Meet Hello Theme, Elementor’s first theme. Since they know Elementor better than anyone else, they could create a theme that lets the user make the most of it. As a result, they created a theme that lets you build beautiful websites using Elementor. Additionally, the theme you use won’t get into your design’s way anymore. In fact, they claim this is the best theme for Elementor. Is that true? Let’s find out!

What is Hello Elementor theme?

What are the best themes for Elementor?

Elementor works with any WordPress theme you can find. Despite this, there are three best themes for Elementor which developers love to use the most. The themes people particularly love are: Astra, OceanWP, and GeneratePress. Not only they’re free themes, but they also power over 800.000 WordPress sites. Hello Elementor is here to challenge these super popular themes. It has a single goal, to be the best theme for Elementor while being the fastest one as well.

What do you need to know about Hello Elementor theme?

Hello Elementor is a clean and simple WordPress theme. As a result, it doesn’t offer many styling options. But that’s not a problem, because you can use Elementor to design every aspect of your website. As a matter of fact, without Elementor, you can only style your pages with custom CSS. For instance, there’s only one menu, but it has no styling. With Elementor Pro you can easily overcome this problem, though.

Although WordPress traditionally has sidebars, Hello Elementor doesn’t have any. If your layout relies on sidebars, Hello Elementor might not be the best theme for Elementor for you. However, you can install a plugin that lets you create sidebars if that’s what you need. Using Elementor’s Sidebar Widget, you can place these sidebars on any page.

While it works fine with the free version, at the end of the day, Hello Elementor feels like a theme for Elementor Pro. For instance, you can’t style the header menu at all without the Pro, unless you do custom coding. However, many people who use Elementor don’t want or don’t know how to do that. There’s nothing wrong with creating a theme for Elementor Pro, of course. But it might have been better to call Hello Elementor what it actually is: a theme for Elementor Pro.

How easy is it to switch to Hello Elementor from a different theme?

Hello Elementor is a lightweight theme, designed to be the best theme for Elementor. Because of this, it makes many people think about abandoning their current theme for its sake. You can switch to Hello Elementor the same way as you’d switch to any other theme. In other words, you need to check the new theme in a testing environment first.

It’s important to realize that Hello Elementor is only a blank canvas you can work with. It’s different from the other popular Elementor themes. Due to the fact that these themes offer more features without the need of Elementor. So you need to be ready to make some heavy changes to keep the look and feel of your site after the theme changes. As a result, you’ll get a simpler and much faster loading website.

Is Hello Elementor a worthy challenger for “the best theme for Elementor” title?

Hello Elementor’s main purpose is to give a blank canvas for Elementor page builder. As I’ve mentioned before, the same team is behind the Elementor and Hello Elementor. Hence you can expect the theme to remain compatible with Elementor for years to come. With this in mind it worth giving Hello Elementor a chance for your next project. As a result, you can reduce the possibility of a conflict between your theme and page builder. If that’s not a good reason to say Hello Elementor is the best theme for Elementor, I’m not sure what is.

Elementor is the most popular page builder plugin. Because of that, there are many other plugins extending it with extra functionality. For instance, there’s a plugin that adds post grid to Elementor. The theme is not only compatible with Elementor, but it also works with these plugins. So if you plan to use any of these plugins, feel confident that the theme won’t cause you trouble.

Is Hello theme the fastest Elementor theme?

You can’t tell how fast a theme is without actually testing it. To find out how fast Hello Elementor is, I’ve imported five Elementor demo templates. Then I loaded each page using Hello Elementor, OceanWP, Astra and GeneratePress. To make the text more interesting, I also added Twenty Nineteen to the mix.

I ran the tests on the same website, with no other plugins but Elementor Free. The only exception is OceanWP, where I also installed and activated Ocean Extra. The server I ran the tests on runs PHP 7.2.16. There wasn’t any caching either on server side or via a plugin. The internet speed was 10Mbit/s for each test. These are the results for each template.

Homepage – Restaurant

Elementor’s Homepage Restaurant demo was my first choice for the speed comparison. To begin with, it has lots of images and a couple of fancy effects, which makes it perfect for measuring speed. As you can see from the table below, Hello Elementor managed to outperform the four other themes. The second fastest was Twenty Nineteen, which might be a little bit surprising. GeneratePress finished in third place with four extra requests compared to Hello Elementor.

Homepage – Fitness

Homepage Fitness is a bit more lightweight template than the Restaurant one. Because of this, it’s perfect for a fast loading landing page. It’s not surprising that Hello Elementor was the fastest to load this page as well. GeneratePress and Astra earned the second and third place respectively.

