Avada is one of the best-selling WordPress themes on the market, boasting over 800,000 sales on ThemeForest. As a multipurpose theme, Avada is built to handle a wide variety of websites, from blogs to business sites, portfolios, and e-commerce stores.
Its key selling points include a drag-and-drop builder, pre-made demo sites, and a plethora of customization options. In this review, we’ll explore Avada’s features, performance, ease of use, and overall value to help you decide if it’s the right theme for your WordPress website.
What is Avada?
Avada is a premium WordPress theme developed by ThemeFusion, known for its versatility and extensive customization capabilities.
With Avada, users can build virtually any type of website, thanks to its rich set of features, including a built-in page builder (Avada Builder), numerous demos, and an extensive theme options panel.
Whether you’re building a simple blog, a professional business site, a portfolio, or even a full-fledged online store, Avada aims to provide the tools needed to create a professional and fully functional website without any coding knowledge.
Key Features
- Avada Builder (Formerly Fusion Builder): One of Avada’s standout features is its built-in drag-and-drop builder, Avada Builder. This tool allows users to create complex layouts visually, without touching any code. Avada Builder is designed to give users full control over page structure, design, and content:
- Drag-and-Drop Interface: The builder’s user-friendly interface enables users to quickly add, rearrange, and customize elements on a page. From text blocks to images, buttons, sliders, and more, all components can be adjusted to fit your design preferences.
- Custom Layouts: Users can create custom layouts for individual pages, blogs, portfolios, or WooCommerce shops. Avada Builder provides flexibility to arrange content exactly how you want it, offering full-width, boxed, or columned designs.
- Pre-built Content Blocks: For those looking to speed up the design process, Avada offers pre-made content blocks, such as pricing tables, testimonials, and service boxes, that can be easily inserted and customized.
- Pre-built Demo Sites: Avada comes with over 85 pre-built demo websites that cover various industries and purposes, including:
- Business
- E-commerce
- Portfolio
- Blog
- Health and fitness
- Restaurants and cafes
- Agencies, and more
- Customization and Flexibility: Avada is known for its vast array of customization options. The theme options panel provides users with control over nearly every aspect of the website, from typography and color schemes to header layouts and site widths. Here are some notable customization features:
- Advanced Theme Options Panel: Avada theme options panel allows users to control global settings like fonts, colors, layouts, and more. You can easily adjust the design of your entire website from one place, without needing to change individual pages.
- Unlimited Color and Typography Options: Users can choose from a wide variety of fonts and color palettes to match their branding. Avada integrates with Google Fonts, offering hundreds of font choices and typography settings like line height and letter spacing.
- Custom Header and Footer: Avada offers multiple header and footer layouts, allowing users to design unique site sections. With Avada Builder, you can even create custom headers and footers from scratch, giving you the ability to brand your site exactly how you want.
- Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Design: Having a responsive website is critical. Avada ensures that your website looks great on any device, from desktops to tablets and smartphones. The theme comes with built-in responsiveness, automatically adjusting layouts and elements to fit different screen sizes.
- Mobile-Specific Options: Avada customization options also extend to mobile responsiveness, allowing users to tweak certain design aspects for smaller screens. For instance, you can hide specific elements on mobile or adjust padding and margins for better mobile usability.
- WooCommerce Integration: For users building an e-commerce store, Avada offers complete integration with WooCommerce. This makes it easy to set up an online shop with all the features you’d expect from a modern e-commerce website. Avada includes:
- Custom WooCommerce Layouts: Avada allows users to create custom layouts for product pages, shop archives, and checkout pages. You can fully design the shopping experience, ensuring that it matches the rest of your website.
- Product Display Options: Choose from various product display options, including grid, list, and carousel views. You can also control how many products appear on a page and adjust image sizes for product pages.
- Advanced Performance Features: Given the extensive range of features Avada offers, performance can be a concern for many users. However, ThemeFusion has worked to ensure that Avada runs smoothly and doesn’t bloat your website. Avada includes built-in performance optimization features:
- CSS and JavaScript Minification: Avada automatically minifies CSS and JavaScript files, reducing file size and improving page load times.
- Lazy Loading: To improve performance further, Avada supports lazy loading for images. This ensures that images load only when they appear on the screen, reducing the initial load time for pages.
- Performance Wizard: Avada includes a Performance Wizard that scans your website and recommends performance optimizations. This tool can help you identify areas where you can improve speed and user experience.
- Multi-Language and RTL Support: Avada supports multiple languages and is compatible with translation plugins like WPML, making it easy to create multilingual websites. It also supports RTL (right-to-left) languages, catering to users who need to build websites in languages like Arabic or Hebrew.
- Regular Updates and Customer Support: One of the reasons Avada remains a top choice for WordPress users is its regular updates and excellent customer support. ThemeFusion releases frequent updates to ensure the theme stays compatible with the latest WordPress versions and third-party plugins.
- Lifetime Updates: Once you purchase Avada, you receive lifetime updates, meaning you won’t have to pay for new versions or feature enhancements.
- 24/7 Support: ThemeFusion offers dedicated support through a ticketing system. Users can access a comprehensive knowledge base, video tutorials, and documentation to troubleshoot any issues or learn how to make the most of the theme.
Performance
While Avada offers a vast range of features and customization options, performance is an important consideration. Multipurpose themes are often criticized for being resource-heavy, and Avada is no exception. However, with the proper optimization techniques, users can still achieve good performance.
In speed tests, Avada performs well when combined with performance optimization strategies, such as using caching plugins, a content delivery network (CDN), and image compression. The theme’s built-in optimization tools, like lazy loading and CSS/JS minification, also contribute to better performance.
Ease of Use
For beginners, Avada can be somewhat overwhelming due to its sheer number of features and customization options. However, once users become familiar with the Avada Builder and theme options panel, building complex websites becomes much easier.
- One-Click Demo Import: The one-click demo import feature simplifies the process of setting up a website. Even if you’re new to WordPress, you can get a professional-looking website up and running in minutes.
- User-Friendly Interface: The Avada Builder interface is clean and easy to navigate. While it may take some time to learn all the features, the intuitive design of the builder makes it easy to create complex layouts without much hassle.
Limitations
Despite its strengths, Avada does come with a few limitations:
- Performance Concerns: As a multipurpose theme with a lot of features, Avada can be resource-intensive. Users with shared hosting or low-resource servers may experience slower load times if they don’t optimize their site properly.
- Learning Curve: Due to the vast array of features, beginners may find Avada overwhelming at first. It requires time to learn how to use all the options effectively.
Pricing
Avada is priced at $69 on ThemeForest, which includes six months of support from ThemeFusion. Users can extend support to 12 months for an additional $21. Given the lifetime updates and range of features, Avada offers great value for the price, especially for users who need a flexible, all-in-one solution.
Conclusion
Avada is one of the most powerful and flexible multipurpose WordPress themes available. It offers an impressive array of features, including a drag-and-drop builder, pre-built demos, WooCommerce integration, and extensive customization options.
While it can be resource-heavy, proper optimization techniques can mitigate performance concerns.
For users looking to build anything from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce site or business portfolio, Avada provides the tools and flexibility to create a professional website without needing to code.
Its regular updates, excellent customer support, and lifetime updates make it a solid investment for anyone serious about their WordPress website.
