Thrive Architect is the primary page builder sold by Thrive Themes in its Thrive Suite package.
The Architect product works to speed up the creation of landing pages, offering an impressive library of pre-made templates and unique, conversion-oriented modules for placing within your landing pages.
Not only that, but it’s a complete drag-and-drop builder that functions primarily on the front end of your WordPress site.
This Thrive Architect review takes an in-depth look at how Thrive Architect helps you create landing pages on a massive scale, while also working with the other products in Thrive Suite to generate beautiful websites, opt-in forms, and elements like comments and countdown campaigns.
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Thrive Architect Review: The Best Features
What’s most interesting about Thrive Architect is that although it packs a significant number of features into the page builder, you also receive additional features with the large collection of integrations, modules, and the other Thrive Suite tools.
The feature list is a long one, but we dug through the entire page builder to identify the more outstanding tools and settings that turn you into a professional web designer, even if you have limited experience.
Take a look at the top features from our Thrive Architect review.
An Intuitive Frontend Drag-and-drop Page Builder
The page builder is the foundation of Thrive Architect, holding together all pieces of the tool for the ultimate designer experience.
We often find that page builders claim they have visual or drag-and-drop designing, but that’s often not the case.
Unfortunately, everyone has their own interpretation of what a drag-and-drop builder is, so that often leads to some page builders offering just a few moveable elements, or maybe it’s a drag-and-drop builder but it doesn’t work that well.
The same can be said for frontend editors. A true frontend editor brings you to the actual front side of your website and lets you see a real-time view of the design.
You can then click on any element to edit or move.
Luckily, Thrive Architect offers a true drag-and-drop page builder along with a frontend design experience.
During our testing, we noticed that you can click on just about any area of your theme design to change text, adjust the formatting, or add a completely new content module to the design.
Also during our Thrive Architect review, we found there doesn’t seem to be much lag with the editor, which is a common problem we notice with many other page builder competitors.
Therefore, the Thrive Architect page builder gets a big thumbs up from us, seeing as how it runs smoothly, allows you to edit almost every item on your page, and it has a simple structure.
Having said that, you still receive advanced tools, but they’re organized well so it doesn’t look too intimidating.
Related Reading: Elementor Pro vs Thrive Architect
Pre-built Landing Pages for Different Industries and Occasions
It’s an understatement to say that Thrive Themes focuses on landing pages. The company seems to live and breathe landing pages and the optimization of those pages.
That’s why Thrive Architect makes for a rapid and simple landing page design process.
It manages this easy process by providing pre-built landing page templates and the modules to go with it. Not only that, but all of the landing page templates are tested and optimized to increase your conversions as much as possible.
The landing pages come packaged with Thrive Suite, so you can play around with around 300 templates, all of which have those unique conversion-oriented elements for collecting emails, prompting people to buy, and more.
They even have several landing page categories for webinar pages, product pages, and opt-in forms.
This all includes what Thrive calls its “Smart Landing Page Technology,” with the following features:
- Your logo already included with each new landing page you design.
- Matching design elements to create a beautiful page that fits your brand.
- Quick customization tools and global fields to ensure you have the same elements on the right pages.
- Options to save your stylings and transfer them over to all future landing pages.
- Pre-made color pallettes that are approved by the Thrive team to look beautiful and fit your brand.
- A one-click color customization tool to rapidly change around your color palettes and see which ones make sense for a certain product or event.
Dozens of Content Blocks Focused on Conversions
Thrive Architect offers dozens of content blocks for you to build a quick landing page or standard website homepage. The blocks are somewhat unique compared to other page builders on the market, but they still provide the essentials for things like media, text, and tabs.
Thrive has two categories for its content blocks: conversion-oriented blocks and regular blocks.
The conversion-oriented content blocks are specifically designed to boost your conversions and grow your business in the process.
Some of our favorite conversion blocks include the following:
- Call to action buttons
- Testimonials
- Styled lists
- Credit card icons
- Lead generation forms
- Content boxes
- Animated countdown timers
- Content reveals
- Pricing tables
- Guarantee boxes
- Contact forms
As you can see, most of these are meant to prompt your customers to buy something or at least make your company look good while they’re on your website (like with the guarantees and testimonials).
