2020 Thrive Themes Membership Review: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives

If you’re looking for a thorough Thrive Themes Membership review, you’re in the right place.

When you’re scouring the internet and you see the cool countdown timers, the professional-looking landing pages, and all of the fancy automation, you might start to say, “I want nice features like that on my website”. Besides, landing pages, countdown timers, and automation has been proven to boost website conversion rates, and who doesn’t want the chance to increase sales online?

If you’re here, it’s likely that you’ve traced the path of these cool features on many people’s sites back to Thrive Themes, and you’re wondering, “Is the Thrive Themes membership a good investment for me?”. In this review, I plan to help you navigate the pros and cons to make the best decision for you. In this Thrive Themes Membership review, I will tell you:

• What it is
• How it works
• Pros and Cons
• What it does well and what it does not
• What others are saying (good and bad)
• My Recommendation
• And, Alternatives (in case you want to do some comparison shopping)

What is Thrive Themes Membership? An Overview

Two entrepreneurs, Shane Melaugh and Paul McCarthy operated their two separate businesses in two separate places across the world. Shane was great at marketing tech products, but he had limitations on product development, so he never reached his potential. Paul was great at creating tech products, but he had many limitations on marketing and sales,  so his products didn’t reach as many people as they should have.

The two met on a popular marketing forum, they noticed alot of complimentary skills, and decided to meet on Skype, then later in Europe. After a few successful products together, they discussed their frustration about how difficult it was to create landing pages and sales funnels to promote their products.

They founded Thrive Themes in 2013 to make solutions that make it easier to sell things on your website. Thrive Themes became one of the first creators of a “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) front-end WordPress editor. They continued on to make additional tools that make selling on your website easier and today, they sell all of their products in a membership package at a much more discounted rate than individual purchase.

How Does Thrive Themes Membership Work?

When you decide to become a member of Thrive Themes, you get access to all of their themes and all of their plugins, and you can use them on up to 25 websites.

WordPress Themes

At the time of this writing, Thrive Themes has 10 WordPress themes you can consider. You can take a look at my review of their WordPress themes here.

Or, check out some of the Thrive Themes demo sites here.

WordPress Plugins

• In addition the WordPress themes, Thrive Themes membership gives you the ability to:
• Split test headlines on pages and posts
• Create courses on your website
• Organize your comments
• Add countdown timers
• Create landing pages (and access tested templates)
• Animate text and images
• Create quizzes to boost engagement on your website
• Capture leads using ribbons, widgets, slide-ins, pop-ups, and screen fillers
• Create different widgets for different pages or posts
• and, More…

See Other Thrive Reviews:

• Thrive Apprentice Review
• Thrive Architect Review
• Thrive Ultimatum Review

Here’s a look at the plugins you’d get with the Thrive Themes Membership…Learn more about the Thrive Themes Plugins on their website here.

How Do I Get Started with Thrive Themes Membership?

To get started with Thrive Themes Membership, you:

1. Visit their website

2. Choose whether you want the quarterly or annual plan

3. Checkout

4. Then, you’ll have access to the members area with the product downloads, support forum, training, and everything else.

Who is Thrive Themes Membership For?

Thrive themes membership is for:

• Marketing companies who work on client sites (they offer an enterprise plan)
• Entrepreneurs who want to get more sales on their websites
• Companies who have a website, but want to increase the conversion rates
• Internet marketers who want to teach others how to get more sales online
• Internet marketers who want to get more sales online

Thrive Themes Membership Tools & Training

In addition to the Themes and the plugins, Thrive Themes offers a large library of training they call, “Thrive University”. In Thrive University, you’ll learn all about how to increase the conversion rates on your website and how to use the Thrive tools.

Thrive Themes Membership Support

Thrive offers a Support forum where you’d create a new thread to get help with any issue you might have. From personal experience, the support staff will log onto your website and try to help you navigate issues that you’re having, but it usually takes about one day for responses. If they have a question or you’re on an opposite time zone, then it can take longer to get responses from support.

