I recently got a chance to work with the Jupiter Theme by Artbees.
Look: This theme is beautiful and comes with lots of options including 25 templates that install with all theme settings, widgets, posts and page layouts installed automatically and instantly.
Price: Retails for $59 which includes 6 months of support. You can extend support to 12 months for just $17.70 more.
Ease of Use: As mentioned before, with lots of template options, you can install and just make changes fairly easily. It comes with some nice theme options to make the theme setup easy for non-coders. Jupiter also comes with the WPBakery Visual Composer. I have noticed that this option is coming on more and more themes offered by Envato. While it is supposed to make designer options available for the layperson who doesn’t know code, there is definitely a learning curve. And for people like me, who are comfortable with CSS, it can often be annoying having to go through the composer to get a look you could have achieved simply through CSS. I find it aggravating to wait for the composer to load and annoying to have to save each individual section and then save the page as a whole. I also find it frustrating not to have an easy way to copy and paste elements from one page to another. I don’t have any hard results yet to prove this, but my personal feeling is that this also slows down the site quite a bit, which leads me to my next topic. That is more a critique of the Visual Composer than the theme itself.
Site speed: While working on my client’s site, I noticed that it seemed to be crawling along, so I tested it on Google Page Speed Insights. It got a very disconcerting 19/100 on mobile and 19/100 for desktop as well. To check to see if it was me or the theme, I tested the main demo for the theme. The results there were better, but still worrisome. 32 mobile and 33 desktop.
To compare that to another theme to make sure my expectations are in line, I went to StudioPress.com and tested one of their themes.
http://demo.studiopress.com/altitude/. This theme tested much better with 63/100 mobile and /100 desktop. And, to compare apples to apples, I need to state that the StudioPress theme does not have the visual composer, so you’re going to need some CSS. It doesn’t have built in icons and CSS animations, so again, you’re going to have to know how to add those yourself. So, overall, to get the same kind of look and functionality, you’re going to need to be a developer or hire a developer. So that’s the trade off – do it yourself vs site speed. You’ll have to decide which one is more important to you.
Overall, this is a really beautiful theme that will allow you to get a professional looking site fairly easily, however, if site speed is important to you, and it should be, you will need to have someone who can take care of the problems that slow this theme down, and you probably just can’t expect to get a very good score with the bloat needed to add these nice looking extras.
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