We particularly enjoy the Content Reveal content module, seeing as how you usually don’t see something like that in page builders.
This unique content module blocks out specific content on your landing page or website until a certain amount of time has passed. For instance, you might run a webinar and only want a promotional offer to show up towards the end of the show.
What’s more, is that Thrive provides a long list of standard page building blocks. They’re not particularly made for increasing your conversions, but they help out quite a bit for making your products and services look beautiful.
Some standard content blocks from Thrive include:
- Paragraphs and text
- Headings
- Images
- Background sections
- Column layouts
- Facebook comments
- Custom menus
- Dividers
- Click to Tweet buttons
- Social sharing buttons
- Fill counters
- Progress bars
- Post grids
- Tabs
- Custom HTML/CSS
- Much more…
Global Fields for Use All Over Your Site
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a situation where you could create global content modules or fields so that they show up in the same format and position regardless of where you are on your website?
That’s the premise behind global fields. Thrive Architect offers this type of functionality where you set specific fields and make them global, ensuring they look the same no matter where you place them.
For example, you could create a global field for social pages like Facebook and YouTube. You could also generate a Terms and Conditions field or one for your contact form.
Another example is your company address. The global fields allow you to type in your standard contact information, like the company phone, address, and name. After that, you can use the same information across your website.
Pre-made Webinar and Product Launch Pages
Along with the hundreds of landing page templates, Thrive Architect offers a healthy selection of landing pages for specific events, like webinars and product launches.
This way, you can scroll through the list of options, filter them based on what your company plans on doing for the event, and implement a pre-made template that’s optimized for something like a webinar or other event.
For instance, the following landing page screenshot is for a webinar. It will load your logo with help from the automation in Thrive Architect, and it includes essential webinar modules like a button to join the webinar, a headline with the title, and a few blocks to showcase the hosts.
After picking a template like this, you can then go into the content module library to add any other elements you feel are missing for the event.Change the preset text and other content, then publish the landing page in a matter of minutes.
Another category in the template library caters to those handling product launches.
The following screenshot is an example of a product launch landing page from Thrive Architect, with an introductory video in the header, some smaller videos to explain everything about your product, and an area to sign up for a guide or buy the new product.
It’s no wonder Thrive Architect is known as one of the ultimate landing page builders, seeing as how a company doesn’t have to do much design work outside of adding their own text and media items.
Our Thrive Architect review showed us just how fast and efficient you can be when making landing pages.
Direct Integrations With Other Thrive Products
We’ll talk more about all the Thrive Suite products in the Pricing section below, but it’s worth mentioning here that you’re not only getting access to the Thrive Architect page builder when you sign up with Thrive Themes.
It’s actually a well-rounded package of tools, all of which come from Thrive Themes and join together to make a wonderful web design infrastructure.
It’s more appropriate to consider all of these products as one product, considering they’re all consolidated into one area of the WordPress dashboard, and you’re bound to utilize each one with other products while making your landing pages and websites.
A great example is with the Thrive Leads product. There’s a good chance you add email opt-in forms and popups to many of your landing pages, and all of that gets handled with Thrive Leads.
The same can be said for Thrive Theme Builder and Ovation. The Theme Builder functions as a way to format your blog posts and other pages throughout your website, offering tools to customize the entirety of your theme and add different elements to your headers and footers.
Architect focuses more on landing and homepages, so you need both to complete an entire website.
Thrive Ovation automates much of the testimonial collection and posting process. As you may know, many landing pages include testimonials, so Ovation and Architect are made to work in unison.
A Review of the Thrive Architect User Experience
The prebuilt landing page templates are excellent. So are the conversion-oriented design elements. But how does it all come together to make you feel comfortable in the dashboard?
Thrive Architect remains within your WordPress dashboard, with menu tabs to open the Thrive Product Manager and Dashboard.
These areas allow you to set global settings and launch all Thrive Products, like Leads, Ultimatum, and Architect.