What Does Thrive Themes Membership Do Well

• They are affordably and competitively priced
• They continually update their tools
• Their support is responsive
• Their tech support will even log onto your website to help you
• Their tools give you the data you need to split test things you’re trying on your website and improve your conversion rates
• They create plugins that are very useful for aesthetics and for conversions

What Doesn’t Thrive Themes Membership Do Well

• They have a support forum and requests can take more than one day for a response
• They don’t offer a shopping cart
• They don’t offer a membership solution
• They don’t offer refunds on membership renewals, so if you want to cancel your membership, you have to cancel before the payment is drafted from you
• Their tools slow down websites and can cause a significant’y slow loading time (especially on shared hosting)
• They don’t offer a free trial

Thrive Themes Membership Review Roundup

Here’s a compilation of the reviews I’ve found for Thrive Themes: both good and bad. These reviews aren’t meant to make Thrive look good or bad, but instead to give you a realistic perspective of what they offer and what their limitations are.

Third Party Reviews

Here’s a brief glimpse at the Google Search results for “Thrive Themes reviews”…

As you can see, most of the third party reviewers on Google are writing good reviews about Thrive Themes, which is a good sign if you’re considering them.

Common Positive Feedback

I’ve heard very positive feedback from many Thrive users: both new website owners and those that have been doing business online for 10+ years. In my #1 recommended Internet Marketing training community, I’m able to interact with quite a few Thrive users. These are some common things you’ll hear customers say about Thrive Themes:

• Sites with Thrive Themes look very nice
• I use all of the Thrive plugins in my business
• I’ve been using Thrive for years and it’s really helped my business

Common Negative Feedback

• Their themes and plugins slow down my site
• There’s no way to do sitewide layout updates, so if you decide to use this sitewide, it can be extremely tedious to edit each page or post
• There’s no free option like some of their competitors (like Elementor and Beaver Builder)
• Support response times are slow
• I’d prefer picking up the phone or placing a support ticket instead of the Support forum

Most Helpful Positive Thrive Themes Membership Review

It’s still very early days for Thrive Architect, but there’s no denying that it’s already a strong contender in the WordPress page builder market.

The power of this page builder can only be strengthened by its ability to seamlessly and effortlessly communicate with other Thrive products, and that’s something it’s competitors are currently unable to compete with.

If you’re serious about building profitable websites, Thrive’s suite contains some of the best products in the business for helping you achieve that — and, of course, your page builder is a crucial component to how these tools interact.

Despite some features on my wishlist not making it to the release version, a few inevitable bugs and some subtle UI inefficiencies, I genuinely can’t wait to see how this develops over the coming months.

All in all, I highly recommend giving Thrive Architect a try. (It does come with a 30-day guarantee).

Lewis Parrot, author at Authority Hacker

Most Helpful Negative Thrive Themes Membership Review

While many developer hours went into Thrive Architect, there are still some things that are a bit overly complicated where there are settings panels on top of setting panels.

Also, Thrive Architect is lacking global save sections which is a huge time saver when building full websites.

Adam, WPCrafter

Thrive Themes Membership Price

The Thrive Themes Membership has two payment options: annually or quarterly. Annual is 24% off of the quarterly pricing, so if you’re considering Thrive Themes, annual membership is definitely the way to go.

My Final Opinion of Thrive Themes Membership

Overall, I’ve used the Thrive Themes and Thrive plugins on many websites, and they look like the top-of-the-line aesthetically. I’ve also experienced my website moving slower from adding the Thrive plugins to my site, so I’ve removed quite a few in order to speed up my site.

I plan to continue using Thrive Themes plugins because they’re definitely ahead of the market in terms of conversion-focused functionality, however, I would recommend anyone considering Thrive to add the plugins one by one. You should test your website using a site like GTMetrix and Google Pagespeed insights before installing the plugin, look at the load times, add the plugin, and look at the load times again.

You’ll want to do this on a regular basis if you plan to use plugins like Thrive Architect, Thrive Apprentice, or Thrive Quiz Builder to build out your website. You want to keep your site load speeds less than 3 seconds or it can damage your website rankings. If you plan to use the plugin quite a bit to build out your website, you may want to consider that you probably need VPS or dedicated hosting to optimally use all of the plugins.

Even with all things considered, I highly recommend Thrive Themes Membership. The tools have tremendously helped me to build my email list, make landing pages, and I like being able to try the other features because I’ll definitely use more in the future.

VERDICT: Recommended