In today’s theme review, we’re going to take a look at the Izo WordPress theme, a free, functional offering from ElfWP that looks to finally solve the one problem faced by so many WordPress users in the past:
Creating a functional, professional-looking website without spending a small fortune on premium themes and without spending endless hours customizing those themes once they’re in place.
While there are a plethora of excellent premium themes out there that boast some incredible, dynamic designs and all-kinds of inbuilt functionality, many of them are likely to be too far out of your price range if you’re hoping to build a WordPress website on a shoestring budget.
Even if you do hand over your hard-earned dollars in exchange for a premium theme, you’re often left with the arduous task of putting everything into place and figuring out how to get your site looking just right.
This is just one reason why the Izo theme appealed to us right away. Not only is it one of the easier to use free themes out there, but it also comes with a number of starter site templates that help you to set up and configure your new site in no time.
As you’ll see in this complete Izo theme review, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Izo Theme Review
While the one-click imports of several quality theme templates may be Izo’s biggest selling point, it’s far from its only key feature. Along with that, the theme also offers:
- Easy Setup
- Effortless integration with multiple WordPress website builders including WP Bakery, Gutenburg, and Elementor, including the Elementor Pro Header/Footer builder tool
- Multiple customization options
- WordPress AMP support to improve the performance of your site on mobile
- Support for WPML to help build multilingual websites
- LifterLMS and LearnDash support to help build online courses and other learning platforms
- Zero jQuery – Izo purely uses javascript for improved performance.
- Ongoing updates to ensure your website is always performing at its best
- Fast, reliable support.
Let’s take a look at some of these key features in more detail.
Easy Setup
You can download the Izo theme for free either directly from the WordPress theme directory or from ElfWP’s own website. Either way, the process is the same as it is with most themes.
Download, then head to Theme – Add New. Upload and activate the theme and you’re almost good to go.
I say almost because once the theme is up and running, you’ll also need to install the Izo Companion tool in order to import demo content. Still, that only takes a single click of a button and means you can be up and running in no time.
Importing Demo Content and Theme Templates
All in all, Izo offers you no less than 15 completely customizable website templates to get you started.
That in itself is impressive enough and should be a great incentive for anyone looking for a quality free WordPress theme to give this one a try. What’s even more impressive, however, is that each one of these 15 templates is well-designed to a good standard.
OK, so none of these templates are particularly jaw-dropping and I doubt they’d win an award for innovative design, but they’re a solid option for anyone who needs a professional-looking website for their small business and, best of all, they’re fully responsive, so you can trust that your brand will be well represented on mobile too.
Best of all, each one of the templates is designed for a particular niche market, increasing the likelihood that you’ll find a template perfect for your needs.
The full list of template designs include:
- Agency
- Digital agency
- Restaurant
- Accountants
- Financial company
- Software as a Service
- Gym / Health & Fitness
- Electronics shop (easily adaptable to any kind of online store)
- Law firm
- Professional movers
- Spa / Health & Beauty
- Medical
- Barbershop
- SAAS
- Industry
While all of these are of good quality, there’s something about the restaurant theme that really stands out to us, so that’s the one we’re going to use for this review.
One-Click Demo Import
Having chosen our theme, you can hit the preview button to check if it really does look as good as you think it might, then simply hit the “import” button.
This process doesn’t just set up the layout and structure of your site, it also populates it with demo content and installs any required plugins (such as Elementor) for you, so that when you’re done, you’ve basically got a fully-working website up and running.
From clicking the import button to the whole import process being finished took about 60 seconds, so we’re already off to a great start.
Customization Options
As with most themes, your first port of all after installation is the Customization menu.
Here’s where you can start making basic site-wide changes such as replacing the logo, determining the main font for the whole site as well as editing your header, footer, blog settings, and more.
This is a good starting point, but to really get into making this site your own, you’ll need to open the actual page in Elementor and start editing your page.
Editing Izo With Elementor
If you’re already familiar with Elementor, you’ll know how easy it is to use this handy web builder to add content and change absolutely anything you want to change about your page.
Either click on an existing element and edit it there and then, or simply drag a new block from the left-hand menu to add text, images, buttons, and more.
While Izo only comes with the free version of Elementor, you may want to upgrade to the pro version to add things like contact forms, pricing tables, testimonial carousels, social media sharing icons, and just about every kind of website functionality you can think of.
Don’t worry if upgrading isn’t right for you right now. You can still use other tools for things like creating contact forms and then add them in using shortcodes, but let’s be honest, that’s far more complicated than it needs to be when you can just do the whole thing with Elementor.
Taking this approach, it took us less than 25 minutes to completely customize our new site with pre-prepared content as well as editing the look and feel of our template.
Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t spend longer, but if you did want to get a professional-quality website up and running as quickly as possible, then you really can’t go wrong with the Izo WordPress theme and Elementor.
Izo Theme Demos: How They Look
You’ve had a peek at the restaurant demo above, but what about some of the other options? Here’s just a small selection of our favorite pre-made templates included in the Izo theme:
Law Firm
Software as a Service
Gym
Final Thoughts on Using the Izo WordPress Theme.
On the face of it, Izo is a fairly simple WordPress theme, but that’s honestly all part of its charm and appeal.
While the 15 different pre-made templates aren’t exactly going to set the world on fire, each one of them is attractive in its own right and will more than hold its own against many premium themes in terms of presentation.
Indeed, if you’re looking for a way to create a professional online presence for a small business or growing brand, Izo has a lot to offer. Just install the theme, choose your favorite template, tweak it in Elementor and you’re done.
As I mentioned above, the whole process from downloading the theme to launching your new site could probably take you less than half an hour, which is no doubt a tremendous advantage for time-strapped website owners.
If there’s one thing I would recommend, it’s making the upgrade to Elementor Pro so that you’ll have an easier time adding lots of dynamic functionality to your new website, but as a free theme, I’m certainly not going to dock Izo any points for not including a premium plugin in its package.
Overall, Izo is an attractive, easy-to-use free theme that packs a lot of options for helping you to quickly create a professional-looking website no matter what kind of business you may run.
Get Izo
Keep reading the article at Learn WordPress with WPLift. The article was originally written by Team WPLift on 2021-01-06 05:46:12.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.