. This can help your site to rank better. Additionally, much effort and thought go into the code used to create this theme. Its code is thoroughly optimized to be light with an emphasis on SEO best practices. Schema’s code is secure and rigorously tested so that your website will be safe and perform at its highest good.
Loading time is a major factor that Google uses to determine the position of websites on the SERP. Luckily, when using Schema, you can rest assured that your website will perform well in the speed department. Additionally, we have to mention that one of the most popular SEO plugins Rank Math was created by the same authors of Schema. This means that if you want the best SEO WordPress theme to work with Rank Math, you should consider using Schema. Plus, it is compatible with the Elementor Builder for more powerful design features.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, $49/yr (unlimited sites)
GeneratePress is a force to be reckoned with regarding WordPress themes. It is one of the first themes to have a competent block-enabled theme builder. With this theme, you can rest assured that search engines will properly crawl your website and will remain accessible to all types of internet and web users.
Out of the box, GeneratePress emphasizes performance, accessibility, and SEO best practices, as seen in the performance score below!
Accessibility is a key factor that Google considers when ranking a website. Many of the more popular themes – including some on our list – completely ignore this important part of web design. However, GeneratePress makes sure that they follow WCAG standards, ensuring those who may use the internet differently can still use and interact with your website.
In addition to covering basics like mobile responsiveness, GeneratePress also uses the correct header tags throughout its theme. GeneratePress bears these aspects in mind and does an excellent job of giving you a reliable tool to make a robust SEO-friendly website.
Features include:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $59 per year
Divi is a theme from here at Elegant Themes with a modular drag-and-drop builder with dozens of modules to create any layout you need. You can also use the many premade layouts and modify them any way you want. The theme options panel includes an SEO tab to set up custom SEO for your homepage, single post pages, and index page.
You can set up custom titles, descriptions, keywords, canonical URLs, custom fields, and more. You can enable or disable any field you want, giving you complete control over how the theme can handle your SEO. It’s an excellent choice for building any website you can imagine. In addition to the base SEO settings, Divi plays very well with SEO giants Yoast SEO and RankMath. You can learn how to optimize your Divi website with Rank Math on our blog.
Features include:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $89
Genesis Pro by StudioPress is our list’s most expensive premium theme but for a good reason. It is based on the robust, state-of-the-art WordPress framework Genesis. The open-source framework was built from the ground up with SEO in mind, making it one of the best SEO WordPress themes available.
Its clean code helps you avoid technical difficulties that could impede your ranking with search engines. Secondly, Genesis Pro boasts powerful security features, so not only is your SEO covered, but the safety of your website is also secure. Of course, it supports Gutenberg deeply, giving you a visual page-building experience supported by a library of StudioPress child themes and pre-built, custom content sections and full-page layouts.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, $360 per year
Astra is one of the WordPress Theme Repository’s most popular free themes. And with over one million downloads on the net, many would agree that it is one of WordPress’s top themes. With free and premium versions, you can expect deep SEO support and capabilities to help your website’s search engine optimization journey.
The codebase structure of Astra follows SEO best practices which are great news when it comes to building an SEO-friendly website. Astra claims only to need less than 50kb of resources, making it one of the best-performing themes on our list. Built with speed in mind, Astra has great performance stats on GTMetrix, Pingdom, and YSlow compared to its competitors. It supports SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math, so you can rest assured that you’ll have your SEO in control when you use Astra for your site.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $59 per year
OceanWP has a feature-rich free version that gives you a helping hand regarding your SEO. For starters, you have schema markup built into OceanWP, which helps with your rankings on search engines like Google. You have the option of disabling this markup if you choose to use an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. Controlling heading tags is another SEO-specific feature OceanWP has natively that can assist you as you optimize your site for search engines.
OceanWP also has deep integrations with many page builders, including Elementor. If budget is an issue and you’d still like to build a robust SEO website, OceanWP is one of the best SEO WordPress themes for you to try.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $54 per year
Neve is a lightweight and fast theme that boasts seamless integration with a long list of page builders. For SEO, Neve comes with an SEO-ready structure. Additionally, it has clean and optimized code. No matter what your builder of choice is, Neve will work effortlessly. Neve boasts of super-fast performance due to its reduced weight as a theme. Right out of the box, the theme has a total install size of only 28kb! Additionally, Neve works well with the most popular caching plugins.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $99 per year
Zakra integrates with page builders like Brizy and Elementor. It also plays well with the popular SEO plugin Yoast SEO. The theme boasts of having a load time of less than one second, according to sites like Pingdom and GT Metrix. Search engines can easily recognize site content for Zakra. Zakra works hard at preventing security risks on your site, all while following WP coding standards tightly.