Landing Page – Vacation

Header background videos are popular design choices on many websites. For this reason, it makes sense to test a template which is a similar design choice. Landing Page Vacation is a cool template which has a background video in its hero header. This time, Twenty Nineteen loaded the template the fastest. Hello Elementor was the second fastest, closely followed by Astra.

Homepage – Agency

After testing a template with a video hero, I wanted to check a less content heavy template again. I’ve chosen Homepage Agency because of its modern look and few, but reasonable number of images. The results are quite similar to what we have got before. Hello Elementor is the first, Astra is the second and GeneratePress is the third.

Product – App

Product App template has very few images. As a result, it helps to get a better look at the actual speed of the theme. The speed test results aren’t so surprising. Hello Elementor is the fastest theme. The close second is Twenty Nineteen which managed to be faster than Astra by 0.02s.

Speed result conclusion

Based on my tests, Hello Elementor is indeed the fastest theme for Elementor. Twenty Nineteen, another rather basic theme was the only one that could beat it. In the light of the results, it’s safe to say Hello Elementor is a great choice for any website. As a matter of fact, it might just be the best theme for Elementor.

Where could Hello Elementor improve to be the best theme for Elementor?

Hello Elementor is a minimal theme, which lets you design your whole site using Elementor. As a result, there are some significant disadvantages, which future updates might solve. Here’s a list of features I’m missing from Hello Elementor the most:

• Global styling options. See, when you download a standalone theme, it has some basic styling. For instance, it sets font sizes, colors, line height and so for texts and headings. Hello Elementor lacks these features. Of course, you can always fix this via custom coding, but it would be nice not to have to do that.
• Removing the page title. Not all pages need to have a visible title. This is especially true when you can’t even style them without custom coding. Because of that, an option would be nice to remove the title from the specific page. Currently, you can only hide it, but that happens with CSS. Additionally, the h1 tag stays there, which can make it difficult for you to do proper SEO. However, if you switch to canvas page template, you can get rid of the page title. But you’ll need to say goodbye to your header and footer, because it doesn’t support them.
• Better usage of Customizer. All themes must be Customizer ready to be a part of WordPress.org’s theme collection. Because of that Hello Elementor uses Customizer, too. With this in mind, it would be great to have a couple of options here, such as some global styling, mentioned above.

In any case, Hello Elementor is a great theme, perhaps the best theme for Elementor. But it would be great to see either of these features in a future release. In the meantime, Hello Elementor remains your average, but speedy minimal WordPress theme.

How can you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor and Hello Elementor?

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated WordPress slider plugin. Moreover, it’s fully compatible with Elementor. As a result, you can add the sliders you created to Elementor using a special Smart Slider 3 widget. Since Hello Elementor relies on the page builder, Smart Slider 3 works with it as well. In case you haven’t used Smart Slider 3 yet, here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to display your slider.

Smart Slider 3 is a great choice to create beautiful sliders, especially, if you don’t have Elementor Pro. Even if you do have it, Smart Slider 3 has much more features compared to Elementor’s own solution. For instance, you can create gorgeous dynamic post sliders, even with the Free version.

Conclusion

Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t easy as there are so many themes to choose from. The final choice always depends on the project’s requirements and personal preferences. With this in mind, Hello Elementor is a great starter theme. It indeed suits well for most Elementor websites. In case it doesn’t suit yours, you can choose from the three most popular Elementor themes from above. They’re great, just like Hello Elementor, although maybe not as fast.

The post Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Why is OceanWP a good choice?

OceanWP is fully responsive and e-commerce ready, furthermore it integrates very well with WooCommerce. It’s designed to work with the best page builders, therefore works well with Elementor, Visual Composer, Divi, and Beaver Builder too.

It is always great when the theme customization options are integrated into the default WordPress editor. Here you can see a live preview of the changes you applied. In the customize menu you can set up different theme elements such as the header, footer, menu and sidebar. First of all, I can tell you that the OceanWP customize menu is very well collected, containing many settings. The WordPress customizer is where OceanWP really shines. With the extensions you get more and more options which you can customize your site.

Ocean Extra: recommended basis plugin

Ocean Extra is a recommended plugin for the settings. If you navigate to the Theme Panel, you have the option to enable/disable the customizer panels. You can upload your logo, favicon, similarly choose your primary color and typography. In the Theme Panel “My library” is available, where you can create your own template like custom header or footer.

