Learn What Is The Best Free WordPress Theme For 2019. Find Fifteen Features Making It Visitor Friendly, SEO Friendly and Implementer Friendly. This Is The Best. Obviously, my choice may appear biased,; but after you read my reasons for claiming Hestia is the Best Free WordPress Theme for 2019, you will probably agree. In fact if you are using a different theme, you may want to try Hestia.
Hestia as the best free WordPress theme because it is Visitor Friendly, SEO Friendly, and Implementer Friendly. The degree of its friendliness is demonstrated in the following fifteen features. It is Responsive, uses Sticky Navigation, has a Back To Top button, has Three Navigation Menus with three locations, allows for Page and Post Layout variation, has a way to add Copyright and handle credits, provides Header customization, has built in Front Page Material Design, supports WooCommerce and other significant plugin features, allows for Additional CSS without creating a child theme, is Translation and RLT ready, is SEO Friendly, and is Speed Optimized out of the box.
After you see the evidence to support the fifteen features important for a best WordPress theme, I believe you will agree the Hestia theme is very feature rich. After you have finished reading my review, let me know what you think. Do you agree with my selection for the best free theme? Do you have another favorite?
Why Hestia Is The Best Free WordPress Theme For 2019
Fifteen Key Features Identified in Hestia
Responsive
This free theme is built for mobile first then laptop. What a difference this makes. I am thoroughly delighted to see how well it looks on the Samsung Galaxy. If it looks fantastic on this small screen mobile device it will look great on any mobile device. This is the first free theme that has looked so fantastic on mobile. I can see the website name, hamburger icon for the menu, the image shows up beautifully as well as the name of the page.Sticky Navigation
Sticky navigation displays very well on both the mobile and laptop. Being able to display my website name on the sticky navigation bar is also a plus. In addition, if the sticky menu appears to unnecessarily take too much space at the top on some pages and posts, I can hide it with the click of a button.
Back To Top Button
Being able to display back to the top button is another plus. I remember the days when I coded Back To Top on each post and page.
Three Navigation Menus
Having three navigation menus is a tremendous benefit. This way no menu has too many items. The very top menu can display either a menu or another widget with minimal information. The main menu is the sticky one. The sticky displays child menu items so well even on a mobile device. The footer menu can be displayed at the very bottom of the website underneath the three column footer. If the sticky menu is not needed on individual pages or posts an option can be checked to hide it.
Multiple Page and Post Layouts
Of course the Gutenberg editor will provide much flexibility for page and post layout, but this theme has some additional optional formats to choose from. Site wide a general layout can be defined for both the page and the post whether to display sidebars and where; however at the individual page and post level layouts can be selected for sidebar location or eliminating it. In addition the page has four options: Default, Full width, Page Builder Blank, Page Builder Full Width and Page with Sidebar. Generally the number of page templates for free themes is two or none.Copy Rights and Credits
Few free themes automatically create a website copyright. This free theme does not either; however here is an easy way to do it: Use the Enhanced Text Widget and code the following PHP. A clickable home page link can also be added with the web URL address for quick reference.Header Customization
The header customization is very unique for Hestia’s Front Page. Two options are available: 1) The full screen header image with a call to action button 2) A much narrower header with the page name. I tried both and decided to use the narrower header. I created my own image even though Hestia supports a solid gradient.
Front Page Material Design
Even though I chose not to implement this feature, the material design is built in to handle front page sections for Team, Testimonials, Features, Ribbon and Clients Bar. What a great way for small businesses to build their brand.
Compatibility With WooCommerce And Other Helpful Plugins
Having built-in compatibility with WooCommerce is a big plus because I am using Hestia for my affiliate marketing websites. Hestia theme documentation also recommends the following compatible plugins to extend its capability. None of the plugins must be installed to make Hestia work, but they certainly add the capability to make Hestia even more powerful as a free theme.
Orbit Fox Companion to extend theme functionality to include Social Media Share Buttons & Icons, reporting, custom menu-icons and free stock featured images.
WPForms to create beautiful contact forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes, not hours!
WooCommerce to sell anything, beautifully. Hestia has a front page section called Shop to display the latest products.
SendinBlue to do all-in-one email marketing in the front page Subscribe Section.