Features include:
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $69 per year
SEOWP is an SEO-focused theme that was created for SEO agencies and worked to be an example of their SEO efforts. It includes premium SEO plugins to help improve SEO and page loading. SEOWP has a built-in SEO tool called Rankie. It is a rank checker that will track site rankings in Google for you and generate powerful reports. SEOWP has robust integration with Yoast and is fully integrated with this stable SEO plugin.
It includes sections for case studies, marketing free books and resources, a landing page template, forms, and more. SEOWP was named one of the best SEO WordPress themes at one point on ThemeForest. It’s one of the best SEO WordPress themes for SEO and marketing agencies.
Features include:
Pricing: $138 per year
Public Opinion is a simple magazine with multiple homepage layouts that focus on SEO. This theme is integrated and works beautifully with Yoast SEO, the popular SEO plugin. Search engines love Public Opinion. The theme focuses on helping your site unlock the power of SEO for ranking on search engines. It includes multiple homepages and category layouts to create the pages you want. There are three different post types, including a rating post type where you can write detailed ratings for reviews. It’s a clean theme that loads fast and is ideal for any magazine or blog.
Features include:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $49 per year
As you can see, being SEO-friendly is more than just being compatible with the many SEO plugins available for WordPress. These themes include clean code that follows best practices for SEO to tell search engines about your content. Between these themes, you’re sure to find what you need to rank high in search engine results and get your content discovered.
| Themes | Price | Free Version | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | Schema | $49/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 🥈 | GeneratePress | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 🥉 | Divi | $89/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 4 | Genesis Pro | $360/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 5 | Astra | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 6 | OceanWP | $54/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 7 | Neve | $99/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 8 | Zakra | $69/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 9 | Public Opinion | $49/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 10 | MH Magazine | $49/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 11 | SEOWP | $138/year | ⌠| Visit |
This is our list of the best SEO-friendly WordPress themes that make your content highly discoverable. Right out of the gate, Genesis Pro packs a punch for those who want to handle their SEO through their theme. Performance-focused people will be thrilled to use Genesis Pro for their site. Secondly, if you’re looking for an SEO-focused theme that works well with Gutenberg, GeneratePress is your theme. Last but never least, Divi is an excellent choice for balancing your SEO and design needs.
What’s your favorite SEO-forward WordPress theme? Did we miss it from our list? Sound off in the comments section down below!
Article thumbnail image by Sergey Korkin / shutterstock.comÂ
The post 10 Best SEO Optimized WordPress Themes in 2023 (Compared) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
WordPress has been around for twenty years and has quickly become the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). One of the best aspects of WordPress is the ability to change the look of your site with themes. Among the different types, block themes are the most recent addition. Based on the block editor released in WordPress 5.9, block themes have evolved to become the future of WordPress. In this post, we’ll outline our picks for the best WordPress block themes available today. But first, let’s explore what a block theme is.
Block themes offer a revolutionary approach to website design in WordPress. They utilize full site editing to allow you to design every aspect of your website, including posts, pages, and templates, without the need for coding. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create headers, footers, post templates, block patterns, and more. Furthermore, developers and designers no longer need to change core WordPress files like functions.php. Using one file – theme.json, you can easily create custom blocks, add or change fonts, or modify other site aspects in one place. Despite being a relatively new design approach, block themes are the future of WordPress.
We considered a few factors when we set out to build a list of the best WordPress block themes. Our first priority was to ensure that every theme on our list fully utilized site editing capabilities. In addition, we made sure that each theme was user-friendly and easy to customize. Of course, we also considered the valuable reviews submitted by the WordPress community. And last but not least, we relied heavily on our own experience with each theme. With those factors in mind, we’ve identified our picks for the 10 best WordPress block themes for 2023. Let’s dive in.
First up is GeneratePress, a WordPress block theme that focuses on speed. Its small page size of just 7.5kb allows for creating a lightning-fast, fully personalized website with minimal effort. You have the option of building pages and templates using the built-in block editor or installing a page builder plugin for added flexibility. Although the free version of GeneratePress offers all the essential tools to build a site, upgrading to the premium license offers many benefits to enhance your web development experience.
The WordPress live customizer allows easy customization, enabling users to set global colors, WooCommerce options, layout options, and fonts. While some block themes require modifying the theme.json file to add fonts, GeneratePress provides a more streamlined approach with its font manager. This feature allows you to easily upload fonts and apply them to specific target elements across your website.
