A remarkable and flawless user experience is the key to building a successful online presence for eCommerce businesses. How often do your customers enter your website, get distracted from running other errands, or abandon your store because of confusing age layouts? Â
According to the statistics, 38% of site visitors stop engaging with websites due to unattractive content and page layout. Thus, attracting customers’ attention and offering a quality experience through an appealing and intuitive page design is important to ensure customer retention and increase sales. Â
And your store’s theme is one important element that helps hold visitors’ interest and assist their page navigation. While you can choose from multiple themes for your WooCommerce website, choosing a multipurpose theme that delivers great performance, offers high customization abilities, and facilitates user experience is what you need to deliver a quality experience.Â
This article reviews one such important theme – the Flatsome WordPress theme. We’ll start with its brief overview and see its interface, features, benefits, and cost to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your eCommerce store. Let’s go!
Flatsome: A Brief Overview
Flatsome – a multipurpose responsive WooCommerce theme published in 2013, is one of the top-rated and popular themes on ThemeForest. In a few days, it will reach 200,000 sales on ThemeForest.
UX themes designed and developed the easy-to-use and customized Flatsome theme – perfect for non-coders and beginners.Â
Flatsome 3.15.6 is the theme’s latest version, which includes many more features and options than its previous Flatsome 3.0 version. In addition, the theme delivers high performance and reliability and is designed for scalability.Â
Besides, it comes with future updates and seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce. Let’s begin with the Flatsome theme review with its installation and setup.Â
Flatsome Installation and SetupÂ
When you install the Flatsome theme and open it on your WordPress backend dashboard – you’ll land on this page.Â
Here, you need to click the Setup Wizard button – which will take you through the process to get started and set up the theme on your WooCommerce store.Â
You can skip the setup wizard and click on the ‘Not right now’ button. And to restart and set it up later, go to Flatsome > Setup > Wizard on your WordPress dashboard.Â
Or, you can click on the ‘Let’s Go!’ button to start the setup. Once you click on this button, enter the purchase code to register your theme and click on the ‘Register’ button.Â
The setup allows you to create your own child theme – which will save any changes or modifications you make in case of the theme update.Â
Next, the setup demands you to install multiple plugins, including:Â
- WooCommerceÂ
- Contact Form 7 (required)Â
- Nextend Google Connect (required)
- Nextend Facebook Connect (required)
- Unlimited Sidebars Woosidebars (required)Â
- Regenerate thumbnails (required)Â
- YITH WooCommerce Wishlist (required)Â
You can either skip this step for now or later determine the plugins you wish to install from your WordPress dashboard. Or, you can also choose to install the plugin’s alternatives, like WPForms, instead of Contact Form 7. However, the theme will still function properly without installing these plugins immediately.Â
Then, you can create your site’s demo content – especially if you’re installing and using the theme on a brand-new website with no content, making it easier to customize and edit the content later, per your liking. Or, you can skip this step if you’re using an existing website.Â
Next, upload your preset logo, choose a preset design, go through the support, and complete the Flatsome setup.Â
So, setting up the Flatsome theme is quite quick and simple, as it takes you through the steps intuitively and allows you to skip certain steps if needed.Â
So, now that we’ve seen how to set up the theme, let’s get into the features of Flatsome and design.Â
Top Flatsome Features For WooCommerce Â
To edit with Flatsome, go to Pages > Add New and click on the Edit with UX Builder on the next page.Â
You’ll land on this page.
Let’s look at all the features Flatsome provides one by one:Â
- An intuitive interfaceÂ
Flatsome comes with a seamless interface, making adding and removing elements of your choice easier.Â
When you click the ‘Add elements’ button, you’ll see multiple elements options in the sidebar – including layout, content, and shop.Â
You can pick from a diverse range of elements, such as section, row, slider, grid, page header, block, stack, image, icon, search box, price tables, gallery, and portfolio. In addition, you can browse all the Flatsome elements here.Â
Besides, the theme is highly responsive – allowing you to preview your website’s mobile, tablet, and desktop version in a single click. For example, just click on the icons displayed on the right-hand-side sidebar to preview your eCommerce store on different devices, as shown below.Â
- An extensive set of theme design optionsÂ
Your store’s design is one of the key aspects to attracting visitors. The more creative and simple it is, the longer visitors want to stay and engage with your website.Â
Flatsome offers many attractive pre-made design templates with premium quality if you don’t have a custom page design ready. The color, block placement, icons, image size, and background design of all the themes are excellent and appealing to design.Â
- Header builder and front-end editorÂ
Flatsome offers excellent header customization options with its Header Builder.Â
When you go to Appearance and click on the Customize option on your store’s WordPress backend, you can see several customization options, including header, style, blog, and layout, as shown below.Â
Clicking on the Header menu gives you an intuitive drag-and-drop header builder to customize your header per your requirements.Â