Instagram feed to send an Instagram feed to the site footer
Additional CSS Option
This feature, which is standard on WordPress themes now, is so helpful because it eliminates the need to create a child theme for a Style.CSS file. I like to change the color of headers to give the eyes a break.
Here is the CSS Styling code I used for this website: “h2, h3 {color: #00802b;}. This theme uses Bootstrap 3.3.7 so I modified the buttons using the following code:
.btn-lg { padding: 10px 10px; font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.5; border-radius: 20px;
color: #ffffff; Font-weight: bold; }
.btn-lg.round { border-radius: 24px; }
.btn-sm, .btn-xs { padding: 5px 10px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.20;
border-radius: 20px; color: #ffffff; }
.btn a { padding: 5px 10px; font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.20; border-radius: 20px;
background-color: #00802b; color: #ffffff; }
.btn-primary.raised { box-shadow: 0 3px 0 0 #33abcc; }
.btn-primary.raised.active { background: #33a6cc; box-shadow: none;
margin-bottom: -3px; margin-top: 3px; }
.btn-primary:hover, .btn-primary:focus, .btn-primary:active, .btn-primary.active, .open > .dropdown-toggle.btn-primary { background: #024b2a; }
Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
Translation & RTL Ready
Since the internet is global, I have no idea who will visit my site; therefore it was important for the best free WordPress theme to be ready for translation and languages that read Right To Left. Hestia is well prepared.
SEO Friendly
SEO is at the top of my list of important features. Without first-class SEO my site will not be ranked highly by the search engines. Obviously I am responsible for On-Page SEO, which is identified by page and post keyword usage and quality content, and Off-Page SEO, which is measured by page and post anchor text and backlinks. But I rely on theme developers to provide SEO technical structure within their theme.
Many of the features mentioned already support good SEO technical structure. SEO is two prong: how easy the source code can be crawled by search engines and how visitor friendly the site is. Navigation, responsiveness, and mobile friendliness make a theme visitor friendly.
SEO technical structure soundness is identified by the following means. 1) How many coding errors does the theme have when checking it at validator.w3.org? 2) Is the theme developed by one of the eight mainstay theme developers (WPMU DEV, Elegant Themes, My Theme Shop, OBox Themes, Studio Press, Theme Fuse, Themify or ThemeIsle)? 3) Does the theme developer claim the theme follows good SEO practices?
Here is a measurement of Hestia’s SEO Technical Structure Soundness. 1) Hestia had only 6 errors when validated by validor.w3.org. 2) Hestia is developed by Theme Isle. 3) The developers claim the latest SEO principles and design have been followed. So Hestia stacks up well as a good SEO Theme.
Speed Optimization
We live in such a fast paced society that many visitors expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or they leave. So I checked the speed optimization of Hestia.
Page load speed is dependent on the structure of the theme and the web hosting service. The web hosting service I use is outstanding. The server is always up; redundancy is performed, CSS and Java Script are minified and an additional speed booster is applied.
Since site speed is part of Google’s algorithm for site rankings, I tested the themes Hestia and Scheme, which is known as a fast loading theme, on a 200 page website using testmysite.thinkwithGoogle.com. Interestingly, both themes took 5 seconds. So Hestia stands with the best for loading speed.
Developed by Leading WordPress Theme Market Places
We established earlier that Hestia was developed by ThemeIsle which is one of the top eight Theme development Market Places.
Extensive Setup Documentation, Videos And Support
I am very impressed with the documentation provide for the free version. Even more documentation is provided for the Pro version. The entire setup process is documented at Hestia https://docs.themeisle.com/article/753-hestia-doc.
Videos are also included on Youtube. Here is a complete guide for Hestia Set-up.
Conclusion
Hestia is the Best Free WordPress theme for 2019. It is visitor friendly, SEO friendly and implementer friendly. It offers a multipurpose front one-page design, a widgetized footer with three columns, blog and page template options and a clean look. For additional design it is compatible with the Flat Parallax Slider, Photo Gallery, Travel Map and the Elementor Page Builder .
The theme is responsive, WPML, Retina ready, is optionally set up to use Material Kit for design and integrate with WooCommerce. Hestia comes integrated with the free Orbit Fox plugin that brings extra functionality to any website with page builder-friendly templates, widgets, social icons and more.
Check the Free Hestia Theme out. We believe you will like it.
Let us know what you think? Do you have another favorite?
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