With this plugin you get a detailed meta box under the posts or pages with the name Ocean WP Settings. There are a lot of options by which you can customize a post or page. I think this is one of the best features in the OceanWP with lots of options. You can add shortcode to many places, hide sidebar, change menu color or set a new header.

OceanWP Extensions: from OceanWP slider to the sticky header

OceanWP can be extended with free and even more premium plugins. You can buy separate extensions, or likewise a core bundle of extensions all at once. OceanWP has premium extensions like the Sticky Header or Footer which is the basis of many sites. One of my favourite ones is Elementor Widgets, it makes building your website easier with Elementor page builder. Navigation Widget, Ajax Search, Logged In/Out widget can be useful on your site as well.

However, there are a lot of free plugins you can download to the theme. What I suggest is the OceanWP Extra, as I have written above. The theme offers lots of demos that you can use and customize on your site with the Demo Import extension. It is probably the easiest way to make a site quickly. OceanWP slider plugin is a Posts Slider, which means that you can make OceanWP slider with 1 or 3 posts or products.

The plugin generates a shortcode, what you can use. I think it’s a basic extension but it is simple and can be easily set up. If you would like to use on OceanWP slider with even more functions, I recommend you Smart Slider 3.

Smart Slider 3 as OceanWP slider

Smart Slider 3 can be certainly a great alternative to OceanWP slider plugin. It can be easy to use as the default OceanWP slider. It helps you create beautiful and complex sliders, and you can customize everything. The best part is that Smart Slider 3 is free, just like OceanWP. Also, it’s available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. The plugin is, first of all, fully responsive, clean and powerful, furthermore user friendly. Using Smart Slider 3 is easy to learn, which also helps a lot documentations and videos.

Smart Slider 3 can be a great free alternative to many premium sliders, but it is more than average image sliders. It has layers, beautiful effects and dynamic slide generators. You can autoplay between the slides and set up the time to change it. In this plugin you can also make a video slider with YouTube or Vimeo which makes your site morFe professional. Also, the plugin has more wonderful features in PRO version.

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How to create responsive OceanWP slider free with Smart Slider 3

After installing Smart Slider 3, you can load an example from our demo page or begin to make a new slider. Smart Slider 3 has different layers which have their own settings and you can customize them. For example, you can change the font color and family of the heading and text layers or set background color. You can choose slide background image fill, and also you can add a background animation. After you have finished your slider, you can publish it.

Insert to the OceanWP slider with Smart Slider 3 is very easy with shortcode:

OceanWP has more opportunity to insert a shortcode. You can just easily copy and paste the slider shortcode into a post or page. Also in OceanWP Settings you can customize the position: before/after the top bar, header, title or footer. Or customize it with Elementor.

How to make a custom header with Smart Slider 3?

In OceanWP you have the chance to make a custom header or footer. This is like a template, and Smart Slider 3 is a good opportunity to use it as a custom header. The easiest way of making a custom header, when you use a page builder like Elementor.

• STEP 1: Navigate to the Theme Panel → My library, than Add New. If you use Elementor, choose Elementor Canvas template in Post Attributes, after that you can customize it.
• STEP 2: When you are ready, go to the Customize menu → Header → General, and set your Custom Header. That’s all!

Reasons to use Smart Slider 3 in your OceanWP theme

• Free: Smart Slider 3 is the most powerful free slider plugin in the plugin directory.
• Responsive: You can customize the slider easily for any mobile devices.
• User friendly: Drag & drop slide editor with intuitive tools.
• Easy to insert: using shortcodes
• Different layers: heading, text, button, image, YouTube, and Vimeo
• Customizable: Every inch of the layers and the slides, such as color, font or size etc.
• Design: It makes your site more professional

Dynamic Slider to your blog

Like the OceanWP slider plugin, the Smart Slider 3 also can create sliders from your posts. You should just once set it up, after that the slider will automatically refresh the content. That’s also easy to do, just choose to give dynamic slides to your slider and one of the WordPress generators. After that, a lot of settings appear, by which you can customize your dynamic slider.

I’ve made an example for you, where I’ve set 3 sliders. I used a free demo slider for the base. Than I gave the title and the date and the first 300 words of my posts as description. The dynamic post slider uses the post’s featured image as the slide background.

WooCommerce slider to your webshop

OceanWP is e-commerce ready, you can build easily an awesome webshops with WooCommerce. In the PRO version of Smart Slider 3 you can build your website to be more efficient and spectacular. You have the possibility of making a dynamic WooCommerce slider with a lot of settings.

