Quick Feature Overview
Features
Thrive Architect is literally packed with page building features to allow you to build anything you can think of with all of the conversion focused features you need to generate more leads and make more sales
Ease of use
Using the drag and drop interface, it's as simple as dragging from the element area and dropping onto the canvas - it's also very easy to integrate 3rd party applications via Thrive Theme's API
Price
You can install Thrive Architect on your website for just $67.00 - this includes all lifetime updates which means even if you don't pay for the support after 12 months, you'll still receive all future Thrive Architect updates
Summery: Thrive Architect (formerly known as Thrive Content Builder) is a WordPress page building plugin and it allows you to quickly and easily build conversion focused websites, landing pages, sales pages and sales funnels without any coding knowledge
What we like
What could be improved
Thrive Architect is available for just $19.00 per month with the Thrive Themes Suite
When it comes to front end page builders for WordPress, there are plenty of them! In fact, entrepreneurs and start up businesses are literally spoiled for choice when it comes to getting digital assets live on the web to start enticing customers to sign up and purchase.
Before page builders were a thing, a start up business would really need to look at obtaining the services of a professional website creation company to build from the ground up and then pay the ongoing costs to maintain and make sure they worked around the clock
With the rise of the page builders, new and old businesses have the opportunity to level the playing field when it comes to wooing customers with their website due to the options and flexibility WordPress page builders give you.
It is literally a case of dragging and dropping onto a blank canvas - which does away with the need to buy those awful pre made themes.
I wanted to use this blog post to talk about my favourite page builder by Thrive Themes.
Thrive Themes is a well-established software company who specialise in creating conversion focused marketing tools for business owners wanting to maximise their ability to attract new online customers.
Unlike the other page builders which primarily focus on 'design' - Thrive Themes do it differently in terms of providing the business tools needed to generate leads and make online sales
Because that's really the important thing, while design is important in terms of users navigating their way around your website, it pales in comparison to the vital lead generation components your website truly needs to deliver regular leads and sales.
Thrive Architect Page Builder For WordPress
Thrive Architect is a website and landing page builder, and is just one of Thrive Themes ten plugins in their marketing suite. Thrive Architect, in a nutshell, gives its users access to a variety of elements which are ready to use on a web page by simply dragging an dropping.
Obviously, there is a lot more involved that just dragging and dropping - i don't want to make it seem like you can have the best website or sales page in the World with just a few clicks of a mouse, but it alleviates the need to be hiring expensive developers while trying to keep within a budget.
What I do want to make clear is that Thrive Architect is a wonderful tool for both beginners and those who have used page builders in the past.
You can very quickly get a web page or landing page up and running which not only looks stylish, but one which easily works to build your email list of potential customers for a follow up in your autoresponder.
In this blog post I am going to break down the creative and marketing elements you can use with Thrive Architect and how to use them effectively to build a website that works as opposed to just having a website for the sake of having one...
If you don't need a website, but want a landing page to generate leads from potential customers, this may also be useful for you.
Foundation Elements
The foundation elements are the real basic elements of a page build and consist of the common things you would expect to find on a website page or landing page. These include:
Most of the elements are self-explanatory and form the core of any page builder. The content box is an exception, because I have only seen Thrive Architect have this feature which is such a simple but powerful element!
I am forever using it to create better, more streamlined, sales focused designs.
A landing page top section created with simple foundation block elements: Columns, image, text and button elements. All dragged and dropped from the side bar on the right hand side.
With these elements alone, you can create a very nice page in not too long a time. It just takes practice dragging things on to the page and getting used to changing design elements.
Thrive Themes have made the user experience extremely fast and easy in this regard. It is very 'newb-friendly' for want of a better phrase, and extremely powerful for experienced marketers and designers.
Building Block Elements
The building block elements are where Thrive Architect starts to get interesting and powerful.
There are 34 building block elements with Thrive Architect, and each one lets you manipulate its design to match your branding colours and style.
As well as building out website pages and landing pages with the list of elements below, most of the them are more practical for blog posts.
Yes...you can use Thrive Architect to craft blogs which look absolutely fantastic and more engaging that just walls of text and a few images dotted around..
You can get extremely creative with the elements and improve read retention and get more subscribers opting in directly from your posts.
Anyway, the building block elements consist of the following - click the blue bar below 👇
Mobile Responsive Page Builder
Mobile browsing is a pretty big deal in case you hadn't noticed already, most of your traffic will come from mobiles in 2020, so it's vital that the visitor experience on mobile phone is an extremely good one!
