Thrive Architect Review – The Best WordPress Page Builder Plugin?

If you can’t find the perfect WordPress theme for your website or want to create unique layouts for your content, a drag-and-drop page builder plugin can help you take control of your site’s design.

But with so many page builder plugins available, which one should you choose?

Thrive Architect is one popular option. After enabling it on your site, you’ll be able to use its drag-and-drop interface to customize the appearance of your content. It also comes with an impressive library of templates to help you get started. There are lots of other useful features, too, including many that will help you generate more leads from your website.

To help you decide if Thrive Architect is the right page builder plugin for you, this review explores its best features, evaluates what it’s like to use, and highlights its pros and cons.

If you like the idea of creating a custom WordPress website or giving your posts and pages a unique look, read our hands-on Thrive Architect review to find out if this is the page builder plugin you need.

Key Features of Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect is a great example of a modern WordPress drag-and-drop page builder plugin.

Before we get to the main part of the review, here’s a quick overview of what this tool can do:

• Works with all WordPress themes – Although Thrive Architect comes with a WordPress theme as part of the Thrive Suite (more on that later), you can use it with any WordPress theme.
• Large library of templates – A selection of high-quality editable templates to speed up the design process, including many sales-focused landing page designs.
• Intuitive drag-and-drop editor – The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor interface gives you an accurate view of your page designs while you work on them.
• Many conversion-focused page elements – You can add a wide range of elements to your posts and pages, including lots designed to help increase conversions and generate leads.

Essentially, Thrive Architect lets you start with a blank page or import one of its many templates. You can then use its content editor to design your page by moving items around, changing their appearance, and adding more customizable elements to your pages.

As Thrive Architect has a strong focus on conversions, lots of its elements and templates have been designed to help you generate more leads from your WordPress website, no matter what your goals are.

Although that’s just a quick overview of the best aspects of Thrive Architect, it should give you a good idea of what this powerful tool can do.

Now it’s time to explore this plugin in more depth and demonstrate exactly how it works.

User Experience

As mentioned, there are lots of page builder plugins available for WordPress. When it comes to picking one, perhaps the most important aspect to look at is the user experience.

Thankfully, Thrive Architect has a very user-friendly interface. The plugin is easy to install, and once it’s activated on your website, another content editor is added alongside the default WordPress editor. Now, whenever you’re editing a post or page, you have the option of clicking on the Launch Thrive Architect button to start using the page builder interface.

Even though the default WordPress editor has been updated significantly over the last few years, the Thrive Architect editor is still a big upgrade in terms of what you can do.

The first step to creating a custom homepage, landing page, or article design with Thrive Architect is to decide whether you want to use one of the pre-built templates or start from scratch.

We’ll cover the pre-designed templates in more detail soon, but using one of them as the foundation for your pages saves you a lot of time and effort. As they’re all fully editable, they don’t creatively constrain you in any way.

To help you get started, tooltips are displayed around the user interface. As there’s a lot you can do with Thrive Architect, it’s great to see these helpful elements being used to steer you in the right direction.

Row- and Column-Based Layouts

Once you start work on your custom page design, you can create custom row- and column-based layouts.

You can then populate those layouts with a wide range of elements. You will find out more about these elements later on in this review. However, there are lots to choose from, with many designed to help you generate sales and leads from your website. Contact forms, like the one below, are just one of the types of elements available.

Inline Editing

One notable highlight of the Thrive Architect interface is inline text editing. Thanks to this, when you’re editing text on your page, you can simply click on the text area and start typing directly into the page design.

There’s no need to add text via a separate window, then wait to see how it looks in your page design once the interface has been updated.

Although inline text editing is becoming more and more common, not all page builder plugins have it. However, thanks to its time-saving properties, it’s definitely a feature worth having.

Context-Sensitive Controls

As well as easy text editing, the rest of the Thrive Architect builder interface has been designed to be as streamlined as possible. Thanks to this, as soon as you click on an element on the page, you’ll get instant access to the controls for that element.

For example, if you click on an icon that’s been added to a page, its customization controls and settings are immediately displayed in the sidebar.

You can then make changes to that element through the visual controls. Any changes you make are instantly applied to the element. As this greatly reduces the time you spend looking for settings and options and waiting for changes to be applied, you’ll be able to get more done in less time.

Clutter-Free Interface

If at any point you feel like the interface is getting a bit cluttered, you can easily hide the sidebar panel at the touch of a button.

