For review

Hi there,
I plan to leave a 5* review on your theme, with the long below comments. I want it to be fair, so, let me know if you have any comment, please
Kind regards

My site is performing well for me. Using Basel for 2 years. Meanwhile, I tried few others (astra pro, generatepress pro, savoy, …) and audited / tested the demos of many many others in terms of functionalities, speed, code quality, number of ccs rules, etc. I decided to stay with Basel, here is why.

My specific needs
– Multipurpose; Selling is my absolute priority, but my blog matters (60% of my visits, my way to gain visitors).
– Mobile: now close to 60% of my visits

My priorities
1- speed
2- findability / searchability
Especially on mobile, and on both blog and shop.
Meaning it shall be easy and fast for visitors to find if there is what they want, and to get it. What is about menus, filters, swatches + focus on what matters, avoid what distracts. A good discriminating factor: is the theme able to deliver a specific menu on shop for mobile, and another one for blog?
NB: I can only agree with Google on speed, it’s also subjective (first contentful paint).

Strengths and weaknesses of Basel
– Strengths: limitless capabilities / reasonable CSS quantity / findability / searchability / adaptability for mobiles
– weaknesses: code quality / integration within wordpress core

Why I still prefer Basel to others?
In short, I did not find any better compromise than what Basel offers.
– Themes like Shoptimizer or Woondershop are far more optimized for woocommerce and much faster, but what they propose for blog is really too poor and unfertile.
– Themes like Astra or GP made my site much faster. They are much better coded, and far better integrated within WordPress, but I did not adopt them because they are very far to offer the same functionalities than Basel, especially on mobile, and I am 100% sure that switch would proved negative for UX
– Re. other themes on themeforest, I did not find one which could be a better compromise than Basel (for those which have the same functions, there are too many more css rules + I refuse to be handcuffed by a given page builder).

Re. Speed optimisation:
My average pageload is 3.7″ (with 60% mobile + rich content in blog). Which is OK but still not enough.
Here, I don’t care about tests (pingdom, etc). I only rely on the real measures made on real visits via google tags + chrome.
Key learning to optimize
– priority n°1: optimize content + layout (simplicity, size of images / videos)
– priority n°2: host
– priority n°3: avoid wp bakery and elementor.
I tried most cache plugins (autoptimize, asset cleanup, W3TC, WP Rocket, …), their impact on my site proved marginal. Whereas the impact of host proved huge, from many perspectives …. and indeed, very very few hosts are able to deliver a fast woocommerce (tested 5, during 1 month each)
Priority n°3 is my most recent learning. Indeed, my blog pages load much faster when using gutenberg. It’s clearly a nightmare to switch from wp bakery to gutenberg, but the speed benefit is obvious. And more importantly: Elementor & wp bakery demand a lot of CPU: either it costs you a lot, or it breaks your site for a short while ! With gutenberg, the minimum CPU is enough (same with beaver builder, which is also 100% wysiwyg but costs more).

Support:
I have been a real pain for many: Xtemos / Basel, but also for the other themes I tried … the hosts (Kinsta, Cloudways, Scala, WPX, …) … plugins (WPML, WP Rocket, …). I honestly believe that Xtemos team delivered the best service. They solved 99% issues (1 still pending), always helped me efficiently. And indeed, they give more solutions than what shall be expected from a theme (ie contrary to others, I never got a : out of scope, contact a developer). But what I value the more, is that they are purely fact based … when all others tend to be judgemental or make assertions without fact-checking if correct and appropriate … what is too often a waste of time …