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Spread Your Wings Online

The Best WordPress Theme Framework For You: Free Guide!

It’s become more and more clear to me, that many are in doubt about which WordPress theme framework to choose. There are so many, and they all differ vastly from each other.

There’s the drag & drop PageLines DMS, there’s the maverick Thesis 2.1, Headway 3 with its innovative Visual Editor, then there’s trusty Genesis now at version 2.0, which can be used stand-alone, with child themes, or even with “special forces” add-ons like Dynamik Website Builder or Genesis Extender. And that’s just the frameworks that I’ll cover here. There are many many more.

Phew…

Picking the right theme framework can be frustrating… and most of them aren’t exactly free!

That’s why we didn’t just create an infographic (a flowchart – leading you to the best framework) but also a free 31-page PDF guide – to help you find the right framework! Be sure to download it, further down this very page;-)

The cost of investing in a WordPress theme framework

  1. Most good WordPress theme frameworks will cost you money.
  2. Each framework has a learning curve. Time invested in learning a new framework has to be taken into account: time is money.
  3. Some frameworks also carry a maintenance cost. You’ll have to renew, typically on a yearly basis as 50% off.

When it comes to investing in a WordPress theme framework, the price tag is often an important decision factor for most people.

Yet in my opinion, price shouldn’t be such a big reason when you’re deciding which framework you should invest in! Basically, the price is a small fraction of the time it will hopefully save you, and the money it’ll potentially earn you, by letting you skip the services of a professional web designer – or – if yourself is a professional web designer, it’ll help you develop and design client sites faster and much more efficiently. Your return on investment is high, as long as you pick the right framework! Hence this very blog post, infographic and guide;)

Still, price is a factor of course, though a minor one. So the infographic includes pricing as well.

Note about PageLines DMS pricing:
PageLines DMS is available in a free, open source version. But it’s feature-limited. The full “DMS Pro” version costs a subscription, billed monthly or yearly. For PageLines DMS, we used the cheapest option available, a full year paid in full, to save money. That’s how we’ve arrived at $96 per year, for PageLines DMS.

The theme framework infographic

I couldn’t include each and every one of the many available WordPress theme frameworks out there. So I’ve had to focus the infographic (and PDF guide) on the biggest and (at least to me) most interesting WordPress theme frameworks.

The infographic is a flowchart, guiding you to the best WordPress theme framework. Start at the top, and see where it guides you!

Click to view or download the larger PDF-version!

And be sure to get the free 31-page guide, down below the infographic!

Which is the best WordPress Theme Framework - for you? (infographic - small PNG web version)
Which is the best WordPress Theme Framework – for you? (infographic – PDF version)

You are welcome to embed the infographic on your own site,
as long as you link it to this blog post!

Thanks to the TinyPNG.org panda for shrinking the above PNG from a massive 488.3 KB to a measly 148.7 KB. Really impressive!

I (Oliver) came up with the idea and concept for the infographic, collected the data, and made sketches. Digital designer Heidi Topholt (Twitter @heiditopholt) then took my sketches and turned them into a pretty nice infographic.

To give you an idea of each frameworks popularity, we also decided to include a few metrics:

Klout Score

Even though I find Klout rather lame, we’ve included it, in the infographic. Better than nothing I guess;-)

Social Authority as measured by FollowerWonk / Moz

A social influence scoring metric, superior to Klout, but quite similar.

Domain Authority as measured by Moz

The Domain Authority was found via the free (but quite valuable) Open Site Explorer tool by Moz.

Download the theme framework guide (it’s free)

Shortly after getting started on the infographic, I realized I had to also write a guide, to go along with the infographic, to make it truly useful.

So here it is: a 31-page guide (in PDF format) that goes into more detail:

 

Download the full guide as a PDF

 

Please comment and share!

Heidi and I have spent way more than a weeks worth of work, on creating the infographic and designing the PDF guide. We’ll be really really thankful and happy if you’ll please help us, by sharing this blog post with your network, so as many as possible, can benefit from it. Just use the sharing buttons below. Thank you so much – it  means a lot to us!

PS: And be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!

Oliver (and Heidi)

Reviewed by Johnny Livingston★Updated in

Comments

  1. I suggest that you issue a change to the flowchart that presents it with a white background. Its current black (or dark grey) background causes our printers to consume much ink, which is a bad thing if your counting the cost and paying the bill yourself. 😉

    Reply

    • Hi Shawn

      Thanks for your suggestion! It’s a good one and one I hadn’t thought about. I’ll do my best to remember it in future flowcharts.

      I’m flattered you wanted to print it, by the way!