With this dynamic slide generator, you can show the contents of your products. You can set up how your slides will look with the data of the first slide. You can put down layers, and use the variables to put those data inside them what you want there to be. In our documentation you can find more information about filters and variables.

Conclusion

I really liked this theme, I found a solution or setting for everything what I needed. OceanWP works very well with the page builders and it’s easy to use and learn. If you would like to build a professional website free, you should try OceanWP with Smart Slider 3.

The post How to Add a Slider in OceanWP Theme appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/wordpress-themes-with-sliders/ Thu, 24 May 2018 19:30:35 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=7876 Strong imagery is a must for any website, but even more so if you have a commercial need to promote your work or sell your products online. One of the best ways to showcase your images is using WordPress themes with sliders. WordPress themes that integrate with sliders – and vice versa – provide an […]

The post The 8 Best Quality WordPress Themes with Sliders appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Strong imagery is a must for any website, but even more so if you have a commercial need to promote your work or sell your products online. One of the best ways to showcase your images is using WordPress themes with sliders.

WordPress themes that integrate with sliders – and vice versa – provide an ideal way to display multiple images fluidly and in an eye-catching way that grabs your visitors’ attention the moment they land on your site.

But before you go downloading that theme you like with its shiny built-in slider, there are a few things you need to know first…

The Problem with Bundled Slider Plugins

What you might not know is that themes that offer slider functionality usually provide it via a third-party plugin. Here’s how it works:

• The theme author buys an extended license for a slider plugin from a plugin developer, and
• This extended license allows the theme author to include the slider with a theme they sell.

A popular example of this is Slider Revolution, which is by far the most popular slider plugin for WordPress. How did it get so popular? It is bundled with hundreds of themes in the hugely popular ThemeForest marketplace, including Avada, the best-selling theme of all time on the site.

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You might be thinking, bundling plugins with themes makes sense. After all, if a theme author designs a theme to include a hero slider header, they should provide the functionality to achieve it. Plus, bundling plugins makes it easier for users to get a site up and running quickly since they don’t have to buy additional plugins to use with the theme.

Yes, it does make sense. But it’s important to be aware of a few traps. Specifically:

• Bundled slider plugins can only be used under the same license as the theme they came with, i.e. you can’t use the slider plugin with a different theme;
• If you need help using the slider plugin, you’ll need to get in touch with the theme author you purchased from during your support period – you can’t access support directly from the slider plugin developer; and
• Bundled plugins can only be updated when a new version of the theme they are attached to is released. Unless you buy the slider plugin separately, you’ll have to wait until the author of the theme provides the latest version of the bundled plugin with their next theme update.

When users purchase a theme bundled with a slider plugin and later realize the plugin they thought they had also purchased is completely useless with other themes, well… let’s just say it’s caused confusion and later frustration amongst ThemeForest customers:

Look, I’m not out to bash Slider Revolution here. I think it’s a fantastic plugin. It’s just unfortunate that the licensing around bundled plugins – especially themes bundled with slider plugins – is confusing. Users aren’t getting what they thought they paid for.

Which is why I think the solution is to use standalone plugins.

Why Standalone Plugins Are Best

A standalone plugin is a plugin that you download or buy on its own, i.e. it doesn’t come bundled with another product. You can download standalone plugins from the official WordPress Plugin Directory and from marketplaces like CodeCanyon (which is part of the Envato company umbrella that ThemeForest also falls under).

When you download a standalone plugin, you get all the benefits of a regular license, including:

• You can use the plugin independently with any theme;
• You can update the plugin whenever there are new updates available from the developer – you don’t need to wait until your theme can be updated; and
• You get access to support.

If you’re launching a new website or planning a redesign and know that you’ll need a slider, it’s best to download or buy it separately from a trusted slider developer. This way, you’ll know that the plugin will work with any theme and if you need support you can count on a quick response from the very people who built it.

Smart Slider 3: The Highest Rated Slider Plugin for WordPress

When it comes to slider plugins, yes, Slider Revolution is the most popular premium option. But did you know Smart Slider 3 is the highest-rated slider plugin for WordPress? With 430 five-star reviews and 200,000 active installs recorded in the WordPress Plugin Directory, you can’t go wrong. Plus, it’s free to download.

There’s a pro version of the plugin, which I’ve compared with Slider Revolution here. But really, the free version is all you need to get started adding a beautiful slider to your website.

Let’s take a look at themes that integrate nicely with Smart Slider 3, along with ideas for how you can feature sliders in your theme.

The new way to build a Slider

Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.

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