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.

Twenty Nineteen features custom styles for all the default blocks and works great with custom blocks provided by third party plugin developers. It’s also been built so what you see in the new editor looks like what you’ll see on the front-end of your site.

It’s a minimal starter theme that has an elegant aesthetic designed to be adaptable to a wide range of sites. Use it for your typography-driven blog or adapt it for your professional business website. It’s also suitable for magazine, portfolio and non-profit sites.

Twenty Nineteen was originally released with WordPress 5.0 and it is proving popular, with over 1 million active installations to date. I personally like the new theme design and have enjoyed tinkering with it in the new block editor (formerly the Gutenberg editor). It’s easy to customize with blocks, and it feels relatively light compared to other free WordPress themes.

Let’s take a look at Twenty Nineteen’s design features, and then we’ll show you how to easily add a slider to this fantastic free theme.

Twenty Nine Features At a Glance

With its pared-down, open aesthetic, Twenty Nineteen provides a great foundation for a wide variety of websites. Plus, with the WordPress Customizer, you can easily access theme options for your site.

Its features include:

Customizable With the New Editor

Twenty Nineteen is completely customizable with the new WordPress editor. You can choose any of the available blocks to create any kind of content for your site, from columns of text to full-width sliders. You can also use blocks provided by third-party plugins.

Unlike Twenty Seventeen, which has a fullscreen homepage design, Twenty Nineteen has a more contemporary full-width, single column design that looks great on all devices. There’s ample whitespace, giving the theme a professional look and feel. The sans serif headline paired with serif body text makes for a classic typographical combination.

Supports Site Logos

Twenty Nineteen supports site logos in the header. Whether you have a personal blog, portfolio, or business site, you can easily add a logo or photo to your site, which will appear in the top-left corner together with your navigation menu.

To add a logo, open the WordPress Customizer and go to “Site Identity.”

The new default theme also includes a social icons menu, which lets you add links to your social media provides in the header, too.

Supports Bold Features Images

With Twenty Nineteen, you can display featured images full-width or fullscreen (the images cover the full width and height of the screen).

Color overlays are a new feature in this default WordPress theme, which you can easily switch on and off. Twenty Nineteen uses a blue accent color by default, but you can change the primary color in the WordPress Customizer. This gives you loads of control over custom colors that make you look like a pro.

Widgetized Footer

There’s a widget area in the footer, which includes all the widgets you would normally see in a sidebar, i.e. search, archives, categories, meta, recent comments.

On screens wider than 1169px, widgets are automatically displayed in a two column layout.

Why Use Smart Slider 3 for Your Twenty Nineteen Sliders?

Smart Slider 3 is a robust, feature-rich and user-friendly slider plugin for WordPress that comes with a custom block for the new WordPress editor. That means it’s easier than ever to add a slider to your WordPress website!

The new way to build a Slider

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

Get Started

The free version of Smart Slider 3 offers just the right number of customization options to help you create a beautiful slider, all without feeling overwhelmed by features. Unlike other free slider plugins, it also lets you work with layers — an essential feature of any slider plugin, in my opinion.

Here are some of the things that I like about Smart Slider 3 over other plugins:

• Content editor – Edit your slides like you would with a page builder.
• Canvas editor – Drag and drop your layers anywhere on your slides.
• Slide library – The Slide Library provides several pre-made slides to kickstart your work.
• Page builder support – Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Visual Composer, and the new WordPress block editor.
• Responsive and touch-friendly – Your sliders will look great on all devices.
• Dynamic slides – Automatically display your WordPress posts in slides.
• Customizable controls – Arrows, bullets, autoplay, bar, thumbnails, shadows.
• Slide backgrounds – 9 background animations.
• Layers – Build unique designs with 6 layers: Image, heading, text, button, Vimeo, YouTube.
• Font and style manager – Easily update typography, font sizes, and styles.
• Sample sliders – With 11 sliders to start.

Smart Slider 3 makes it really easy to add sliders to Twenty Nineteen. Whether you want to add a slider to the header of your site, a fullscreen slider background, or a simple image slider, Smart Slider 3 makes it really to add new sliders to your WordPress site.

How to Add a Slider to the Twenty Nineteen Theme

Twenty Nineteen theme is the perfect theme for any modern blog. Your visitors can focus on the content of your post, without any distractions. But you don’t need to have fancy effects to make your website interesting and interactive. Instead of distracting your visitors, you can create a simple slider which strengthens your message.

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What’s a Simple Slider?

A simple slider is a kind of slider, that’s not bloated with fancy effects. Generally, it has images and a few lines of text, which either describe the image or tell a different story. They can browse them in an easy and convenient way.

Smart Slider 3 Free is the perfect choice to create a simple slider to enrich your blog posts. As a matter of fact, you can customize every aspect of your slider. Not only you can create an unlimited number of sliders, but they’ll be truly unique. What’s more, all sliders you create are fully responsive. Gutenberg makes it super easy to add your slider to any page or post of your website.

How to Create a Simple Slider for your website?

It’s incredibly easy to create a simple slider with Smart Slider 3. First, add images, then put down some layers and style them. Finally, add arrows or bullets and the perfect simple slider is ready. To demonstrate how easy it is to create a simple slider, we recorded a video for you. It shows you how to create a beautiful simple slider and add it to a post using Gutenberg editor.

With Smart Slider 3 you’re not restricted to create static slides only. You can create beautiful dynamic post sliders as well. A dynamic post slider shows your latest blog posts automatically. In other words, you don’t have to update the slider after you add a new post. Moreover, a simple blog slider on your homepage can attract more people to your latest posts.

How to publish a slider to your Twenty Nineteen slider’s homepage?

Twenty Nineteen theme has one widget position only, at the footer of the page. This position is perfect to create copyright text or footer menu. On the negative side, the footer widget position makes it harder to create header sliders. But worry not, because you don’t have to give up on having a homepage slider. You can always edit your theme’s files and place your slider there.

Publishing a Smart Slider 3 slider to your theme’s file

In this tutorial below, we’re going to place a slider just below the main menu. We’re going to directly edit the theme’s files, so be sure to use FTP and don’t edit your theme from Appearace > Theme Editor.

When you update your theme, all modifications will be lost. If you want to avoid that, create a child theme for your changes. Then only edit the child then, which makes your edits update-safe.

1. Let’s open up the theme’s header.php file located at /wp-content/themes/twentynineteen.
2. Find the following code: </header><!-- #masthead -->
3. Go to the Smart Slider 3 slider you want to publish and copy its PHP code. It will be something like echo do_shortcode('[smartslider3 slider=1]');
4. Write the following code to your theme’s file, just below </header><!-- #masthead -->

   <?php
       if(is_home() || is_front_page()){
   
       }
   ?>

   This code makes sure your slider will only show up in your home page. If you want to have the slider on all pages, skip this step.

5. Put the PHP code you copied in step 3 to the 3rd line of the code, like this:

<?php
    if(is_home() || is_front_page()){
        echo do_shortcode('[smartslider3 slider=1]');
    }
?>

This is how the final result should look like:


6. Save the file and upload it back your site.

That’s it, the slider will show up in your home page now.

Ready to Get Started?

Overall, Twenty Nineteen is a great new addition to the collection of WordPress default themes. It has a clean, elegant design that’s easy to customize and adapt for any kind of site.

Want to add a slider to Twenty Nineteen? With Smart Slider 3, you can easily add sliders to the new theme using the new block editor. Try Smart Slider 3 for free today!

Have you used Twenty Nineteen? What customizations have you made? Let us know in the comments below!

The post How to Add WordPress Sliders to Twenty Nineteen appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

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