Avada Theme for WordPress:

Is this the best Small Business Theme?

If you are building a website on WordPress for your small business, then you’re probably looking for a theme to design the site with.

Well I’ve built a few, and my personal opinion after using over dozens of different themes, is that the Avada Theme is the best for a small or medium business. I’m talking about the build of a standard info type of website for a small business like a trade or consulting type business.

For a project that’s purely ecommerce / online shopping – I’d probably go with a different theme like Flatsome or even ditch WordPress for Shopify. (If you wanted something a bit more basic, then Squarespace might be an option)

I know there are different articles on this theme and others, but most you’ll find on this are from the web developers perspective. This article is purely from the small business owners perspective and the people who are going to be using it in the long run.

These are the reasons why I’ve chosen Avada for most of the sites I’ve built in the last few years:

*** Note: I know some reviews like to break out the speed tests, inspect the code and things like that. I won’t be doing that here. While that stuff can matter – it’s not really relevant from a small business owner’s point of view. They just want it to work for their business.

Pre-built Websites

At the time of writing, Avada has 98 pre-built website designs. You can see them here: https://avada.com/prebuilt-websites/

You can easily install these once you’ve installed and set up the theme. There are so many designs that there will be one that suits your business – or will suit after a few easy modifications.

They have names / industries on each design – but they are not hard rules, ie. you don’t have to use the lawyer site design only for lawyers only – it’s a professional corporate style design you can use for anything. Same with the other designs.

Once installed, they are very easy to customize and you can change as much as you need to to make it your own. Yes you can use them “as is” and just put in your logo and content, but I’d recommend making at least some customisations like color etc. to make it unique to your business.

Plus the guided setups in the theme are getting better and better with each update so it’s very easy for even a novice user to get up and going fast.

A Massive Range of Features and Styling Options

Avada has more than just about any other theme in terms of features and styling options. And they are extremely easy to use.

You can customize the site in just about any way – and any layout is possible, including different layouts for different sections or pages of your site. Plus there are advanced editors for common parts of your site like the header and footer.

Another advantage are the many “Elements” which are pre-made design options like content boxes, callouts, icons, toggles and everything else you would need.

This means if you are making your own site from scratch, you have enough tools at your fingertips to make it look great. Or if you are customizing a pre-built site – you have a lot of flexibility to make the site your own.

See the elements here: https://avada.com/elements/

It also has different types of layout builders and content editing tools and even has a Woocommerce builder so if you are adding ecommerce to your site, you can further customize that side of things.

Great Mobile First.

Most themes these days are pretty good in terms of their responsive / mobile version. Avada is no exception – in fact, Avada’s mobile version is excellent.

If you’re not sure how important that is for your business, then I’d suggest you check your analytics – you’ll probably be surprised at how much of your traffic is from mobile devices.

Avada makes a great mobile first version and they seem to have put a lot of thought into things like the navigation, responsive page breaks etc. plus all of the pre-built Avada sites I’ve tested have looked great on mobile – both tablet and phone.

The pagebuilder also has good mobile options so you can have total control over what appears and how it appears in the different screen versions.

All In One.

Avada is an all in one theme. So it has the page builder (Fusion Builder), features like the elements (Icons, callouts etc.) and other things included. (Page builders can be an extra purchase with a lot of themes if you want all of the features)

It even has a decent form built in – but I do prefer gravity forms these days for its features and CRM integrations.

This is not only good for the reason that you don’t need to buy extra things on top of the theme, but it also means that you can update everything together – which saves time, makes it easier and stops compatibility issues.

Avada is also highly compatible with most of the popular plugins like Woocommerce, Gravity (and other) forms, Directories and more. (and because it’s so widely used now, a lot of plugins build in compatibility with it.) So you don’t get a lot of those annoying compatibility issues that you only find once you start putting your site together.

Widely Used and Supported – (So it’s not going anywhere)

This is right up the top for me. There are a lot of themes that tick all the boxes above – and more. But, many are new or have smaller user bases. Avada’s user base is huge and the more people using a theme the better for a few reasons.

First, if you have an issue – it’s easy to find the answers on how to fix it. If there are a lot of users, chances are, someone else has already had the issue and solved it – so the answer will be online. There will either be an easy fix or a patch. Plus their support is good so anything can be fixed by the company if need be.

Second, if a theme has a lot of users and continues to sell well – it’s going to stick around. The developers have a financial incentive to stick it out and keep improving / developing it. So it will continue to improve and keep getting updated for new WordPress versions.

Trust me, there is nothing worse than a theme being dropped by developers, becoming obsolete and failing to update. I know from experience, it’s a pain in the ass, especially on big projects.

Overall Developer Perspective – OK

In terms of the things that developers look for like how good the code is, speed, size etc. It’s actually good. It’s not at the absolute top of every category, but it scores high on most things and for a theme you buy off the shelf – it’s great.

Now, you’ll always have the developers that believe that your theme has to be custom built to suit your business and hyper optimized for maximum efficiency (because that’s what they sell) –  but the reality is, that’s just not feasible for a small business – either financially or the time and effort required.

To Sum Up Avada Theme

So there’s a few reasons why I think Avada Theme is the best small / medium business WordPress theme and why I use it on just about every project I’m involved in.

There’s a lot more I’ve not included, but this should give you a decent understanding of the theme to see if you want to give it a shot!