You can launch Thrive Architect from the convenience of any page inside WordPress. Simply click the Launch Thrive Architect button to reveal the frontend page builder and start adding things like design elements and page templates.
Upon opening the page builder, it brings you to a popup page that asks what type of page you’d like to create. For instance, you could choose a normal page, a blank page with a header and footer, a completely blank page, or a pre-built landing page.
The speediest way to make a landing page is by using the pre-built page library.
You can then scroll through the entire library and search for different categories such as Sales Pages, Courses, and Lead Generation pages.
These are professional designs that don’t take too long to customize on your end. We’re very satisfied with the quality of the landing page templates and believe it’s one of the primary reasons Thrive Architect stands out as a page builder.
Having said that, they mainly provide landing page templates, so it falls short if you’re trying to make something like a contact page or a general webpage to highlight your services.
The page builder shows up once you select a design template. The entire interface is on the frontend, giving you a situation where you see all changes made before your eyes, as opposed to some builders where you move around elements and have to preview the changes to see the results.
The page builder offers buttons to add new content elements and adjust any current content on the page. As an example, you could click on any paragraph text box or image to either drag it to a new location or edit the content within the element.
They also provide buttons to find pre-built content modules, or sections of a webpage that are already stylized to some extent.
Each content element has its own little library to choose from. For example, we clicked on the Countdown timer content module to reveal an even longer list of countdown timers with different styles and colors.
This area allows you to insert the pre-designed content modules on any location within the current design. The main downside is that you can’t customize the header and footer modules from Thrive Architect.
However, this is resolved by using the Thrive Theme Builder. That combination makes for more moving parts (which some people might not like) but it’s still good to know that all the customization tools are available in some way when you sign up for Thrive Suite.
Finally, the design interface offers ways to toggle the visibility of your content modules and check out how your designs look on mobile devices.
You can even adjust the settings and styles for the mobile designs without affecting how it looks on the desktop views.
We found that Thrive Architect has a smooth design experience and plenty of options to choose from when building your landing pages.
The Thrive products are all combined into the WordPress dashboard for easy access, and it truly only takes a few minutes to create a landing page when using the page templates and the content modules.
We also appreciate the mobile view editing, since many page builders offer a mobile view but you can’t edit any of the content from that view. Thrive, however, makes it easy to modify elements that don’t look quite right when on a smartphone or tablet.
We’ve read about some lag from Thrive user reviews in the past, but it appears many of these bugs have been resolved over the past few updates. The drag-and-drop technology moves smoothly and without any jumpiness.
There are also some quick buttons in the designer to seek out and find unique page design elements, all nicely categorized for you to locate anything from countdown timers to media blocks.
Not to mention, they have a full section of page block modules with conversions in mind. You can still run A/B testing through Thrive, but it’s at least nice to know that Thrive has already done much of the testing for you.
Thrive Architect Review: Pricing
Thrive Architect comes in a package called Thrive Suite, where you receive a myriad of products from the developer, such as Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Quiz Builder, and Thrive Architect.
There are nine products altogether, making it a valuable solution since you get a page builder and several other tools for launching your website and building a marketing funnel.
Because Thrive sells its products in one suite, the pricing is rather simple. You choose between yearly or quarterly billing cycles then receive access to all nine Thrive products for a monthly fee.
Here’s what the pricing looks like:
- $19 per month – This is the yearly plan, which includes unlimited updates, installations on up to 25 websites, unlimited customer support, all nine Thrive modules, and a 30-day moneyback guarantee.
- $30 per month – This is the quarterly payment plan, which includes the same wonderful support, updates, installations, and guarantees from the yearly plan. And you get all nine Thrive products.
As mentioned, Thrive offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee, where you can ask for a refund up to 30 days after the initial purchase.
The support and updates remain active as long as you continue to pay for your Thrive Suite membership. Therefore, you could technically just buy the Suite for a one-time fee, but then you would lose all updates and customer support.
All website elements remain intact if you cancel your membership. You simply won’t get those updates or customer service. You also lose access to the premium template library.
