So, the much needed update overhaul on Thrive Themes’ popular Thrive content builder has come. The new and enhanced version is called Thrive Content Builder.
Here is the first hands on review of the Thrive Architect plugin with all the details you wanted to know.
Let’s continue with the Thrive Architect Review 2021.
Thrive Architect Review 2021
Thrive architect plugin is essentially an upgrade to Thrive content builder (or TCB v2.0) with a different name and more enhanced features. With Thrive Architect, you can now customize any element with any styling like gradient, shadows and even make the designs more mobile friendly without disrupting the desktop view.
In my Thrive Architect review, I found Thrive Architect to be a complete overhaul with lots of features requests for TCB taken into account like customizing the appearance of buttons and styled lists, ability to disable the “reminder to save option” and ability to do vertical splits in your layout, to name a few.
With the Thrive Architect plugin you can even add overlays and layers on the top of elements like images without having to use a photo-editing tool.
What Is Thrive Architect Plugin? An Introduction
Thrive Architect is a WordPress plugin that helps you build visually appealing blog posts and landing pages with it’s drag & drop builder.
It comes as a part of the thrive suite of plugins but can be bought as a standby product to be used with any WordPress theme. With thrive architect, you can add animations, styled video elements, pricing tables, testimonial boxes, content boxes and much more.
These features make Thrive architect the best visual builder plugin for WordPress I have ever seen. Let’s discuss Thrive Architect features.
1) More power to the editor sidebar
With the release of Thrive architect, the sidebar editor became even more functional with more features to help improve the user experience while editing a page.
Ability to Pin And Drag & Drop Editor Elements
This one is a great time savior and helps you drag and drop your most used elements to the top and pin them there so that you can use them without any hassle.
Ability to Hide certain Elements based on device
You could use the responsive element feature of Thrive architect to delete or disable display of some elements based on dive used by reader.
Ability to edit text as you write, simultaneuosly
With the new Thrive Architect, you can edit any block of text right from the point you are writing. This feature was previously present in DIVI visual builder and I am glad Thrive incorporated it as well.
Other options include, ability to customize font color, text transformation (like all caps, sentence case, letter spacing, typefocus animation, text shadow etc).
2. Create Visual elements With Thrive Architect that are fluid responsive
With Thrive content builder you could create beautiful landing pages, visual elements but the only problem was you couldn’t control how these things can be viewed on mobile. The margins and paddings and text styles obviously created a some sort of distortions on smaller devices which didn’t always look good.
Thrive Architect now address this classic issue with all visual builders by letting you design the images and visual elements including complete landing pages suitable for Desktop view. After that, you can go on and edit each element to see how it is viewed on smaller devices like tablets and mobiles.
These cvhanges done to optimize thesmaller screen views will however not reflect in the larger device (read desktop) lauout. This is a magical relief.
How to create a Homepage (landing page) with thrive architect?
While the Thrive Architect is intuitive and easy enough for you to grasp every change and create amazing homepages and high converting landing pages without any hassles, I have a video tutorial where you see the step by step video of creating a sandwitch-style homepage from scratch.
What you will learn in this video tutorial:
- Managing font to fit your site branding
- Using enhanced margins and paddings to create designs faster
- Customizing buttons in a complete new way and creating ghost button styles
- Adding color overlays and text on the top of images even without using image editor
- Final editing the homepage template to make it appear good for mobile and tablet view.
How to create a vertical split using Thrive Architect?
Vertical splits are one of the best ways to give your readers an immersive experience by spiting your view section into two halves and placing an image or media on one half and text on the other (can vary).
Example of a webpage with a vertical split design
And here is how to perform a vertical split web design with thrive architect…
New improved landing page collection
Thrive leads has a new improved thrive landing page edition. The landing page templates here are refined to only the most popular ones used as of now (they will add even more landing page templates in near times).
The inbuilt landing page templates are bundled into their categories like review set including the landing pages for review like single review page, review comparison page, video review landing page template etc.
How to access the thrive landing pages with thrive architect?
video tutorial to load and create landing pages with thrive architect
If you are confused, landing pages can, as of now, be only accessed for pagesand now for posts as we could do with TCB earlier.
To access the Thrive landing page templates, simply hover on the gear icon on the top left of the sidebar editor and choose the otemplates column.
Thrive Architect: Backward Compatibility & Editing Previous Templates
The thrive architect plugin can be upgraded just like any other plugin update. Here are a few things you should keep in mind before upgrading, though.
You can edit your previous thrive content builder elements as is from the new thrive architect interface.
- Edit previous text, images, and other simple elements like columns without any hassle
- You will need to migrate some elements like buttons, backgrounds etc to make them editable with the new interface. (takes 1-click)
- For compund elements like pricing tables, thrive members only templates and other such elements, you can only edit the text/links and images as of now. You can no longer change their design but your previous designs stay as is.
Will thrive architect upgrade effect other plugins like thrive leads and thrive ultimatum?
Yes, since the thrive content builder was the base for designing elements and optin forms in thrive leads or thrive ultimatum for that matter, they sure will be affected by this update.
All my optin form templates, landing pages (I don’t have an active ultimatum element on the blog) are functioning fine even after officially upgrading to thrive architect. So, rest assured, no changes will happen to your existing templates or optin forms.
But for newer optin forms or quiz builder pages, you will need to use the thrive architect to create new designs.
With the new thrive architect, I was however able to edit my optin forms to make them more fuild responsive on mobile screens, delete some not-so-required elements and make them look designed-only-for mobiles!
This is one change I loved about Thrive Architect.
Conclusion: Thrive Architect Review and Tutorial
So, in this thrive architect review, we saw how you can upgrade the good ol’ thrive content builder into the all new thrive architect to get even more ease and power to create visual elements and make your blog more engaging and converting without even touching a single line of code.
Hi Swadhin,
It was a great review! I really appreciate you sharing this. I have been looking for a trusted builder, and I think it will be a great alternative for me. I came to know about the features from your post, and your hands-on review will definitely help me make na informed choice. Learning about your experience was great and I think it will be a deciding factor on whether or not I try this tool for myself.
Hi Swadhin,
I am using Thrive Architect and I must say it’s worth buying for creating a beautiful content. My site looks cool with Thrive products.
This is a very interesting plugin! I’m not sure I would need to use it currently but it’s nice to know about for the future!
This is a very thorough review. Thank you so much for sharing all of this valuable information.
Sounds like a nice plugin!
Hello Swadhin,
Thrive architect looks very promising by your reviews.
Key features like Vertical split and Editing previous templates is something every web masters would like to have.
I think I would be laying my hands over to it, as they would be offering free trail version, as the pricing seems bit high to me.
Thanks for the share.
Shantanu.