Searching for the theme for your next WordPress site?
The Creativo theme from Rocky Themes is a multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with 23+ pre-built starter sites for a range of different niches.
You can import one of the demo sites to get started and then easily customize everything using your choice of Elementor or WPBakery Page Builder – no code required.
Beyond individual page designs, you can also customize your header, footer, blog archive, single post templates, and more. Plus, the 50+ custom Elementor widgets give you even more flexibility if you choose to use Elementor as your builder.
In our hands-on Creativo theme review, we’ll take a deeper look at what this theme offers and show you how it can help you create and customize a great-looking WordPress site.
Let’s dig in…
Creativo Theme Review: Exploring the Main Features
Creativo is a multipurpose WordPress theme, which means that you can use it for any type of WordPress site, from blogs to brochure websites, eCommerce stores, portfolios, and more.
Let’s go through some of the main features that help you accomplish that…
23+ Importable Demo Sites
To kick things off, Creativo offers 23+ pre-made demo sites that you can import and use as the foundation of your design.
These demo sites span a range of different niches and use cases, including the following:
- Business website
- Blog
- eCommerce store
- Portfolio
- One-page website
Within those broad categories, you might get multiple designs for different niches. For example, there are separate business-focused designs for agencies, startups, restaurants, construction, lawyers, and so on.
You can browse all of the starter websites here, but here’s a quick look at some of my favorites…
Creativo Main is a pretty classic design that could work for a range of niches:
Creativo Shop can work for a range of different eCommerce niches, thanks to its versatile design:
Creativo Laura works great for any type of lifestyle blog, such as travel, cooking, fashion, and so on:
Finally, Creativo Cafe works great for any type of cafe or bar, with a nice vertical menu on the left and a good-looking menu:
Again, this is just a sampling of the 23+ starter sites that Creativo offers.
Tight Elementor Integration (or WPBakery Page Builder)
For all of the pre-built demo sites, you can choose between using Elementor or WPBakery Page Builder. That is, each demo site has two versions – one built with Elementor or one built with WPBakery Page Builder.
However, it seems like Elementor is the main focus as Creativo offers some special goodies there, such as a set of 50+ custom Elementor widgets.
Personally, I would also recommend choosing Elementor if you use Creativo, as it’s far superior to WPBakery Page Builder at this point.
These widgets cover two broad categories:
- Design widgets – you get special widgets for countdown timers, testimonials, Google Maps embeds, and more. These help you create more stylish designs.
- Theme building widgets – you get widgets to dynamically insert a post’s title, content, and so on. These widgets are important because they let you use Elementor for theme building without requiring you to purchase Elementor Pro (though Creativo still will work great with Elementor Pro if you already have a license).
Here’s an example of some of the widgets:
Speaking of theme building, Creativo doesn’t just use Elementor for the page designs themselves.
You can also use Elementor to customize your site’s templates, including the following:
- Header
- Footer
- Single post (individual blog posts or pages)
- Blog archive (the pages that list multiple blog posts)
For example, let’s say you want to tweak your site’s header design. Rather than being limited to preset options as you would experience with a lot of other themes, Creativo would let you use Elementor’s visual, drag-and-drop interface to fully customize your header.
The same is true of the other templates that I mentioned.
To accomplish this without needing Elementor Pro, Creativo includes its own Creativo Elements tool. Along with giving you the theme building widgets, this tool also lets you manage the templates for the various areas of your theme.
For example, editing the header template would launch the Elementor interface:
Similarly, editing the single blog post template would let you fully customize the base template for individual blog posts.
To help you do this, you get dedicated widgets for all of the important post elements, including the title, content, featured image, and so on:
Live Options Interface for Further Customization
While you’ll use Elementor (or WPBakery Page Builder) to customize a lot of your design, Creativo also offers a detailed theme options area.
Rather than using the native WordPress Customizer, Creativo opts to use its own custom theme options area, which makes me a little worried sometimes.
However, unlike some other themes that relegate their custom options to a backend interface, Creativo still offers live, visual customization.
So even though it’s not using the native Customizer, you still get that nice experience where you can immediately see your changes on the live preview.
You get a ton of options in this interface – here are all the various menu items:
For example, if you open the Typography options, you can change all of the fonts on your site:
However, it would be nice if you could fix the sidebar menu rather than having the options appear on hover. I kept accidentally hovering over the main menu items, which obscured the settings area. Not a big deal, but I found it a bit frustrating.
Hundreds of Templates and Blocks
In addition to the full pre-built starter websites, Creativo also includes hundreds of other templates that you can use in your designs.
These include full page templates, as well as templates for headers, footers, singles, and archives.