      =)
      Oliver

      Reply

  2. Cesar,
    As I was not able to reply in nested comments, here is new one.
    I was using CloudFlare, but it was breaking JetPack comments, so I switched to MaxCDN.
    Anyway, CloudFlare and MaxCDN are not on the same boat in my opinion, CF has a very fast DNS response time, but MaxCDN offers better files delivery.
    And $9 is not so much
    About data center in South America, I’ve read today, that Digital Ocean is going to open one soon.
    If you need any more news, catch me at G+ 🙂

    Reply

  3. Hi Oliver and Heidi,
    It’s been a long time since I read such a thorough article discussing the different frameworks. I really appreciate your efforts and find it very informative. Of course I like the fact that as a Headway fan you really like Headway 😉 But all your remarks about the other frameworks showed me there is not one way leading to Rome. Keep on doing the good work! Thank you very much for your efforts and time getting this together.
    Jos

    Reply

    • Thanks Jos!

      I’m not married to one solution. I think there’s plenty room for improvement, also regarding Headway. But currently, it’s a quite unique product, in that it’s the only WordPress theme framework that gives non-coders so much design freedom.

      Currently I’m thinking about whether a guy like me, who can code, should rather stick to that particular way of working. Efficiency is a major objective. But there’s pros and cons to each approach. And Headway can be used as a parent theme, for a child theme in which the Design editor has been disabled. But then again, for some stuff, it’s nice to use the Design Editor for unique page layouts for individual pages, etc.

      Ahh, all those choices, huh?

      =)
      Oliver

      Reply

  4. Another great post Oliver! You don’t post often, but the quality of your content is fucking awesome! Your resources section is very useful as well!
    Digging the infopgraphic, I’m staying with Headway 😉

    One thing though, I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but reading from the laptop, the font size in your comments section is a bit small? (looks fine on iPad though)

    Shit I’m only 26 and my eyes are already getting old :-p

    Reply

    • Thanks! Actually I have a big reservoir of unpublished content piling up. Not published yet, because work/client projects have demanded most of my focus. I intend to blog more often. Always quality though. Not a big fan of filler content;-)

      Well… Apart from that Terence McKenna post last christmas haha:)

      Thanks for your kind words David. Always welcome:)

      And a double thanks regarding the font-size of the comments! Better now?

      Reply

    • Thanks Cesar, your support means a lot to me, it really does. Glad to know my contribution is useful.

      The world of WordPress is exciting these days. So much new stuff happening. And Ghost got released! Made quite a dent it seems. I know I’m also gonna play with it soon. How about you?

      Reply

        • Hmm, interesting. I keep hearing good stuff about Digital Ocean. Will try them when time. Testing new hosts can be a big time-drain. Also wanna look into WPEngine to compare them to Flywheel, which I played with recently. Very impressed by their speed. Just not interested in paying for the “managed” part of hosting. I can manage it myself;)

          Anywho, thanks for the link to the 87studios article on Ghost setup. Quite handy, have just retweeted it:)

          Now… All I need is to come up with a domain name for my Ghost site. Have been wanting to blog about more personal endeavors for years now. Ghost seems like a good opportunity to finally do something about it. “Hand me that Moleskine so I can brainstorm will ya?” =)

          Reply

          • Yes, the Moleskine comparison makes perfect sense for Ghost: just focus in writing. Indeed it was exactly what I felt when I wrote my 1st post with it.
            I’m not bashing WP at all, but it just too tempting to use a lot of features from it’s plugins library….
            Digital Ocean is the opposite of WPEngine: you handle it all! While WPEngine is the Holy Grail of WP hosting (no problems in 15 months, perfect speed, security, no downtime, …) it doesn’t have the excitement of you being the sole responsible for your server, taking risk of been hacked, having necessity to read and learn to maintain your server.. well, it’s a very different profile of customers, and I chose to be on both 🙂

            Reply

              • Hi folks!
                Thanks for sharing article from my blog.
                To add some voice into this, 87studios is also running on Digital Ocean cheapest VPS and I use nginx with php-fpm. With Genesis on board site is fast and easy to maintain. I really can recommend DO for all bloggers.
                Cheers,
                Kris

                Reply

                • For email I use zoho.
                  You can use any email service, all to do is just add proper mx records to domain settings.
                  I didn’t want to create email server on DO (but it’s possible – https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-and-setup-postfix-on-ubuntu-12-04 )
                  It’s all up to you.

                  And to add a little more to hosting discussion. Spending $29 monthly for WPEngine is just a waste of money if you don’t have a blog with over 100k visits.
                  I use also MaxCDN – so with expenses like $14 per month I think my site will handle up to 20k visits per month and then just I’ll switch to second tier at DO.
                  Using DO is not as simple as shared hosting with CPanel. It was my first VPS and it took me 10 hours to move site from shared server. But finally I’m happy using it – no more downtime because of ‘high resource usage’.

                  Cheers,
                  Kris

                • Hi Kris. For CDN I’m using Cloudflare, the free plan. I think it’s good. I’d like to know how it compares to MAxCDN’s starting plan at 9US. MaxCDN counts bandwidth, has no security features and charges 30 for SSL. Cloudflare has unlimited bandwwith, security features, and charge only 20 to handle SSL.
                  Anyway the great feature I seek is a Data Center in South America, now only Amazon, Google and Akamai have it.

Questions or comments? Feel free: you're welcome!