Sydney vs Extra comparison [2025] 💥
SYDNEY THEME (Extra vs Sydney)
In this Sydney Theme review we take a look at the most important features of this theme was launched by aThemes, a professional company that offers some very good Wordpress themes through their website. In 2013 Charlie Livingston started aThemes as a one man company but nowadays they work with 6 programmers.
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Sydney theme review: Rating
If we check Sydney's rating on Wordpress.org, we see that practically all raters gave 5 stars except for a few haters. The theme is also quite well known among designers and is highly ranked on Wordpress.org for popular themes.
Sydney theme review: Demos
The Sydney theme offers about 12 modern demos that can be installed with 1 click. The choice is not too large, but since the theme is still very new, this will probably be expanded soon. Sydney also has 2 special Woocommerce demos from which you can quickly start webshops.
The great thing about demo websites is that they make a quick start. The website is already online but still with the wrong photos and texts. So put your own logo in it, adjust the texts and photos and you are well on your way to having your own website.
Sydney theme review: Webshops
I count only 2 demos for webshops in total. The theme is 100% compatible with Woocommerce, but if you are going to build a webshop then choose a theme like Astra or another theme from my top 10 for webshop themes. One can certainly build a good webshop with the Sydney theme, but there is simply better than this.
Sydney theme review: Speed
The Sydney theme is one of the fastest themes out there for Wordpress and should actually be in my list for fastest WP themes. Only the theme itself without additional plugins with only a well-configured cache plugin produced the result presented above. Check out a demo from Sydney itself and see how fast it loads. Of course you can optimize your website yourself for loading time. Follow this tutorial here.
Sydney theme review: Pagebuilders
The Sydney theme uses its own Building Blocks by default, but is compatible with Beaverbuilder and Elementor Pro page builder, one of the best out there in the field. I also definitely recommend installing Elementor for free if you're going to work with Sydney, but it's much better to buy the pro version.
Sydney: Google Fonts
With Sydney you don't need any additional plugins to have all Google Fonts. Sydney already has this built in as standard and you have more than 600 fonts available. You can set which font to use for each section, it all works perfectly.
Sydney theme review: Widgets
Sydney even offers some top widgets in the free version such as: Contact info, Video, Call to action, Clients, Employees, Facts, Latest News, Services Types, Lists, Social profiles, Testimonials, Skills, Timeline (Pro), and Latest news carousel (Pro). The theme is not only compatible with Elementor but with all top page builders so you can use the page builder that you like best.
Sydney: More features
Sydney has over 200,000 active installs and was downloaded much more often because it is simply a very good business theme for Wordpress. Sydney also offers the following features that I won't go into further: Frontpage Blocks, a very good SEO but unfortunately without Schema MarkUp, 100% Responsive on all devices, Parallax Backgrounds, Crelly Slider Support (Pro), and beautiful Full Screen Backgrounds. If Sydney has piqued your interest, I suggest you continue reading on their own website.
Sydney theme review: Conclusion
Sydney is a very good theme that has more impressive loading times. The demo layouts are beautiful, the theme set up is quick and easy. The theme is also very suitable for building shops with it, although it only offers 2 demos. The Sydney theme is ideally suited as a business theme and is 100% Translation Ready. If you'd rather dig a little further, I'd recommend checking out my list of the top 10 WP themes this year.
EXTRA THEME (Extra vs Sydney)
The Extra Theme excels in options for blogs and magazines...
The Extra Theme was introduced to the public in 2015 by Elegant Themes marketed as the second most important theme next to their bestseller, the Divi Theme. Extra comes with the same page builder and structure as the Divi Theme, which is highly praised for this. The DiviBuilder, together with Elementor, is the best available in this area. I personally rate the Divibuilder a bit higher. Elementor works very nicely but it doesn't have a real inline text editor (yet). The Extra Theme is therefore equipped as standard with the best possible components.