You can access these from the Creativo Templates tab of the Elementor template library:
Detailed Page-Level Controls
To help you control the design and layout of individual pages, Creativo gives you detailed page-level controls that appear below the native WordPress editor.
You can use these to customize pretty much everything about a post/page, including the header (choose a custom header or disable it), layout (full-width or sidebar), and lots more.
Full WooCommerce Support
If you want to create an eCommerce store, Creativo offers full WooCommerce support.
First off, there are two dedicated WooCommerce starter sites, though all of the other starter sites also support WooCommerce.
You’ll also get dedicated WooCommerce settings in the Creativo live options interface:
One feature that I really like here is that you’re able to deactivate WooCommerce on non-shop pages, which helps keep your site lightweight by avoiding loading WooCommerce’s scripts when they’re not needed.
How to Use Creativo to Customize Your Website
Now that you know some of the main features of the Creativo theme, let’s briefly look at what it’s actually like to use Creativo to build your website.
Import a Pre-Built Starter Site
To get started, you can head to Creativo → Demos to access all of the pre-built starter sites.
First, you’ll want to choose your page builder. Again, I recommend using Elementor (the default), but you’re also able to choose WPBakery Page Builder if you prefer that.
Then, you can hover over the starter site that you want to use and click the Import button.
For this example, I’m going to import the Creativo Laura design, which is a nice lifestyle blog design.
When you start the import process, you can choose exactly which content/design elements you want to import:
After a short wait, your site should look exactly like your chosen demo.
Customize Your Site Using Live Options and Page Builder
Once you import your starter site, you can start customizing it using the various options that Creativo offers:
- Live Options – you can use the live options interface to easily control sitewide settings, such as fonts and basic layouts.
- Page builder designs – you can customize the individual page designs using your chosen page builder.
- Theme templates – you can use Creativo Elements to customize your site’s header, footer, single, and archive templates using Elementor’s interface.
- Page-level controls – you can use the page-level controls to adjust the canvas for individual pieces of content.
I detailed all of these methods above, but the basic idea is that they all work together to let you fully customize your site without needing any custom code.
Creativo Performance and Weight
To assess the basic weight of the Creativo theme, I ran a test using just the naked theme (before importing a starter site).
The default homepage was 365 KB and 14 HTTP requests.
Around 200 KB of that size came from the default fonts, so you could easily cut this down to more like 150 KB just by using a system font stack.
The rest of the theme was pretty small, with around 100 KB of JavaScript and 11 KB of CSS.
Here’s a breakdown from WebPageTest:
Creativo Pricing
Creativo only comes in a premium version, but it’s priced competitively with other themes on the market, starting at just $49 for use on a single site.
You have two options when it comes to purchasing a license:
- One-year license – you get one year of support and updates for the theme. After the first year, your current version of the theme will keep working normally but you won’t receive new updates or support unless you renew your license.
- Lifetime license – you’ll get lifetime updates and support for a one-time fee.
The one-year license also has different options depending on the number of sites upon which you want to activate Creativo.
All of the plans are full-featured – the only differences are the number of sites that the license supports.
Here’s the full pricing break-down:
- Personal Plan – $49 for use on one website and one year of support/updates.
- Business Plan – $99 for use on five websites and one year of support/updates.
- Agency Plan – $149 for use on 20 websites and one year of support/updates.
- Lifetime – $179 for use on five websites and lifetime support/updates. You also get priority support.
All of the plans are also backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Finally, I want to note again that you do not need Elementor Pro to use the theme building functionality in Creativo. This is because Creativo includes its own theme building widgets and interface.
Normally, you could only use Elementor to design your theme templates (e.g. your header) if you purchased Elementor Pro.
Creativo also bundles in WPBakery Page Builder, so you wouldn’t need to purchase that either. You also get a few other free bundled plugins such as Slider Revolution and LayerSlider.
Final Thoughts on Creativo
If you’re looking for a new multipurpose theme, Creativo gives you all the features that you need to create any type of site.
You get a good number of importable starter sites to use as the base. Once you import a starter site, you can fully customize it using a mix of the live options settings (with real-time preview) and your chosen page builder.
Thanks to the Creativo Elements tool, you can also use Elementor to design your theme templates without needing to purchase Elementor Pro, which gives you even more flexibility (and helps you save money).
If you’re interested in trying it out, you can browse the Creativo starter sites to get a feel for what it looks like.
Then, you can purchase Creativo to import one of those sites and start building. While Creativo doesn’t have a free version for testing, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee so that you’re not risking anything.
Keep reading the article at WP Mayor. The article was originally written by Colin Newcomer on 2022-11-02 07:00:00.
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