A Review of the Entire Thrive Suite
Since the Thrive Architect page builder is only sold as a complete package with other Thrive products, we think it’s a good idea to also let you know what else comes with the Thrive Suite:
- Thrive Theme Builder – A tool that works hand-in-hand with Thrive Architect, but focusing more on constructing your overall website and modifying your theme, with support for blog post and standard webpage editing. Thrive, Architect, on the other hand, offers a content and landing page builder, making it more suitable for homepages and landing pages.
- Thrive Architect – You already know this one. It’s the landing page builder!
- Thrive Quiz Builder – A sleek designer for quizzes. It allows you to create unique quizzes then collect the answers from your users.
- Thrive Leads – A wonderful option for building your email list with elements like forms and segmentation tools.
- Thrive Optimize – An A/B testing tool that links to your Thrive Architect landing pages, allowing you to see which designs work best for increasing conversions.
- Thrive Comments – A gamified website comments solution that you implement on your blog posts and pages.
- Thrive Apprentice – A complete system for making online courses, attracting students, and collecting payments from your users.
- Thrive Ultimatum – An evergreen countdown creator with options for collecting contact information and showing products and events that people can look forward to.
- Thrive Ovation – A solution to bring in and post testimonials on your website. It links directly to the Thrive Architect landing page and content builder, and it runs automatically for improving your social proof online.
A Review of the Thrive Architect Customer Support
The Thrive Themes company runs support for its products in Thrive Suite, including for Thrive Architect. One of the main ways to speak with a representative from Thrive is by using the online chatbox.
Thrive has a Members area to manage your subscriptions and gain access to the chatbox and email ticketing system.
That makes it easy to locate the support resources and even research problems yourself, since it also has a direct link to the Help Center.
The Thrive Help Center serves as the secondary way to find support for the Thrive products. It’s a knowledge base filled with hundreds of articles on topics for plugins, Thrive Architect, and the many other products within Thrive Suite.
For instance, the Thrive Architect section of the knowledgebase offers several articles on editing with the page builder, using different file types, and saving your work.
Other than that, you can go to the Thrive Themes Blog to learn about marketing tactics and see which new feature may work for your company.
It appears Thrive Themes doesn’t have an option for calling the customer support team, so that’s the main downside of the customer support area.
The Pros and Cons from Our Thrive Architect Review
There are many benefits to going with a page builder like Thrive Architect, but we’ve also encountered some downsides. Take a look below to see the main pros and cons of Thrive Architect.
Pros
- Thrive Architect has an expansive collection of landing page templates, many of which focus on specifics like webinars and product launches.
- The frontend user interface runs smoothly and beats out what you often see with other visual builders.
- The pricing is reasonable, and you get a whole suite of tools instead of just one.
- Most design elements and templates are optimized for conversions.
- You can integrate with a wide range of third-party tools like email marketing apps, social networks, and online storage.
- You can build using the drag-and-drop modules or the reliable HTML and CSS editors.
- The online resources are plentiful, and you can contact a real person through a chatbox or email.
Cons
- The page builder modules are powerful and unique, but the list of modules is a bit shorter than what we’ve seen with other page builders.
- Some people may only want to use Thrive Architect. For those users, being forced to buy the entire suite may end up being a waste of money.
- Thrive Architect lacks settings to customize your entire theme. However, the Thrive Theme Builder completes the rest of those customizations.
Conclusion: Is Thrive Architect the Right Page Builder for You?
We recommend taking a hard look at the pros and cons to figure out whether or not Thrive Architect is the right page builder for your organization.
From this Thrive Architect review, consider the pricing, the idea that you receive an entire suite of products, and the fact that Thrive Architect has a primary focus on building landing pages.
We like it most for that purpose: to build landing pages. So, you may not find as much value in Thrive Architect if you’re more interested in designing your regular web pages and blog posts.
However, the combination of tools in Thrive Suite could provide the options you need. Just remember that Thrive Architect by itself really only helps for landing pages and homepages.
Let us know in the comments if you have any questions about this Thrive Architect review. Also, share your thoughts if you’ve used Thrive Architect in the past.
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