The last thing you want is the mobile version of your pages to be unreadable.
Unreadable and poorly laid out mobile pages mean visitors will simply leave quickly. Nobody likes losing customers, so don't let your mobile experience to drive potential clients and customers away.
Fortunately, Thrive Architect makes it easy to edit and optimise both mobile and tablet versions of your pages extremely easily. All you need to do is flick between the desktop, tablet and mobile view ports to enable editing per device.
When you edit on desktop, those edits cascade down to tablet and then mobile. So its always worth making the extra effort, and double checking how the tablet version of your site looks and make edits before making sure mobile phone has a seamless user experience.
Each different view port lets you edit colours, text sizes, positioning of elements (padding and margins) and many other options which let you to create the perfect mobile experience. It's important...don't scrimp on time when it comes to making sure it's less than perfect.
Thrive Architect Templates
If you're not savvy with design and don't really want to spend so much time getting your sales pages, landing pages and website pages up and running, you can choose to start from a pre designed Thrive Architect template from the cloud - installed in just one click.
Once you have chosen a template, you can quickly start customising it with your own messaging, branding colours and imagery by simply pointing, clicking and editing live on the screen.
Thrive have done a great job in producing and testing these templates for conversions and letting you to use them for your own needs.
The Thrive Architect templates are extremely sales focused, so if you're looking to sells things like services, online courses, webinar access and things like this, you will absolutely love their simple templates.
Most templates all have the sequential pages as well, so you would also be able to download 'thank you' pages in the same style as the main page template.
Most templates all have the sequential pages as well, so you would also be able to download 'thank you' pages in the same style as the main page template.
Thrive Architect API Integrations
Thrive Architect has a direct integration with pretty much all of the email marketing software online as well as connections with popular webinar software., email delivery and social media
This means you can seamlessly connect Thrive Architect with other software without having to go out of your way too much.
The onboarding for setting up the API connections is from the Thrive Themes dashboard in WordPress. You simply select the type of connection you want, enter your API code you get from the 3rd party service and you're done.
For most people, email marketing is a necessity, and luckily, Thrive Architect integrates with most of the main ones such as Active Campaign, MailChimp, Aweber to just scratch the surface, You can find a full list here
Once you have set up your API key and pasted it into Thrive (super easy to do) you can then simply use a lead generation element on the page and make sure that all names and email addresses typed in by visitors will store in your email marketing service and show on the correct list you have set up for segmentation purposes
This is great if you have automated email sequences you have created as it means as soon as they land on your email list, they will receive a series over emails over a course of days or weeks without you having to touch anything.
This is a little more advanced, but I do specialise in this area, so feel free to speak with me if you wanted a custom solution
My favourite 3 Thrive Architect features
Well, I love everything about Thrive Architect! As a page builder, it is very similar to that of the competition in the fact that it's drag and drop, front end editor.
But what set's it apart from the others, other than being faster and having a more intuitive interface has a few key features which really set it apart and makes the experience really enjoyable!
I am also the type of person who doesn't like to have too many WordPress plugins running...the more plugins you have...the more troubles you are likely to encounter.
Thrive Architect and the rest of Thrive Themes marketing plugins play nicely together and as a result ensure you are more likely to have less downtime in the event any plugin decides it doesn't want to play ball.
Also, with Architect, it does a few things which you would need another plugin for if you were using another page builder.
Let me go through my 3 favourite features of Thrive Architect.
Floating Video
This is a fairly new feature and one I am using on my websites. So typically, when you go to a VSL (video sales letter) or a landing page with a video and press play....the video will start playing, but as the visitor scrolls down the page, the video continues playing at the top and goes out of the view of the reader as he/she goes reading your text.
Floating video basically means, that the video will become 'sticky' and position it's self on the bottom/top - left/right positions of the screen as the user scrolls down the page, so it is always in sight and engaging the user in spite of the them consuming the text on your page.
Floating video improves conversions on sales or landing pages and usually you would need to custom code or install a separate/unreliable plugin to help achieve the same effect. With Thrive Architect, you can do this with just 2 clicks - it's so simple, but so beautiful!
See how this works with the demo video below, press play and watch it stick to the top right when you scroll down 👇
Tables
Perfect for affiliate marketers who want to create mobile-optimised data tables on their blogs to do things like product comparisons using heads and cells. Typically, you would need to purchase another plugin to have effective tables to use on your blog.
