Flatsome Theme is the #1 Best Selling WooCommerce Theme on Themeforest. Why is so appreciated in the marketplace and how to improve your workflow using it? Here’s is my perspective based on my experience with Flatsome theme:

A Theme for non-techie Users

At the time of writing this article, it has 200.000+ sales. The main reason? It’s very friendly for non-techie users. It provides an easy-to-use system to build a fully functional & stable WooCommerce website quickly for a low price. But when expectations are higher for appearance or more functionalities, things are not so simple.

The advantages the Theme author highlights for the client are:

  • Build anything with UX Page Builder;
  • The Unlimited Options in Customizer;
  • The Speed Optimization;
  • Design that Sells;
  • Always up to Date.

But these are general advantages you can see about almost every theme. What makes it stand apart from other Multifunctional Themes is WooCommerce’s Target Audience and its stability over the years.

My Experience with Flatsome Theme

For a few years, I avoided the Flatsome theme (like many other Themeforest themes) and I used other developer-friendly themes like Astra or Kadence. But last year, a client asked me to use Flatsome for a re-design project because his team is already familiar with it as they use it for many other websites. My arguments to use one of the developer-friendly themes I trust were in vain. This discussion was a big aha moment and made me decide to dive more into Flatsome. If there is a demand for this theme, it’s worth spending time to understand it, develop a workflow for it, and… like it.

So, for more than one year, I’ve been working for a large Flatsome shop and a few small ones. And I’ve started to put everything I learned in this blog to organize the knowledge achieved over this year.

The Pros of working with Flatsome Theme from developer perspective

  • The theme has been stable over the years;
  • The teme & UX builder use basic features, nothing fancy (like Elementor, for example);
  • The builder generates clean code and well-organized classes;
  • There are many elements available in UX Builder;
  • Each styled element (button, row, section, etc.) can be saved as a preset element and used in a different page;
  • Block post type can be used for global sections in order to change an element for many pages.
  • It’s easy to copy/paste a section from one page to another one, disabling the UX Builder.
  • The UXBuilder generates shortcodes that can easily be edited in Simple editor;
  • Flatsome provides a few hooks (actions & filters).
  • A license can be used for the live website, but also for testing and staging: the live site, 3 staging and 5 locals.
  • UX builder elements have many restrictions, but the elements can be overridden with custom functions.
  • Even though the theme offers (like all Themeforest products) just 6 months of support, there is a large community on Facebook where you can find answers from experienced users.

What I don’t like about working with Flatsome Theme?

  • like many other themes, it’s painful to build an easy-to-manage system class for large websites;
  • there are just a few global settings available in Customizer: a few options for colors and font; it’s much easier to rely mostly on Custom CSS than Customizer.
  • default theme css is difficult to override using style.css and much easier to target the element with Customizer CSS (which is difficult to organize);
  • The ID is randomly generated and you have to target by classes, not by ID-s. For scrolling to a section there is a special element Scroll to link.
  • The theme is a little behind the actual WordPress trends.
  • Flatsome Theme is packed with a few woocommerce features easy to be implemented by Customiser .
  • The documentation is not very extensive, but you can find many answers to advanced questions on the Facebook group.
  • The blog section is low-developed and it needs custom code to add it a custom design.

I know there is no perfect system that would provide all the solutions needed. If the Flatsome theme is well-appreciated by the client, our job is to build a good system in order to build well-maintained solutions.

(This article will be continually updated, based on my experience with Flatsome)

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