New Theme Selected and Plugin Of The Week!

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In this episode of the Niche Site Tools Podcast, we’ll talk about the new theme that I have chosen and will be recommending going forward. We will also have our first installment of the tool/plugin of the week!

Recommended WordPress Theme: Elegant Themes

Drum-roll please…After several weeks of research, I decided to go with Elegant Themes!

I chose Elegant Themes due to their large install base, great looking sites utilizing their themes, ease of use, mobile optimization and responsive support team.

I have several friends that utilize Elegant Themes and in particular, the Divi 2.0 theme is quite popular.

I really liked the clean uncluttered designs that I have seen and when reaching out to a few folks, they said the Elegant Themes site builder is very easy to utilize.

If they needed any help during the upgrade/migration process, the support team was very responsive and resolved their issues or pointed them in the right direction very quickly.

Elegant Themes has 3 main levels or price points:

For the vast majority of folks, myself included, the Personal plan for $69 is the way to go.

That gives you full rights to utilize any and all of the 87 themes that they currently have available, on an unlimited number of your own sites AND on the sites of any of your customers, if you develop sites for other people.

That is a yearly fee, however, if you decide before the year is over that you do not want to continue to pay going forward, you can cancel at any time. You would still have access to any and all themes that you have already downloaded and could continue to utilize them going forward.

The only downside is that you would no longer be eligible for security/feature updates and would no longer have access to any new themes that come out in the future.

The Developer version adds in 4 plugins and the high-resolution Photoshop versions of the theme logos and images, but those images are usually only needed by high end graphic designers.

The plugins appear to be more for folks that also utilize other themes, but would like to have many of the features of Elegant Themes on those other sites.

And of course, the Lifetime access plan would be for those folks that know and love Elegant Themes and would prefer to pay a 1 time fee, rather than an annual plan.

You can upgrade to any of the other plans at any time, so if you started with the Personal plan, you could always upgrade to the Developer plan by just paying the additional $20 fee.

I purchased the Personal plan myself this past weekend and I’m starting to kick the tires on two sites that I utilize for testing themes and plugin testing and so far so good!  You can view my PayPal receipt here.

Here is a quick video that I created, to show you what you can expect:

I am really excited to dig in further and see what cool things we can do with this theme from both a design perspective as well as from a feature/functionality perspective as well.

If you’ve been looking for a new theme or are just starting out, I’d definitely recommend that you give Elegant Themes a try. They provide a full, no-risk, 30 day money back guarantee.

Over the coming weeks, I will be doing some testing on the two test sites that I have and will provide you with full details here and in the Podcast on how things go.

I also sent a SpeakPipe message over to Mark Mason at LateNightIM.com as well, asking for any tips and things to be aware of when migrating from one theme to another and he will be doing a full response on an upcoming episode of his Podcast.

I am definitely looking forward to his response and will be sure to share the full details here, in addition to the results from my testing.

Tool/Plugin of the Week

Our first plugin of the week is UpdraftPlus Backup and Restore for WordPress.  A proper backup/restore plugin is ESSENTIAL for anyone that runs WordPress, or any type of site for that matter.

If you are not yet backing up your site(s), please stop what you are doing and go get a proper plugin now.  Really, go ahead, I’ll wait… 😉

But seriously, you really do need to be backing up your site on a weekly basis and Updraft Plus Backup and Restore is an excellent, free plugin that you can utilize.

I personally use it on all my sites and in the last few weeks I had to do a full site restore here on this site and all worked perfectly, with no issues.  Check out the Podcast for full details.

Conclusion

I’m very excited to have chosen Elegant Themes and am really looking forward to how that theme could help us all take our sites to the next level.

If you are considering a new theme, I’d certainly recommend giving Elegant Themes a try along with me.

If you do, I would really appreciate it if you would go through my affiliate link.

At no additional cost to you, I would receive a commission if you decide to purchase through my link.  You are of course under no obligation to do so, but if you do, I sincerely thank you ahead of time!

Do you have any plans to upgrade your theme?  Perhaps you are a current user of Elegant Themes?  If so, do you have any recommendations or suggestions for those of us trying it out for the first time?  Please let us know in the comments below, thanks!