You have the same ability to completely customise the way the table can look such as changing colours, adding imagery and having the ability to generate a mobile optimised version of the site by wrapping the desktop version of the table.
I use across my affiliate websites when I am showcasing certain products and making the information about each product easily consumable, instead of just writing a wall of text about the product. It's a more visual and structured way to present the data!
Here's an example of a table below which was just from the table template library in Thrive Architect 👇
Product | Key Features | Rating |
|---|---|---|
Product Name | Feature Description | Here comes some text |
Product Name | Feature Description | Here comes some text |
Product Name | Feature Description | Here comes some text |
Product Name | Feature Description | Here comes some text |
Post List
This feature has had a major overhaul. It basically lets you to insert a blog layout on any website page like 'recommended blog posts' and gives you full design control over how the layout can look.
You get complete design control over how each blog link's appearance and the element can filter what posts show there. So they could be the most read/popular posts or they could display via categories or tags. It's up to the user how they wish to approach this.
Blog posts are a great way of keeping visitors on your website, you should always be on-page linking on your website to strengthen your SEO profile.
You can also use the post list element on your thank you page after they have opted in for a lead magnet via your landing/sales page.
On the thank you page you would typically say 'thank you' for opting in to a service (etc..) but you could also include 3 of the most relevant blog posts on the TY page to keep the engagement up and ensure they stay on your site a little long.
It's so easy to use yet so powerful what you can achieve with it! As you can see below!
Still running Thrive Content Builder?
If you're still using the old version of Thrive Architect previously know as "Thrive Content Builder" - you simply need to update the plugin in WordPress to get all of the amazing benefits and updates Thrive Architect has to offer it's users!
Taking Online Payments with Thrive Architect?
Like all other page builders, there is no way in which you can take payments using Thrive Architect. (at least not yet anyway..)
It is purely a page builder letting you set everything up to make the sale: the website, the landing pages the sales funnels, but in terms of taking payments, you will need a 3rd party solution.
Fortunately, there are a few options you can use to accept payments and offer upsells and downsells. The following systems are what we recommend you look at if you're looking to accept payments and use seamlessly with Thrive Architect
It is purely a page builder letting you set everything up to make the sale: the website, the landing pages the sales funnels, but in terms of taking payments, you will need a 3rd party solution.
Fortunately, there are a few options you can use to accept payments and offer upsells and downsells. The following systems are what we recommend you look at if you're looking to accept payments and use seamlessly with Thrive Architect
Thrivecart is what I recommend due to it being off WordPress. I don't like to put all my eggs into one basket....and it's on a lifetime deal which you can check out here! CartFlows also has a lifetime offer, but I would say is a little more advanced to set up
I am not sure if Thrive Architect ever has plans to have their own checkout element (that would be excellent) but it's not something I would be waiting around for. Grab a mature product like Thrivecart on a lifetime deal if you need a cart to generate more revenue per sale.
Buying Thrive Architect
Thrive Architect is available for a one-time price at a very affordable $67.00 one-time-fee with all future updates; which is very rare for a page builder and support for 1 year.
The $67 is for one website, if you wanted to install Thrive architect on 5 websites it would cost $97.00 or you can get complete access to all Thrive Themes plugins to install on 25 websites for just $19.00 per month with the Thrive Themes membership.
The membership (which I highly recommend) comes with the following plugins:
I fully recommend purchasing the membership and building an actual digital business that the above plugins let you to build.
Many page builders come in around the cost of $200 a year and only give you a page builder with some theme builder capacity....they don't give you anywhere near the marketing capability Thrive Themes gives you
Thrive Themes Support
If you purchase the Thrive Themes suite, and pay yearly you get continued support throughout the duration, which is excellent. If you have a query they provide support via video, or actually go into your website and fix the issue.
Other page builders support I have used is useless and very unresponsive. I've always been happy with Thrive's level of professionalism and support.
In closing...
I thoroughly recommend Thrive Architect (and Thrive Themes as a company) to entrust with growing your digital empire. I have used for many years throughout all of my businesses; including this one - and it has never let me down!
So if you're starting out, the price is absolutely affordable which will enable you to build a solid lead generation system and sales funnels to take your business to the next level.
Get The Thrive Themes Suite Right Here With Theme builder
Start building the website exactly how you want it and use the Thrive Themes marketing tools included in the membership to create a real conversion focused online business which will put you ahead of your competition.
We do earn a small affiliate commission when you purchase at no additional cost to yourself