As the Thrive Builder takes over the entire WordPress dashboard interface when in use, you can focus on what you’re doing. This means you’re less likely to be distracted by any of the tasks associated with running your WordPress website.

Style Editor

Another impressive aspect of Thrive Architect is the Style Editor. While you can change all the colors in use on your page individually, the Style Editor lets you change all the colors in just a few clicks, according to your chosen style.

So if you want to quickly change your page’s overall style or branding, you can simply choose one of the pre-defined options.

Undo and Redo Revisions

If you need to walk back any of your edits, you can use the undo and redo feature to cycle through your changes.

Thrive Architect also has a Revision Manager that makes it easy to jump back in time to a previously saved version of your design.

Highly Mobile Responsive Designs

With so many people using their smartphones to access the internet, it’s good to see that any pages you create with Thrive Architect are mobile-friendly.

However, Thrive Architect does more than just producing mobile-friendly or responsive pages. This page builder also lets you easily preview your pages in a range of viewports. Doing so gives you the ability to see how your designs will look on screens of different sizes.

Not only that, but Thrive Architect also lets you set the visibility of elements, based on the type of device that is accessing the page. Due to this, you can hide any elements that you think might be distracting or not suitable for mobile users.

You also get the option of creating alternatives that are only visible to people using smartphones or tablets.

If you want your content to look its best, no matter what device is being used to access it, you’re sure to appreciate this impressive level of mobile friendliness.

Overall, the Thrive Architect user interface has been very well designed. Despite giving you lots of control over how your content will look, Thrive Architect is relatively easy to pick up and start using.

It’s worth pointing out that in the past, Thrive Architect and its user interface and experience were ahead of many of the most popular page builder plugins for WordPress. Now though, it’s fair to say some of those plugins have caught up, adding inline editing, a truly WYSIWYG experience, and detailed mobile display settings. However, despite catching up, there isn’t an alternative that has clearly surpassed Thrive Architect.

Thrive Architect Elements

Elements are another key feature of Thrive Architect and are something I’ve already touched upon in the previous section.

In short, elements are the features or modules that you can add to your pages when working with Thrive Architect. Thanks to this, Thrive Architect makes it easy to create feature-rich content that not only looks good but also helps you achieve your goals.

As well as having a good selection of general-purpose elements, such as text boxes, image displays, and background sections, Thrive Architect also has lots of conversion-focused elements. Due to this, you should be able to generate more leads from your website.

Some examples of these lead generation elements include:

• Countdown timers for promoting time-sensitive offers
• Opt-in forms for collecting email addresses and other information
• Calls-to-action buttons for generating clicks
• Testimonials for demonstrating social proof from customers or clients
• Bullet lists with custom icons for highlighting key features and benefits
• Pricing tables for comparing different products or purchase options
• Guarantee boxes for highlighting money-back and refund policies

You can view the full list of elements on the relevant part of the Thrive Architect sales page to find out more.

Just like almost every other aspect of Thrive Architect, the elements can all be fully customized to ensure they have the right look for your website. Not only that but there are also multiple templates for many of the elements.

For example, when using the opt-in form module to add an email newsletter sign-up form to a page, you can choose from a good selection of different layouts.

However, if you can’t find a suitable template, it’s not a problem. All of the elements can be edited through the intuitive Thrive Architect user interface, making it very easy to customize them.

Another nice feature of Thrive Architect is that any widgets that are active on your site can be added to your pages in the same way as elements.

This includes the default WordPress widgets as well as any that have been added to your site via third-party plugins. Thanks to this, if you find that there’s an element you need that is missing from Thrive Architect, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to install a plugin that adds it to your site.

Landing Page Templates

There are now over 300 editable page templates in the Thrive Architect library, giving you plenty of options when it comes to adding new content to your site.

As Thrive Architect has been created to help you generate more leads and sales from your WordPress website, many of these templates have a strong focus on driving conversions.

As well as the lead generation templates, there are also regular designs such as templates for the homepage, about, contact, and portfolio parts of your website.

There are a few coming soon and under construction templates, too, that you can use while you work on your site in private.

However, the majority of the templates are focused on encouraging your visitors to complete a specific action, whether that’s signing up for something, joining your email list, or moving along your sales funnel in some other way.

If you’re looking for a way to make your website more effective when it comes to generating leads and closing sales, Thrive Architect and its templates are sure to help.

All these templates can be fully customized through the Thrive Architect interface. They can also be mixed and matched to help you create the perfect design for your site.

This all makes Thrive Architect ideal for both users who have their own ideas for their content layouts as well as those who would like some inspiration.