GeneratePress also boasts an impressive site library with over 100 premade layouts available for use with a premium license. Whether you’re building a business, blog, or ecommerce site, you can get up and running quickly with these pre-built templates.
But GeneratePress is more than just a user-friendly tool for website customization. It’s also a valuable asset for developers thanks to its advanced hook system, which allows for the creation of new functionalities with ease. Additionally, the block-based theme builder combines GeneratePress with the GenerateBlocks plugin, allowing newbies to design their websites without coding. With the ability to create templates featuring static and dynamic blocks, content can be displayed effortlessly.
GeneratePress is Best For:
The block-based theme builder, drag-and-drop interface, and expansive page-building options available through the GeneratePress Blocks plugin will be greatly appreciated by novices. In contrast, developers and WordPress experts will discover the hook system as an exceptional tool for integrating new features into their websites. Overall, GeneratePress is a top-tier WordPress block theme worth trying out.
Pricing: Free, with a premium license starting at $59 per year.
Next on our list of best WordPress block themes is Divi. It’s widely considered one of the most popular themes in the world, with over 1 million live Divi sites in the United States alone. Its popularity is due to the fantastic features it offers. Divi provides the most customization options of any FSE theme on our list. You can design posts and pages in real-time with a no-code front-end Visual Builder, create custom templates with the Theme Builder, and even create a global color palette thanks to Divi’s built-in color manager.
Divi offers direct support for WooCommerce, providing users with over 20 Woo-specific design elements. With these features, users can easily create stunning and functional product, cart, and checkout pages, allowing them to customize ecommerce sites to fit their preferences perfectly.
Furthermore, Divi seamlessly integrates with a wide range of popular plugins, including MemberPress for creating a membership site, Restrict Content Pro for building a learning management system (LMS), and offers custom field support through plugins such as Toolset. That makes Divi stand out from everyone else – its versatility enables you to create virtually any type of website you can imagine.
Finally, Divi presents an impressive collection of more than 2300 professionally-designed layouts that can make your WordPress site a reality in just a few clicks. These layouts cater to over a dozen business types, ensuring something for everyone. Moreover, these layouts are furnished with royalty-free original photos, icons, and in some instances, Photoshop images that can be modified to achieve a more personalized look.
Divi is Best For:
Divi’s wide customization options make it the best WordPress block theme for WordPress beginners and experts. If you’re new to WordPress, you’ll appreciate how easy it is to load one of 2300 free design layouts and quickly change text and images. On the other hand, advanced users will love the flexibility of the Theme Builder, which makes template creation a breeze.
Pricing: $89 per year
Our next theme, eStory by Themegrill, is a WordPress block theme that’s perfect for bloggers. With over 10 customizable templates, you can give your blog a unique look by changing colors, images, and fonts. Plus, you’ll have access to 25+ block patterns and 3 starter sites, so you’ll always have inspiration. eStory is all about performance, too. It boasts an impressive 1-second page load time, so you won’t have to worry about bounce rates caused by slow speeds. As with all FSE themes, you can use the editor to edit templates easily. But don’t worry, you’re not limited to what they provide. With full site editing, you can add or delete any blocks you want, giving you complete control over your site’s look and feel.
Unlike traditional WordPress themes, which typically require you to make customizations through the WordPress customizer, eStory allows you to modify every aspect of your site’s appearance directly through the site editor. This means that you can adjust everything from the images and fonts to the colors and layout at the template level. With the free version, users can access nearly limitless customization options. That said, upgrading gives you access to the eStory theme and over 20 other fully responsive themes, each with a unique focus.
eStory is Best For:
If you’re a blogger looking for a premade theme that’s easy to customize and tailored to your needs, eStory might be the perfect solution. However, check out Divi if you want more options and flexibility in your block theme.
Pricing: Free, with a premium license for $69 per year.
Next up on our list of the best WordPress block themes is Twenty Twenty-Three, which just so happens to be WordPress’s flagship theme. Now, don’t expect anything too flashy from this one. In fact, depending on what you’re looking for, that could be either a pro or a con. But, the real magic of Twenty-Three lies in its simplicity. Though it might seem a bit vanilla at first glance, you can turn it into whatever you want, thanks to full site editing.
Twenty Twenty-Three is a leaner version of its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Two. However, it still offers a lot of features. Users can enjoy global style variations, block patterns, full site editing, and color and typography changes. However, if you want to add fonts, you may need to use a plugin or be skilled enough to modify the theme.json file. Fortunately, this is not as intimidating as it may seem. You can easily add unlimited fonts with just a few lines of basic CSS.