Extra Theme Ratings
Elegant Themes does not have a rating system on its own site like many other themes, but their rating is maintained by independent websites, which is much more impressive. Click here to take an instant look at the ratings on these sites. Let's set the average rating at about 4.93 out of 5. Those are such great numbers that no other theme or company can match. There are at most a few free themes that have such ratings on Wordpress.org.
Extra Theme Review: Speed
Elegant Themes took the fast loading of their themes pretty seriously about a year ago and made remarkable improvements. Both Divi Theme and Extra Theme have benefited greatly from this and scored fast loading times.
Extra Theme: Blog Lay-out Builder
They call it the Category Builder themselves. With this tool you can build exactly that homepage or other pages as you had in mind. At the top, of course, features posts and in the columns post from different categories or carousels with posts. All very clear, a great tool.
Extra Theme: Blog Demo Lay-outs
The Extra Theme also gives you quite a few default homepage layouts that you can use as a starter. Actually superfluous with the presence of the Category Builder that I discussed above, but certainly good to give you an idea of what is possible.
Extra Theme: Blog Page Lay-outs
The posts or page content can also be completely adapted to your wishes. Extra makes your blog shine, the pages look very slick. The DiviBuilder is a master at building beautiful pages quickly with just a little bit of experience with the page builder.
Extra Theme: Blog Post Formats
The Extra Theme offers 7 different types of posts that you can use for your articles such as Video Posts, Ads Posts, Featured posts, Masonry posts, Carousel posts, Review posts, standard blog posts, or Tabbed Blog Posts. As mentioned, the Extra Theme is one of the best themes for building blog websites and related items due to its many options.
Extra-Theme: Review all kinds of Products
You can easily turn your blog into a review site as the Extra Theme already has special options built in for this. For writers of reviews like myself actually optimal. Maybe I should start using Extra for my next project.
Extra Theme: Modules
The Extra Theme is packed with modules that a professional blog might need. Already discussed above in "Blog Posts Layouts" there are no less than 7 different types of posts that you can use for your articles such as Video Posts, Ads Posts, Featured Posts, Masonry, Carousel etcetera. I'm not going to list the rest, they're all in the black image below.
Extra Theme: Review and Share
Under your posts, you can choose whether people can leave a rating in the form of stars and comments, and whether your posts can be shared by them on social media.
Extra Theme Review: Headers
To start with, all headers are provided with Advanced Mega Menus that make the sub-tabs look beautiful and easy to scroll and clear for your visitors. As for the headers themselves, you will find quite a number of pre-styled headers that you can use for your website with 1 click. Further adjustments can be made with the HeaderBuilder.
Extra Theme Review: Portfolios
Would you also like to show a showcase or portfolio to your audience in your blog? No problem because the Extra Theme has practically all the great options that the Divi Theme has for portfolios.
Extra Theme: Woocommerce Webshop
Some of you will certainly want to sell things through his website in addition to having a blog. The Extra Theme is of course at home in all markets and offers particularly attractive layouts for shops. Of course you have all possible Woocommerce elements and options at your disposal via the DiviBuilder. I'm not going to show all of that here, but rather read my Divi Theme, the Extra Theme has the same options, such as different shop styles. Incidentally, you also get Divi if you want to purchase the Extra Theme.
Below you can watch a video of the Extra Theme created by its builders: Elegant Themes.
Extra Theme review conclusion
Extra left a very good impression on me. The Theme has impressive and many options for blogs and is an absolute must. The fact that the DiviBuilder is already optimized in this theme is of course also great. There is no better page builder to work with and exceeds even Elementor. The Extra Theme is not for sale separately but comes for only 89 dollars minus discounts that are often there together with Divi, the DiviBuilder as a separate plugin + a number of other elite plugins and 86 other themes as a package. I don't think there is a better deal in the web design world, an absolute must for every design agency.
Extra vs Sydney conclusion
Extra and Sydney are both good themes for creating blogs. Extra is great as it is practically like Divi (just explained above) but Sydney is also a great theme although I prefer Extra. Both themes can be purchased as a membership, respectively from Elegant Themes and aThemes. Every professional web designer should have these two packages in his arsenal anyway.
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