Getting access to 300+ templates is great. However, some other page builder plugins, such as Divi Builder, include even more. Furthermore, their templates are more varied and cover a wider range of websites and content types.

However, if you’re really focused on generating leads from your website, the set of templates that you get with Thrive Architect should be just what you need.

Conversion Rate Optimization

When you purchase Thrive Architect you don’t just get access to that plugin. You also get access to all of the plugins from Thrive Themes as well as their flagship theme (more about this in the pricing section).

One of those plugins is Thrive Optimize, a tool that lets you run experiments on your website to optimize your content.

Thanks to the inclusion of Thrive Optimize, you can quickly create multiple versions of your pages to find out which one your audience responds to most positively.

One example of an experiment you can run could be creating multiple versions of a page, each with different calls to action.

Thrive Optimize will then show the different versions to equal portions of your audience until a clear winner has emerged.

Then, you can end the experiment and display the version that generated the most clicks or some other action to your visitors.

The Thrive Architect templates have definitely been designed with conversions in mind. However, if you want to generate the most leads possible from your visitors, being able to test the templates and your designs is invaluable.

What’s more, Thrive Optimize integrates seamlessly with Thrive Architect and can be accessed just like any other features of this page builder.

Other Features of Thrive Architect

That covers the main features of Thrive Architect. However, there are lots more reasons to choose this plugin, including:

• Integrates with many third-party services, including Mailchimp, Facebook, and Zapier
• Educational content to help you use Thrive Architect and create-sales focused websites and content
• Actions and animations to catch the attention of your audience
• A lightbox tool for creating pop-up overlay windows
• Social media integration for adding share buttons and displaying content from social accounts
• Ability to create auto-scrolling web pages
• Support for adding custom HTML and CSS to your pages

You can view the full extent of what this page builder plugin can do on the Thrive Architect web page.

Thrive Suite Pricing

Thrive Themes no longer sells its products individually. Instead, you must purchase their Thrive Suite package.

One huge benefit of this is that you not only get access to Thrive Architect, but also a collection of other very useful conversion-focused products, including Thrive Optimize, Thrive Leads, Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Theme Builder, and more.

The only real downside of the package approach is that a one-year license for all of these tools will cost you $228, which is the equivalent of $19 a month. Alternatively, you can pay quarterly; however, this costs the equivalent of $30 a month or $360 a year, making it the more expensive option.

After the period you’ve paid for is up you’ll need to renew your license to maintain access to updates, Thrive Themes support, and the premium templates. If you don’t renew, you can continue using the products unsupported. Everything you created with them will continue to function as before. 

$228 or $360 a year might seem like a lot. However, if you plan to use even just a few of these tools, these prices should be easier to justify. Not only that, but the functionality of Thrive Architect could replace several WordPress plugins you might have been thinking about buying anyway, such as powerful contact form, social sharing, and table builder plugins to name just a few.

Also, if you take into account the often expensive price of powerful lead generation plugins such as Thrive Leads, the package starts to look more competitively priced.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee in place, so you can buy without risk.

You can view the full details of the Thrive Suite all-in-one conversion-focused toolbox, and find out exactly what you get for your money on the relevant page of the Thrive Themes website.

Thrive Architect Review – Conclusion

Thrive Architect is definitely a powerful tool for creating custom content designs for WordPress websites.

Whether you want to add a few conversion-focused elements to your pages, such as sign-up forms and calls to action, or publish highly optimized sales pages on your website, Thrive Architect is up to the task.

After testing out the plugin for this Thrive Architect review, it’s clear that this page builder is up there with the best options from this category, including Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder.

However, one area where Thrive Architect does edge ahead of the competition is its focus on generating conversions. Due to this, if you are creating a website for a business or want to generate more leads from your blog, Thrive Architect has lots of features that will help you turn your site into an effective marketing tool.

Thanks to the sales-focused features, such as the split testing tool (that comes as part of the Thrive Suite), the opt-in forms, lightbox windows, and more, Thrive Architect is sure to help you grow your business.

Thrive Architect has many of the essential and popular features found in regular page builder plugins, making it a good all-around option for anyone who wants to take control of the design of their posts and pages. However, if you want to customize the other parts of your website, such as the header, footer, and archive templates, then the Thrive Builder theme that is based on Thrive Architect is the tool for you.

Joe

Joe has been using WordPress for many years, building many different types of websites along the way. Joe now enjoys working as a freelance content writer and is available for hire.