One of the best things about Twenty Twenty-Three is its use of fluid typography. This means that fonts are responsive, just like the site width. The type size is relative to the browser window’s width, eliminating the need to set up media queries or painstakingly edit individual text boxes for each breakpoint.
Twenty Twenty-Three is Best For:
Twenty Twenty-Three can be an excellent WordPress block theme if you’re determined to create a theme from scratch. Its minimalist foundation allows developers to modify or build any website they desire. However, if you’re searching for a more straightforward route to achieving the website of your dreams, consider eStory. With its user-friendly interface and pre-built templates, eStory offers a hassle-free experience in creating your ideal website.
Pricing: Free
Our next WordPress block theme, BlockPress, offers extensive customization options. It stands out from the other free themes on our list because it includes animation effects, allowing you to easily create stunning parallax, transform, 3D, hover effects, and more. Additionally, BlockPress provides the functionality to generate mega menus, transparent and sticky headers, and over a dozen query loop templates to showcase your blog posts.
BlockPress is highly customizable thanks to the pre-built template part options included with it. Several options include a transparent header, a cover image hero section, or a colored title and image hero section. Plus, it provides a cool page template with sticky columns, so you can highlight the information that matters most to you. Also included are multiple template parts for headers and footers to find the perfect look for those essential aspects of your website.
But that’s not all. BlockPress is remarkably lightweight, thanks to its use of conditional asset loading. This means it generates all the necessary styles and scripts on the fly, resulting in some of the fastest page loading times of any theme on our list, with an average page size of just 2kb. With such impressive speed, you won’t even need a separate speed optimization plugin to ensure your website loads quickly.
BlockPress is Best For:
If you’re in the market for a multi-purpose theme that offers a wide range of customization options, look no further than BlockPress. This lightweight theme is the perfect choice for creating a visually stunning website without relying on additional plugins. With features like animations, sticky sections, and mega menus, you’ll have all the tools to make your site stand out.
Pricing: Free
Moving on to the next WordPress block theme on our list, we have Wabi. This particular theme uses a simple design that emphasizes the power of typography. It is specifically tailored to cater to text-heavy websites by incorporating ample white space, minimalistic styling, and accent colors. Although Wabi’s understated appearance may cause it to be disregarded, several hidden gems within the theme may catch your attention and prompt you to take a second look.
Wabi boasts a simple yet striking feature that allows users to assign one of six accent colors to post title backgrounds. Although it may seem like a small detail, this feature is a powerful tool for drawing attention to individual blog posts and breaking up the monotony of a text-heavy website. Beyond this, Wabi offers other subtle design elements, such as the option to add decorative borders to images. These little nuances add a touch of visual interest to websites that primarily feature written content.
In addition, Wabi allows you to incorporate even more visual elements by providing a collection of premade block patterns. These patterns include headers and footer options, hero layouts, subscribe forms, and query loops. Best of all, each design maintains the minimalistic styling that Wabi is known for, ensuring your website remains sleek and uncluttered.
Wabi is Best For:
Those looking for a minimalistic, clean WordPress block theme for blogging will love Wabi. While there are only a few bells and whistles here, plenty of design elements are included to help showcase your blog or news-heavy website.
Pricing: Free
Introducing our next entry, Bricksy – a free, lightweight WordPress block theme perfect for bloggers. It’s packed with full site editing capabilities, an array of premade block patterns, and global styling options, making it a worthy addition to our list. While Bricksy includes default templates in all block themes, it also comes with unique templates, such as home, about, WooCommerce, team page, and more. The best part? Editing all of these templates is a breeze thanks to the user-friendly editor.
One of the best features of Bricksy is the ease with which you can add or edit content. Like all full site editing themes, you can edit every aspect of your website, including Bricksy’s included templates. You have the liberty to leave things as they are or explore the diverse range of Bricksy’s pattern blocks – consisting of whole page layouts for travel, wedding, food, and fashion, as well as an array of headers, footers, and general blocks, such as hero sections and image galleries. Adding these blocks is a breeze, giving you the power to customize your website in a few clicks.
Bricksy is Best For:
If you’re searching for a theme that heavily features photos for your food, travel, or wedding blog, then Bricksy might just be what you need. Its user-friendly interface makes adding content a breeze through dozens of pattern blocks or by quickly swapping out text and images using their premade layouts.
Pricing: Free, with a premium license for $59 per year.
Moving on to our next best WordPress block theme, we have Tove. It provides over 40 block patterns, is lightweight, and is ideally suited for those who want to feature their café or restaurant. It embodies the color wheel gamut with various muted rainbow colors and provides a fun and whimsical design.
