The Avada Theme
Avada is a multipurpose theme with its own builder, sold as a complete website platform. It genuinely is one — which is the strength, the weight and the lock-in in a single sentence.
Avada is sold as a website platform rather than a theme, and that description is accurate. It bundles its own builder, a large options system, header and footer construction, prebuilt websites and a set of premium plugins. One purchase, one vendor, most of the site.
For a certain buyer that is exactly the proposition. It is worth being clear-eyed about what accepting it means.
What "complete platform" involves
- Its own builder, integrated into the theme rather than sold separately.
- An extensive options system, controlling layout, typography, colours, header and footer at global and per-page level.
- Prebuilt websites importable in one action.
- Bundled premium plugins, licensed to the theme author — see ThemeForest WordPress themes for how bundling works.
- Theme building, so archives and single templates are editable in the same interface.
The genuine advantage is coherence: one vendor, one support channel, one update, and features that were designed to work together rather than assembled from five plugins that were not.
The options system is the double edge
Avada's settings are deep. Almost anything visual can be changed without CSS, at global level and then overridden per page.
That is why non-technical owners like it, and it produces two predictable costs:
- Finding the right setting takes time, because there are a great many of them. This is a real ongoing cost for whoever maintains the site.
- Everything you configure is a theme option, stored per theme, and gone on switch. On a system this large that represents substantial work.
The lock-in
Three layers, and unlike some competitors they are not separable:
The builder is the theme. You cannot keep the layouts and change the theme, because the layout capability belongs to the theme. Pages built with it do not survive a switch.
Options do not travel. Header, footer, typography, colours, per-page overrides — all theme-owned.
Any theme-registered content types strand their content on switch, leaving rows in the database with no admin screen and no URL. Content types belong in a plugin, as custom post types explained sets out.
Do the ten-minute test rather than reasoning about it: build one representative page on a staging copy, switch to a default theme, and look at what is left. The general version is in how to judge a WordPress theme.
The habit that limits the damage, whatever you decide: write blog posts in the ordinary editor, not the builder. Posts stay portable at no cost in capability.
Performance
A theme carrying this much capability carries more code than a lean one. Avada includes performance settings — asset control, conditional loading, image handling — which exist precisely because the baseline needs managing.
Approach it empirically:
- Open the demo closest to your intent and check the network panel on a text page. That is your floor.
- Build your own page and measure it, on a mobile profile.
- Then work the larger levers: images, hosting, caching, following how to speed up a WordPress site.
A well-configured Avada site on good hosting is fine. A demo-import site with unoptimised photographs on cheap shared hosting is not, and the theme will get the blame.
Prebuilt websites
They save real time and behave like every demo import: they bring content, and they may install plugins.
Import on a fresh site before writing anything, or on staging first. Importing onto a site with existing content creates pages you will then hunt down and delete — templates versus themes covers the general caution.
And expect the finished site to look considerably less impressive than the demo once your own photographs and your real headline lengths go in. That is not a criticism of Avada; it is true of every demo, and it is the comparison worth making before buying.
Who it suits
A good fit for:
- Owners who want one product to build and run the whole site, and will stay with it.
- Sites needing a lot of layout capability without a developer.
- Projects where the alternative is buying a builder, a slider, a portfolio plugin and a form plugin separately.
A poor fit for:
- Content-heavy sites that need portability.
- Developers who want control of markup, for whom a block theme is a better foundation.
- Projects with a hard performance budget.
- Anyone likely to re-theme within a couple of years.
Common mistakes
- Building blog posts in the builder.
- Importing a prebuilt site onto a live site.
- Configuring hundreds of options before testing the exit.
- Buying one licence for several client sites, which the standard licence does not cover.
- Leaving performance settings at their defaults and concluding the theme is slow.
Before you commit
Install on staging, import the closest prebuilt site, then replace the demo content with your longest headline, your real images and your actual navigation. Check it on a phone, measure it, and then deactivate the theme and see what your page becomes.
If that last result is acceptable to you, Avada is a reasonable choice. If it is not, you have learned it in an hour rather than in year two.
Frequently asked
- Both, sold together. The builder is part of the theme rather than a separate plugin, which means the layout capability and the theme cannot be separated — you take both or neither.
- Pages built with its builder do not survive the switch, and its extensive theme options are stored per theme and lost. Test on one page before committing: build it, switch to a default theme, and look at what remains.
- It carries more code than a lean theme and includes performance settings to manage that. Whether visitors notice depends more on images, hosting and caching. Measure a real page rather than relying on either the marketing or the reputation.