You can adjust the placement of the menus with the drag-and-drop editor and add anything easily from buttons, search form, vertical menu, and your custom HTML code. In addition, the editor also lets you adjust the style, including height, width, and color.Â
You can also preview the customized header’s desktop, mobile, and tablet versions through the header builder editor.Â
Work Sharp, an eCommerce store, is an excellent example of a website using the Flatsome theme. They have a simple, sleek header with small hover animation menus – giving the website’s homepage an interactive user experience.Â
- UX BuilderÂ
Like Avada comes with its own live page builder, Fusion Builder – Flatsome comes with UX Builder.Â
It lets you easily edit individual elements of your website and see live changes immediately on your site. This builder comes with 36 different content elements – including title, slider, sections, and products. Â
Here you can easily customize the content’s text, font size, alignment, and color.Â
Simply click on the particular element you wish to customize and alter its text, alignment, or size as required.Â
- Flatsome Studio
One of the most splendid and noteworthy features of the Flatsome theme is its Flatsome Studio. It’s a digital library with an extensive set of free images, sections, and pre-designed layouts – which you can import using a single click.Â
You can choose from hundreds of elements and templates for sections like eCommerce, footer, grid, campaigns, contact, and testimonials.Â
For example, Infobest, a Romanian software development website, uses Flatsome to design its website. They use the theme’s testimonial template from the Flatsome Studio library to display customer reviews all over their site and enhance brand credibility. Â
- Built-in slider elementÂ
The built-in slider element is another important front-end editor feature, making adding slides on your website with hover effects and animations easier.Â
You can add anything from banners, images, and grids as slides – with each slide having an overlay color, animation, caption, and hover effect.Â
You can easily customize the slider’s navigation, auto-slide, and advanced settings.Â
- Search Engine Optimization
The speed and performance of your website play a critical role in your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) performance. The longer it takes for your eCommerce store to load, the higher the bounce rates and the lower the SEO rank of your website on the search engines.Â
Hence, choosing the theme that offers multipurpose features along with faster speed and performance is important.Â
Flatsome comes with a lightweight CSS and JavaScript framework – which is excellent for ensuring faster page loading speed. Besides, it uses smart lazy loading on all the images and backgrounds – making images load only when needed, again making your site load faster.Â
Moreover, the theme keeps its parallax effects and CSS animations to a minimum of 60 fps – making the website smooth and high-performing.Â
- Flexible styling optionsÂ
Navigating to the Appearance > Customize > Style menu, you can adjust your website’s color and typography or add custom CSS – choosing from unlimited color options and over 700 Google fonts.Â
In addition, you can also customize your website’s footer, blog, menus, pages, and widgets with enhanced customization and styling options.Â
- Support and documentationÂ
Flatsome offers reliable help and support with online documentation, premium email support, videos, feature requests, and access to the Flatsome community with users using the theme.Â
You can access this support by navigating to Flatsome > Help & Guides on your backend WordPress dashboard. You also get 6 months of dedicated support from UX themes with future updates. Additionally, you can extend this support for upto 12 months with additional charges of $17.63.Â
Here’s the link to the extensive Flatsome support:Â
- Video tutorials on Flatsome’s YouTube channel
- A vast collection of articles in the Flatsome knowledge baseÂ
- Online support available through ThemeforestÂ
- Flatsome examples to view different use cases and to take inspiration from
Thus, whenever you face any difficulty – you can resort to any of these support channels to resolve your queries in no time.Â
Other Flatsome FeaturesÂ
Here’s a list of other important Flatsome features that make it one of the most popular WooCommerce themes:Â
- Create custom blocks with elements you use the most and display the blocks using a shortcode on any post or page – a convenient and time-saving solution.Â
- The ability to design checkout pages with ease.Â
- Glance a quick view of the category pages to view products.Â
- Add to cart option from the category pages.Â
- QuickZoom functionality for the product pages.Â
- A catalog option to display products without prices.Â
- Different filter options and layout options for category lists.Â
- The live search option allows visitors to see and find what they’re looking for as they type.Â
- WPML ready.Â
You can also see the new features and read the new changelog of Flatsome 3.14 and Flatsome 3.13 releases.Â
Flatsome Pricing ReviewÂ
The Regular License of the Flatsome theme costs $59 (excluding taxes) for a single site.Â
And its Extended License costs $2950 if you want to use the theme for multiple websites or multiple users. It also charges an additional cost of $17.63 for a support extension of 12 months.Â
Conclusion: Should You Choose Flatsome?Â
You should definitely consider the Flatsome theme for your WooCommerce store given its seamless WooCommerce integration, SEO-optimized design, a wide range of elements, and flexible styling options.Â
Its interface and front-end builder is also quite easy to use and understand. Yes, getting familiar with all the elements and features requires some time and a bit of a learning curve. But, once you get acquainted with the interface – there’s no going back.Â
So, whether you’re a beginner or a proficient web developer, check out and choose the affordable, user-friendly, and performance-driven Flatsome theme to build professional-looking eCommerce stores with ease.Â