Thrive Themes offers one of the best and most affordable all-in-one suite of WordPress plugins that build beautiful websites with drag-and-drop ease and total customization.
But it's more than just a collection of tools... it's about equipping you with a conversion-focus approach that turns visitors into leads, customers and fans, and the knowledge and community to help you build, manage and grow a profitable online business that you'll love.
More...
I've been using their tools since 2017, and in this comprehensive Thrive Themes review I'll cover:
- The various products they offer, what they do, and how they help you build and run your online business.
- Why Thrive Themes is arguably one of the best and most cost effective investment for online solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.
- My own experience using Thrive Themes products and being within their "ecosystem" since 2017, and how it grew my online business.
Thrive Themes Review Summary
Features
Thrive Themes has a full suite of products for building websites, landing pages and funnels, membership sites, online courses, editing content, capturing leads, creating scarcity campaigns, split testing, creating online quizzes and more.
Their products are feature-filled, with tons of elements to add to your content and many predesigned templates.
The products also integrate with many other popular online tools, applications and platforms.
Ease of Use
Thrive Themes products are intuitive, easy to use and work fast... it's the closest thing to true WYSIWYG I have ever experienced.
There is no need to know coding or have design skills.
Customer Support
The support is good. There are lots of video tutorials, a large knowledge-base, as well as a very active and helpful Facebook Group, where you'll get your questions answered quickly and effectively.
Cost / Value
Thrive Themes products are affordable and very competitively priced. The full Thrive Suite is best value for money I have come across to date.
Overall Rating: 5/5
Conclusion:
- Thrive Themes offers a comprehensive range of feature-filled, easy to use, intuitive, and affordably priced tools for WordPress business websites.
- Their suite of top-notch products, together with the growing wealth of knowledge in Thrive University and the Thrive Themes Blog, and good customer support, Thrive Themes is a highly recommended option for anyone wanting to start, build, maintain, and grow an online business.
- Thrive Themes takes the ability of quickly and easily building beautiful and professional, conversion-focused websites out of the hands of website coders and designers and places it directly into the hands of the business owners, internet marketers, affiliate marketers, solopreneurs, and such.
What Is Thrive Themes
Thrive Themes describes itself as "the most advanced, yet, simple-to-use WordPress suite of website tools. We create truly conversion-optimized plugins and themes to give a real boost to your business."
Founded in 2013 by marketing expert Shane Melaugh and tech fanatic Paul McCarthy, today Thrive Themes has over 100,000 happily satisfied customers. You can learn more about Thrive Themes - their history, mission, values and their journey up till now, on their About Us page.
Personally, I see Thrive Themes as an ecosystem that consists of a suite of really awesome WordPress plugins as well as training that helps you build and grow an online business that thrives (pun intended!)
WordPress Plugins
An comprehensive suite of easy-to-use, conversion-focused plugins for WordPress websites. Tools for building websites, landing pages and funnels, membership sites, online courses, editing content, capturing leads, creating scarcity campaigns, split testing, creating online quizzes and more.
Knowledge
Thrive University and the Thrive Themes Blog are an ever-growing library of actionable courses, guides, and tips about creating websites and funnels, growing your email list, increasing your conversions, and getting the most out of Thrive Themes products - everything you need to know about building, maintaining, and growing a successful online business.
Support
An extensive knowledge-base and collection of tutorials on all Thrive Themes products, along with an active Facebook Group.
Now, let's move along with the Thrive Themes review and learn a bit more about each part of their ecosystem.
Thrive Themes Plugins and Themes
Thrive Themes currently offers 10 plugins for building websites, landing pages and funnels, membership sites, online courses, editing content, capturing leads, creating scarcity campaigns, split testing, creating online quizzes and more, namely:
- Thrive Theme Builder - a full-fledged WordPress website builder
- Thrive Architect - creates, edits and customizes landing pages and blog posts
- Thrive Optimize - enables full A/B split testing and conversion tracking and optimization right within your own site
- Thrive Leads - creates optin forms to grow your list of email subscribers.
- Thrive Ovation - captures, displays and manages social-proof customer testimonials on auto-pilot
- Thrive Apprentice - allows you to create, manage and sell online courses, memberships, and other digital products.
- Thrive Quiz Builder - creates online quizzes that allow you to gain valuable visitor insights and generate leads.
- Thrive Ultimatum - creates scarcity campaigns with countdown timers to boost conversions.
- Thrive Comments - gamifies your blog comments for more engagement.
- Thrive Automator - automates processes and work flows between plugins and other online tools.
Before we get into each of the products, it's important to note that there are a few features that are standard across all of their products, including:
Let's now take a quick look at each one and what they do, then we'll talk about how they help your online business.
Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Theme Builder is the plugin you'll use to build the theme (the look and feel) of your website. It allows you to visually create and customize every aspect of your WordPress website, including your header, footer, blog post templates, sidebar, page layout, category pages, search pages, 404s, and more. And it's all done in an intuitive visual, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG interface.
Thrive Theme Builder comes with 3 companion themes, namely Shapeshift, Ommi and Kwik. These are professionally designed companion themes allow you to quickly create websites with beautifully designed layouts.
What's even better is that Thrive Theme Builder is equipped with a Site Wizard that walks you through the steps to get your website up in minimum time. In just 10 steps, the wizard helps you add your logo, choose your header, footer, and the layouts of your homepage, blog posts, and other pages.
After going through the Site Wizard you will have a core website created that looks quite beautiful and professional right out the gate.
You then just need to make adjustments to suit your particular wants, and then add content.
And with Thrive Themes Global Settings and Smart Colors you can easily set theme-wide color palettes that dynamically update across your entire website with one click - You choose the colors that match your brand and Smart Colors algorithmically updates your entire brand before your eyes.
You can learn more about Thrive Theme Builder here.
Thrive Architect
Thrive Architect is a visual drag-and-drop WYSIWYG WordPress page builder and content editor. It has a simple and efficient user interface (UI), consisting of 3 main sections...
Thrive Architect Simple 3 Section User Interface
- The Elements Sidebar, located on the right hand side of the UI. It's from here you can select from anyone of the 45+ elements (such as text, images, icons, tables, videos, audios, call to action buttons, countdown timers, lead generation forms, etc.) to add to your page or post. This is sidebar is also used to load pre-designed page templates.
- The Options Sidebar, located on the left hand side, where you'll be able to do more detailed formatting of your elements and apply various options to the elements that you dragged across to your middle pane.
- The Middle Pane where the main editing takes place and where you see your content take form.
Thrive Architect is fast and it's intuitive. You can learn more about Thrive Architect on Thrive Themes site.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is an all-in-one conversion-focused lead generation and opt-in form plugin for WordPress. You'll be able to create and customize opt-in forms and run A/B tests to efficiently grow your subscriber lists.
With Thrive Leads you can utilize 10 types of opt-in forms and quickly edit the forms with the simple drag-and-drop editor.
You'll also be able to split tests your forms and automatically increase your conversion rates as well as get a massive conversion boost by showing relevant, highly targeted offers to your visitors based on posts, categories, tags and more.
Thrive Leads gives you simple overview reports on the most important metrics so you see how your opt-in forms are performing over time and where your most valuable traffic is coming from. Learn More about Thrive Leads.
Thrive Quiz Builder
Thrive Quiz Builder allows you to create fully customized online quizzes that lets you gain valuable insights about your visitors, build a segmented email list and drive website engagement.
Creating the types of online quizzes that Thrive Quiz Builder creates would normally take hours of coding... with Thrive Quiz Builder, it just takes minutes.
Thrive Apprentice
Thrive Apprentice is an online course creation and management tool. And it's one of the most customizable WordPress course builder on the market. With full, drag-and-drop visual editing capabilities across every course page and element, you have complete design freedom over your online courses and brand.
Why would an affiliate marketer bother about creating courses? Well, you can boost your subscribers by quickly creating free online courses as lead magnets
This is the same plugin that I use to create the courses in the WMappDigital Library and what Thrive Themes uses to create their courses in Thrive University. Learn more about Thrive Apprentice.
Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is a comments manager that's much more powerful that the default WordPress comment system.
You'll be able to increase engagement through several innovative features like upvoting and downvoting, gamified comment incentives and an impressive number of after-comment-actions. Learn more about Thrive Comments.
Thrive Optimize
Thrive Optimize makes A/B split testing for pages simple, quick and non-techie.
Split testing allows you to "split" your traffic between different versions of a page so you can test which one performs better in terms of conversions. And it's the only true way to find out what works better and improve your conversions... don't rely on you think would work better just from the looks of things.
Traditionally, A/B split testing was a complicated and/or expensive task. Thrive Optimize solves these problems, by making it both easy and inexpensive.
With Thrive Optimize it really just takes a few minutes to set up a split test. And, you can choose to let the software automatically choose the best variation of the page, once enough data is gathered.
Thrive Ultimatum
Thrive Ultimatum is a scarcity marketing tool for WordPress. And if you don't know as yet, scarcity marketing is proven to significantly increase conversions.
With Thrive Ultimatum, you can quickly and easily create various countdown timers, recurring countdowns, or evergreen campaigns that create a sense of urgency.
You'll be able to boost sales by presenting your scarcity campaigns to the right audience.
You can easily advertise your special offers all across your website. Or, if you prefer, only show the countdowns on specific pages, specific blog posts.