Tove is an exceptional tool for building restaurant sites, boasting full site editing capabilities and over 40 block patterns that streamline the process. Notably, Tove offers a collection of menu pattern blocks that simplify the otherwise tedious task of creating a restaurant menu on a webpage. With impressive responsive layouts tailored for smaller screens, Tove’s menu pattern blocks are a game-changer for anyone seeking an easy and efficient solution to this challenge.
But wait, there’s more. Tove also offers a variety of other patterns to complete your site, including blog, call to action, and hero blocks, in addition to over a dozen patterns for headers and footers. With all of these layouts at your disposal, all you need to do is drag your desired block into a page or post and then customize the fonts, colors, and images to match your branding.
Tove is Best For:
If you’re a restaurant owner looking to build a responsive website, Tove is a good option. Thanks to the ample layout options, you won’t need any design experience. That said, if you want unlimited design freedom, check out Divi.
Pricing: Free
Our next theme, Julia by Pixelgrade, is designed to feature your most delicious recipes on a food blog. With an amazingly simple style manager, an onboard recipe indexing system, and predefined widget areas for ad placement, this full site editing theme is one of the best WordPress block themes on the market. Additionally, Julia comes multilingual-ready with WPML support, so you can cater to a broader audience.
Julia’s intuitive style manager is its best feature. This tool seamlessly integrates the WordPress customizer with Pixelgrade’s proprietary system, giving you the power to manage every aspect of your theme’s styling effortlessly. With Julia, you’ll have the flexibility to choose between light and dark modes, adjust color levels, explore a range of predefined font pairings, and experiment with various hover effects, among other options. Plus, the style manager includes settings to adjust color contrast, which ensures your website is accessible to those with visual impairments.
But that’s not all. Julia also boasts predefined widget areas specifically dedicated to running advertisements, making it a breeze to monetize your blog. With this feature, you can quickly implement various advertising strategies and generate revenue from your website.
Julia is Best For:
Pixelgrade’s Julia theme is a perfect match for folks looking to build and monetize a food blog. With unlimited styling options and an easy drag-and-drop builder, WordPress users of any skill level can produce a stunning food blog that caters to a broad audience.
Pricing: $75 per year
And finally, we have BlockBase – a block theme crafted by the folks at Automattic. Like Twenty Twenty-Three, BlockBase is a minimalist WordPress theme that allows you to unleash your creativity. While it comes with the usual Full Site Editing (FSE) theme features like setting up colors and fonts, choosing from a selection of headers and footers, and several pattern blocks, its real strength lies in its simplistic foundation. Because of this, Blockbase provides ample space for developers to work their magic.
BlockBase’s bones are strong, leaving room to build something beautiful. There are no bells and whistles or dancing bears, but Blockbase is blazing fast because of this. Those with coding skills can use Blockbase’s foundation to create any website they want. You can create a block theme, add styling options through theme.json, and build custom blocks to create any website your little developer heart desires.
BlockBase is Best For:
Because of its simplicity, BlockBase is an excellent choice for developers that want to take a simple theme and make it their own. That said, through full site editing, anyone with an eye for design can create a beautiful, functional website.
Pricing: Free
Of all the themes featured here, GeneratePress and Divi stand out among the rest as the best WordPress block themes.
| Theme | Price | Free Option | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | GeneratePress | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 🥈 | Divi | $89/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 🥉 | eStory | $69/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 4 | Twenty Twenty-Three | Free | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 5 | BlockPress | Free | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 6 | Wabi | Free | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 7 | Bricksy | $59/year | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 8 | Tove | Free | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
| 9 | Julia | $75/year | ⌠| Visit |
| 10 | BlockBase | Free | âœ”ï¸ | Visit |
GeneratePress and Divi both offer tons of customization options, a user-friendly interface, and professionally designed layouts. GeneratePress is the best overall, thanks to its lightweight, adaptable structure and ability to work with any page builder. That said, although we may seem biased, Divi is a close second. Divi’s front-end visual builder is simply unmatched. Being able to see design changes in real time is a game-changer. Plus, Divi has excellent customer support. Our support techs are skilled and knowledgeable to help with any Divi-related issues (should they arise) – and in a hurry. Plus, having options to integrate other necessary plugins is a huge bonus. Ultimately, your chosen theme depends on how you want to design your website and which tools you prefer.
Are you looking for more theme reviews? Check out our post for the best WordPress themes in 2023, or if you’re a serious writer, check out our picks for the best themes for bloggers.
The post 10 Best WordPress Block Themes for 2023 (Reviewed) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.