Hello vs Storefront Theme comparison [2024] 💥
HELLO THEME (Storefront vs Hello)
Hello is the default theme for Elementor...
In April 2020, Elementor released its own theme, the Hello Elementor theme. Not a bad idea because many people wondered which theme to use with Elementor, that is now more or less clear.
Since Elementor has so many possibilities, there is sometimes a battle between Elementor and a Wordpress theme, which also offers the same possibilities. That is redundant and not necessary. People prefer to use a theme like Hello Elementor, which leaves everything to the page builder but in itself offers a stable basis for the website.
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Of course there are also themes such as Astra Pro which is also fully focused on Elementor and only extends it extra. Such a theme is of course a lot better than Hello, but one must have a great knowledge of themes and page builders to know this at all.
HELLO RATINGS
Hello has a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Wordpress.org. A number of people apparently expect something special and think it is too basic, at least that is my conclusion. However, it is seen that the theme has already been installed on 1.000.000+ websites despite its short existence, which is unprecedented.
HELLO LOADING TIME
We are doing 2 tests, the first without a cache plugin, the second with the best cache plugin installed, WP-Rocket. As expected, the theme loads very quickly, it is after all a minimalist theme.
Without WP-Rocket cache plugin
With WP-Rocket cache plugin
HELLO CHILD-THEME
Creating a child theme is not that difficult, but you still need to know how. For those of you who don't know, on Github becomes a ready-made child theme for Hello Elementor offered. Ultimately, a child theme is little more than a functions.php file and a style.css stylesheet. Install both the theme itself and the child theme with the same name. Activate the child theme and you can edit these files there. If you upgrade your theme, these files will not be overwritten if you changed them.
ELEMENTOR FREE
After you have installed the theme, you will see that there is really little of a theme, which is also the intention. There are no sidebars, no footer and no header. There are no theme settings as other themes have and you cannot adjust anything via the WP customizer. Everything is left to Elementor with this theme, but don't worry because Elementor can do everything.
Elementor allows you to construct the complete pages and posts through sections and columns using its templates as shown below.
ELEMENTOR PAGE DESIGNS
You don't have to build everything yourself, of course. Elementor offers demo layouts for pages from which you can start the design. This is something that premium themes also offer, but Elementor can do the same and more as most of these themes.
ELEMENTOR PRO
Despite the fact that Elementor Free is a nice page builder, the difference with Elementor Pro is huge. Only here will you get full control over your header, footer, and hundreds of demo designs. The Pro version contains 50+ extra widgets compared to the free version, form builders and a sea of options for shops with Woocommerce. It is highly recommended to upgrade to Elementor Pro. Via the button below you can read my review for Elementor Pro.
STOREFRONT THEME (Storefront vs Hello)
Storefront is the default theme of Woocommerce...
In this Storefront Theme review we take a look at whether the theme that Woocommerce itself released to work with their E-commerce plug-in is actually a good product. One of the things that immediately struck me is that extensions have to be purchased for a number of functions of Woocommerce. This does not necessarily have to be a problem, because there are many themes with a free version that are very good but do not offer 100% functionality.
STOREFRONT: RATING
If we check on Wordpress.org Storefront's rating, we see that practically all raters 5 stars gave up except for a few haters. The average score is 4.4 which is a good score, but there are themes with almost 5/5 so it is not really impressive. The theme is currently installed on 200,000+ websites (active installs), which is a pretty high number for a minimalist theme.
STOREFRONT: DEMOS
As a free theme, the Storefront theme does not offer demos, which are also not really necessary. But if you want a different design, the Storefront Child Themes that Woocommerce offers might be a good alternative. I'll say right away that these cost about $40 each and basically you can get a good Woocommerce theme like WP-Astra. There are 2 free Child Themes, called Deli and Boutique.
STOREFRONT THEME REVIEW: WEBSHOPS
Logically, the theme is 100% compatible with Woocommerce, and is only suitable for building webshops. It is theoretically possible to create a blog or corporate site with it, but the theme is not intended for that. I recommend getting one of the top Woo-themes for that.
STOREFRONT: SPEED
The Storefront theme is one of the fastest themes out there for Wordpress and should actually be in my list for fastest Woocommerce themes, but then again, the theme should also be a star which is not the case. The bare theme with no extra plugins with just an optimized cache plugin produced the result presented above. Of course you can optimize your website yourself for loading time. Follow this advice here.
STOREFRONT: PAGE BUILDERS
The Storefront theme uses the Gutenberg page builder by default, but is compatible with Elementor Pro, and all the other elite page builders out there for Wordpress.
STOREFRONT: SHOP PAGES EXAMPLES
A Website built with Storefront is 100% responsive on all devices, fully compatible with Woocommerce and all its extensions. Below are some layouts from the demo shop for Storefront. Everything looks good, but as said before, there are themes that are much, much better to build a shop with such as Divi or Astra.
STOREFRONT: PAID AND FREE EXTENSIONS
There are a total of 11 special plug-in extensions that have been developed especially for Storefront. Of these extensions, 4 are free, the rest can be purchased (something I wouldn't do). The 4 free plug-ins are: Product sharing buttons, Contact Section on the Homepage, Hamburger Menu and an extra Footerbar.
STOREFRONT THEME REVIEW: CONCLUSION
The Storefront theme certainly does its job well as free theme and is very suitable for building shops with Woocommerce. It was made for that, so it's not surprising that it works well. However, there are much better themes that also work perfectly with Woocommerce, the free versions of which are also better than Storefront.
Storefront vs Hello conclusion
First of all, thank you for reading this Storefront vs Hello comparison to the end. Both themes are 100% compatible with Elementor page builder which is great. If you have the money to install Elementor Pro I would do, the difference between free and pro is very big. Hello was made especially for Elementor just like Storefront was made for Woocommerce. If you don't want to use Elementor, forget about Hello because on its own it's worth nothing. Both themes load very fast and I can recommend them both, Storefront for webshops and Hello for other types of websites.
Tip: There are themes that are ranked much higher in my top 10 themes for [2024] than Hello and Storefront. The themes in this list are of course very good alternatives to Storefront and Hello.
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