Thrive Ovation
Testimonials (or social proof) has been proven to be a significant conversion booster. Thrive Ovation is a testimonial plugin for WordPress.
You'll be able to gather and manage testimonials from within your website, and display them with the click of a button. Learn more about Thrive Ovation.
Thrive Automator
Thrive Automator allows you to create smart automations that integrates your website with your favorite WordPress plugins and online marketing tools
Thrive Automator is like Zapier for WordPress!
How To Install Thrive Themes On Your WordPress Site
Thrive Themes has made it very simple to install full range of products. Once you've logged into your Thrive Themes Member Area, you'll have quick access to everything - Thrive Themes Blog, Thrive University, Members Only Content, Knowledge Base, Support Forum and more.
From this dashboard, you'll be able to also download the Thrive Product Manager plugin and install it in your WordPress dashboard. Once installed, you'll be able to install and manage all the Thrive Themes products and themes.
And thereafter, you'll access all of the installed plugins and themes and get working on your website.
Thrive Themes Landing Pages & Templates
At the time of writing this review, Thrive Themes has about 350 landing page templates for Thrive Architect. You can use these templates to create professional looking landing pages almost instantly, for every purpose imaginable. And since there all fully customizable so you can quickly and easily tweak the templates to suit your particular taste and needs.
Many of the templates include guided instructions on what content should be included on the page.
Also, each Thrive Themes product has their own respective templates. So for example:
Thrive Themes Integrations
Thrive Themes plugins connects with many of the most popular online business and marketing softwares including ecommerce platforms, shopping carts, email marketing services, mail delivery services, webinar platforms and more through API integrations.
And with the free Thrive Automator plugin you can create smart automations that integrates your website with other WordPress plugins and online marketing tools.
Learn more about Thrive Themes Integrations here.
Thrive Themes Support and Tutorials
There are three levels of customer support, all of which are just one click away from within your member dashboard:
- The Knowledgebase - a comprehensive collection of step-by-step "how-to" articles and videos about using all Thrive Themes products.
- Email Support - you can send a quick email to their support team to ask for advice and answers on anything related to the plugins, themes and other things related to Thrive Themes in general. Typically, you'll get a response within a day.
- Ticket Request System - you can request support through this system. This is for more in cases where you have a technical issue. And there's the option for support rep to into the back-end of your website and check things out.
- Thrive Themes Facebook Group - allows you to ask specific questions anytime you get stuck or run into any problems with their plugins or themes (or with WordPress in general). It's a very active and responsive group with just over 7,000 members. You'd typically get a response within a few hours or so.
Thrive Themes offers unlimited support and unlimited updates for the plugin suite.
Thrive University
Thrive University is a collection of online courses, guides and other content on various topics related to online marketing and starting, building and growing an online business.
There are four levels of access for the content:
- Free for everyone - which are free to anyone.
- Subscriber - these are also free, but you can only access them by creating a free Thrive University account here.
- Thrive Suite Exclusive Content - these are available to persons like myself that have opted for Thrive Themes Suite Membership
- Premium Content (Paid courses) - these are individual courses you'll have to pay for. Deep discounts are often given to those that have Thrive Suite Membership.
Here's a quick peek inside Thrive University...
At the time of writing this review, there were over 40 courses within Thrive University, most of which are free. Here's a listing of the courses.
The courses are always well organized and easy to follow.
I have found tremendous value in these courses. I have seen other people charge a lot of money for courses similar to the caliber that you'll get in Thrive Themes University for free.
Thrive Themes Blog
The Thrive Themes Blog is also quite invaluable. You'll find hundreds of posts that can help you with your online business.
You'll get advice, insights, tutorials, tips related to internet marketing and online business as well as how to get the most out of Thrive Themes' products and service.
Articles are posted every week and generally fall into one of the following categories:
Thrive Themes Pricing
There are essentially two pricing options with Thrive Themes plugins. You can purchase Thrive Themes products individually or Thrive Themes Suite has a subscription based pricing, which is currently set at $299/year (which equates to $25/month (charged yearly at ), which gives you access to all their plugins and themes, unlimited updates and support, access to exclusive content and Member Exclusive courses at Thrive University and member exclusive discounts on premium courses.
- unlimited updates
- 24/7 unlimited support requests
- access to Thrive University courses
- access to the Thrive Themes Facebook Group
- unlimited updates
- access to Thrive University, but also FREE Thrive Suite Only courses
- Thrive Suite exclusive webinars
- 24/7 unlimited support requests
- access to new plugins (even before they're launched officially)
- access to the Thrive Themes Facebook Group
An added benefit of the Thrive Themes Suite subscription is you also get early access to premium Thrive University courses at deep discounts. For example, the Audience From Scratch course, which teaches you actionable steps to build an audience of dedicated fans that can't wait to buy from you, currently sells for $697, but it was offered to Thrive Themes Members for $197 before it was launched to the general public!
