I was very interested in taking a deeper look at the Solopreneur premium WordPress theme by Fancy themes. Having been looking for a new WordPress theme for my personal blog, I was struggling to find a theme that I liked the look of and that was focused on email conversion. The main things that instantly stood out to me were the landing pages and the footer CTA’s features.
I thought I was going to have to build myself a custom theme to do all of the things I wanted but I kept putting this off as its a big project and I had required several features:
- High converting landing page for home page
- Footer CTA’s
- Clean minimalist look
- Light weight theme (not bloated)
- Landing pages without navigation and sidebars for email subscribers Thank You pages.
Instantly I could tell that the Solopreneur theme could do the majority of these features.
Theme Settings
After uploading the theme and activating my license, I noticed that the team had been busy and rolled out a few updates. So I went ahead and updated the themes files, and now I’m running version 1.05 for this review. You can take a look at the change log to see what has been updated and what’s coming in the future.
You’ll also be prompted to install their free forms plug-in “Optin Forms” as seen in the image below. If you want to get the theme looking like the demo version, you’ll want to go ahead and do this.
Then, you can use WordPress theme customizer to set your theme options up, as seen below.
As you can see from the image above you have the option to change:
- Theme Colours – Primary Accent, Secondary Accent, Font Color, Link Color & Link Hover Color.
- Theme Settings – Default post layout (Standard – Includes sidebar, Full Width Slim & Full Width), Post Meta Settings, Social Sharing Buttons (This is via Jetpack) & Footer text.
- Theme Fonts – Base font, Heading font & Heading font size.
- Footer Callout – Background image, Callout title, Callout text, Button #1 text, Button #1 URL, Button #2 text & Button #2 URL
- Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest & RSS.
The other options are standard WordPress customization options.
I think we should take a deeper look into the Theme Settings options and Footer Callout.
The first option within the Theme Settings is to be able to select what style of page you want as default:
- Standard (Includes Sidebar)
- Full Width (Slim) – 8 column width out of 12 column grid system centralised.
- Full Width
The next option you have available is to decide about the visibility of post information in the post meta settings:
- Hide author and post date info.
- Replace date posted with date updated.
- Hide comment counts.
- Hide category list.
- Hide tag list.
- Hide author bio.
To be able to add the social sharing buttons you’ll need to install Jetpack as recommended. Though I decided to use Social Warfare plug-in instead.
Finally, you have the ability to change the footer copyright text and to remove the FancyThemes link, should you want to.
Responsive
I think it goes without saying that all themes these days have to be responsive due to the amount of mobile traffic and the likes of Google adding it as a ranking factor. You can check to see if your theme passes the Google mobile-friendly test, which Solopreneur passed with no issues.
This is only a personal bugbear (but I thought it’s best to note it anyway) and it’s that I’m not a fan of the mobile header for menu and search.
I feel it takes up a bit too much of screen real estate. I much prefer the hamburger menu next to the logo which would reduce the mobile headers size by half. In saying this, the functionality and user friendliness of a mobile header makes it a tough decision which is why I think it’s a personal one.
I installed WP Rocket caching plug-in and I was able to instantly get a good Google insights score. You can test your website to see what Google recommends you in order to improve your website. This is all due to the fact that Solopreneur theme is light weight and not got bloated features or code. I was able to get my site to load in under 0.8 of a second! If you want to speed up your WordPress theme, check out this guide I wrote about to how to speed up your WordPress blog.
Landing Pages
The next big notable thing with this theme is the pre-built landing pages. They have built two different options to choose from and these are great for your home page. Instead of the standard 3% conversion rate that most basic options receive with a dedicated landing page, you can look more towards 30% plus conversion rate.
I’ve added a screenshot below of what the two landing pages look like. It should be noted though that you have the option to hide the navigation and only show the logo in the centre of the header. However, this hasn’t been used in this case.
The first option of landing pages consists of:
- Header
- CTA
- Social proof
- Testimonials
- Secondary CTA
- Footer
The second option of landing pages consists of:
- Header
- CTA
- Social proof
- Feature Content
- Testimonials
- Recent posts
- Secondary CTA
- Footer
Support
I couldn’t believe the level of support that FancyThemes gave me. I would ask several questions and they’d provide me with a detailed response that resolves the issue. The other thing was that I offered them some feedback for the Solopreneur theme to make it even better and they took this on board and have added this either into their next update or into their roadmap.
Summary
With this theme just coming out of development there are a few things that I would like to see integrated and changed in the future.
- Currently, the CTAs only allow for OptinMonster pop ups. I would like to see Thrive leads, SumoMe and Leadpages support added. I have been told this will be added in an update soon. Right now, I’m using version 1.05, so you can check the change log to see if this has been updated.
- There are just a few CSS issues that I can see when using my theme. I don’t mind fixing these manually myself but I’m sure many customers wouldn’t have this knowledge. I know the support team would help out on this as they helped me with other issues I’ve encountered before.
- Luckily I know how to create a child theme to make updates. But when it comes to simple updates other users might have, it would be good to have a custom CSS field built into the theme options. They could possibly add a theme options panel instead of the WordPress customizer, but that’s not a pressing matter, though.
- I would like a simple landing page to use for redirecting email subscribers once they subscribe. This way I wouldn’t have to use a paid service like Leadpages.
- To be able to add extra text to the landing pages via the WYSIWYG editor within WordPress. I’ve been told that this feature is going to be added soon.
These requests aren’t life changing but might help out a few more users. I just wanted to give you the full picture and what I really want from this theme. I look forward to seeing what they do in the future as this is a great start for a new themes company. I will be using this theme on my personal site for a while, and I can’t wait for future updates.
Solopreneur Theme Review
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Price
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Speed
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Features
Summary
I love the concept behind this theme. After searching for an email conversion focused theme for my own personal blog I came across Solopreneur and this does the job well. Having dedicated landing pages and call to action blocks in the footer, this was an easy choice to buy this theme. With it being new, there are a few tweaks I'd like to see updated and add into future updates as mentioned in my summary section in the review.
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