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 …

Hello,

Thank you very much for sharing your review before posting. We much appreciate it despite the fact that it is your review and you can post anything on ThemeForest. So the main thing about the review is that it is true and we fully agree with you. We would be glad if share your experience as our theme’s review.

As for the speed, we are still open to improve our theme and accept all customer’s recommendations. Because of the fact that Basel was developed almost 5 years ago, some advanced techniques in code optimizations can’t be applied there, unfortunately. If we do them on Basel, almost everything made on more than 8000 websites might be broken. That is why we can do only simple optimizations like library updates, remove unnecessary scripts and CSS styles. But in general, it shouldn’t make any trouble for the performance.

Currently, we are working on our new template with options like advanced CSS generator, different content for the mobile version, and extended JS files split. These features should make it possible to get 80-90 points in Google page speed on mobile. So you could test it after release if you have time and will 🙂

Kind Regards

Hi,
I believe the main css is far too big even though https2 allow parallel download still if possible we can break into smaller files.
“some advanced techniques in code optimizations can’t be applied there” —> would you mind telling what exactly are we talking about here. Maybe you guys can release a beta version for it.
I know woodmart is quite the hotselling product and i would not mind moving to woodmart but i really love basel since it provide good amount of configs.Please if possible consider adding the changes in basel and if possible add elementor support for it.

“Currently, we are working on our new template with options like advanced CSS generator, different content for the mobile version, and extended JS files split. ”
— We are tallking about basel here right??. When can we expect that version??

Hello,

We were talking about different templates, not Basel.

We will consider all your suggestions for our updates. We are going to optimize our Basel theme for better loading as well. We can’t guarantee that Elementor support will be implemented soon. Because if do this now, we will harm the performance. So it might be possible only after optimizing our CSS and codebase in general. WoodMart is built on a different codebase which is why some advanced optimizations are possible there but not possible for Basel yet.

Kind Regards

Elementor is somehow comfy to use, I agree, but re. speed and re. CPU use … I spent 1 full week to make 3 different complex pages and achieve to get same layout, with Elementor, Wp bakery, Generate blocks and Beaver Builder. They were my homepage (polinecouture.com), this photo gallery (https://polinacouture.com/galerie-des-tissus/) and one page.
I tested the 4 every morning during 1 week (at 5am when most Europe and US sleep to avoid traffic issues) on my VPS on Google page speed + made audits via dareboost, yellowlab.tools, webpagetest.org, etc. All in all, incl. ease of use, Beaver is the best by far, but Elementor and Bakery, for speed and CPU, I don’t understand the benefit. Or that’s just for “special effects” and gimmicks, which anyway slow down by themselves? And knowing that the best selling websites, starting from Google up to Amazon included simplicity in their key leverages of success?
Further, when you consider where WP is going (ie blocks), given the nightmare to move from Balkery / elementor / Beaver to WP core, what could be good reason to believe in Elementor? Like many, I read that Beaver and Elementor were compatible with Gutenberg … and then I tried. Yes, the page remains visible, but once in WP / Gutenberg, it becomes a unique, unmanageable and useless block. And if you use WMPL, all translations are lost.
So, all in all, ask for Elementor AND better speed, sorry, that’s like asking to run faster while adding a millstone around the neck.
Last, I speed tested Basel vs Woodmart, but I could not do it like for like, just indirectly via sites using them, or the demo; results say that Woodmart is not faster, seems slower, but as it’s not like for like (eg same layout, plugins, cache, server, etc), it could be wrong.

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