What Sets Thrive Themes Apart
There are so many tools available for building WordPress websites... and there are more coming out every day, it can make your head spin trying to choose the best fit for you and your business. But there are a few things that sets Thrive Themes apart...
Thrive University
Thrive University is a regularly updated library of actionable online business courses and guides. You'll Learn how to create high-converting websites, landing pages, and opt-in forms from scratch, from the ground up. There are also many courses that cover tactics and strategies for growing and scaling the number of customers and revenue of your online business.
Focused on Conversions
The team at Thrive Themes is obsessed with conversions. Thrive Architect comes with several proven conversion focused elements built right in... Including infinitely customizable buttons, testimonials, countdown timers and lead generation forms that integrate with your favorite email marketing tools.
Also, the page templates are all formatted with conversion in mind. Many of these templates are tutorialized, meaning that walk you through how to write attention grabbing and engaging content without being a copywriting expert.
Thirdly, Thrive University has several free online courses on copywriting, improving conversions, creating engaging content and more.
Global Settings and Smart Colors
Smart Pages is essentially a feature within Thrive Architect that allows you to create, edit and customize pages (and an entire website) to be exactly the way you want, and get it done A LOT quicker than any other content builder out there. You can more about Smart Pages here.
Thrive Themes Suite - Real Value For Money
I have not been able to find a better value for money option any where else than that offered with Thrive Themes Suite. At just $19/month you'll be able to do so much terms of building websites for your business.
They Listen To and Take Care of Their Customers
The Thrive Themes support team obviously listens to their customers... They release new features, updates, blog posts, courses and guides on a very regular basis, based on user feedback.
Thrive Themes Alternatives
I haven't yet been able to do a detailed review of the more popular alternatives to Thrive Themes plugins. However, you can read the detailed comparisons done by Thrive Themes. Here are the direct links to the articles below...
Thrive Themes Use Cases
Thrive Themes is considered by many to be one of the best all-in-one marketing suites for WordPress websites.
Because of Thrive Themes has such an array of conversion-focused plugins that allow you to create websites, build landing pages, generate leads, quiz customers, sell products, and more, it can be used to build, manage and grow almost any type of online business, including:
You can learn more about how real people are using Thrive Suite to build their online businesses. I'm featured there 
My Experience with Thrive Themes
My journey with building an online income stream started all the way back in 2005. I was looking for a way to supplement my income as a young engineer, and came across affiliate marketing, which is about promoting other people's products and services and earning a commission when a sale is generated.
As an affiliate marketer, I had to built websites and publish content around the products I promoted, which lead me on the search for website building platform.
I built websites using all kinds of software including Adobe Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Kompozer, X site Pro, and more, and eventually settled with WordPress. But, the issue though, was getting your website to look and feel exactly how you wanted. I tried many WordPress Themes and content builders.
Then I discovered Thrive Themes in 2017. Once I started using Thrive Architect I soon realized that I had found exactly what I was looking for - an easy-to-use and intuitive platform I could use to build great looking websites quickly and gave me the flexibility to customize things as much as I wanted.
But, Thrive Themes exceeded my expectation in ways I didn't expect... In addition to allowing me to quickly build beautiful affiliate websites, Thrive Themes expanded my online income streams.
Through the Thrive University courses I became aware of the importance of building conversion-focused websites, which increased my earnings as an affiliate marketer.
As I continued to build my websites with Thrive Themes, I gained the confidence to start offering website development and design services to others. So, I now had a second online income stream.
I had learned so much about online marketing strategies and techniques, that I decided to create courses to share what I learned with others, and used thrive Apprentice to create and sell the courses .
So, Thrive Themes allowed me to 3X my online income streams - from just affiliate marketing to providing website development services and creating and selling courses online!
All this gave me the confidence and freedom to leave my then stressful and unfulfilling engineering job, and focus on my online business.
Thrive Themes Review - Final Thoughts
- Discovering Thrive Themes has been a game-changer for me. I am now able to quickly and easily create websites exactly how I want them to look. It is truly a joy seeing my online business ideas being transformed into fully functioning websites.
- The Thrive Themes Blog and Thrive University will certainly provide you with actionable tips and knowledge about internet marketing and building an online business... it would be of great benefit to you no matter what level you are at.
- Thrive Themes Suite represents great value for money giving you access to the full range of Thrive Themes WordPress themes and plug-ins, constant updates, instant access to new plugins, and exclusive member-only templates and courses, for just $19/month.
- If you want a hassle-free way to build beautiful conversion-focused websites for your online business, Thrive Themes comes highly recommended.