Acabado theme review

This review is based on my own personal experience using the Acabado WordPress theme that was created by Income School. I’ve currently been using Acabado for nine months and I’ll try to deliver some insight into whether this might be the right theme for you.

Overview

As someone who works with Acabado theme on a daily basis, I’ll outline what this theme was built for (in my opinion) and how that coincides with what new bloggers need. I’ll also discuss what features are available for its users and the features that might be lacking.

We’ll discuss the following:

• General discussion
• What Acabado was built for
• The features of Acabado theme
• Features that might be lacking on Acabado theme
• When you should or shouldn’t use Acabado theme

Answering some FAQs:

• Will Acabado still be useful for larger websites?
• How fast is Acabado really?
• Is Acabado an ugly theme?
• Does Acabado offer support?
• What are the best plugins to use with Acabado?

General discussion

Okay, so you might be wondering what a WordPress theme review is doing on a motorcycling website/blog. Fair enough…

I didn’t intend to write a review on the theme I’m using but I recently realised that there aren’t any good reviews on the theme. By ‘good’, I mean that the information they provide in the review is actually useful. Quite frankly, the authors of top-ranking written review (at the time of writing this) didn’t even purchase the theme and probably just wanted to get some quick traffic.

So I don’t have any affiliate links in my review and you can just ignore my products in the sidebar. It kinda feels like a moral obligation to write this because the other reviews on Acabado (that I’ve seen) are badly written and they’re not very helpful.

But before we start off, I should probably mention that I’m not a Project 24 member and just bought the Acabado theme separately. If I had the money, I would have purchased the course and I still intend to, even after what I was able to gather and learn on my own.

What Acabado was built for

In my opinion, Acabado was made with the beginners in mind. A new blogger who has never used WordPress before would undoubtfully be afraid that they won’t be able to understand the settings of WordPress or features and maybe screw things up.

The authors/creators of Acabado made it really simple to set up and get on with creating content. The settings and features are arranged in settings pages below one another. So the user just goes through each one without missing anything. And I think this is important because a new blogger might not be aware of all the aspects that make up a website.

According to the authors (and myself), this is something that can hold you back when starting a blog. A visual editor might be easier for an experienced blogger when they know what they are looking for but the beginner is going to miss some things and might not even notice that there are some important settings that need to be changed.

Acabado was built to be super easy to use and eliminates the risks of forgetting anything important, but it gets more interesting…

Acabado is great for building custom pages without a page builder. It’s a clean modern theme that allows you to add custom CSS without having to overwrite other CSS classes with the notorious !important;

New bloggers might not see the value in this but believe me, 18 months from now you’ll know enough about CSS through testing things out that you’ll want to build some unique pages. I wouldn’t really use this too much in blog posts, but on other static pages like a homepage or database, it’s really handy. Have a quick look at this page to see what I’ve done so far with custom CSS (note: the hover effects are deactivated in mobile view).

Examples:

This is just some basic stuff, but there’s a lot more you can do. CSS isn’t difficult at all so try learning it along the way while writing your blog. For the CSS that I used here, you can copy the code from my ‘Acabado CSS repository’ on GitHub.

• GitHub acabado repository

In essence, Acabado is a theme for beginners, but it’s also good for those who want to build custom pages with HTML and CSS.

The features of Acabado theme

Acabado has all the basic features that you can think of. I’ll just list them below:

• Adding a logo
• Adding a favicon
• Choosing between full menu or hamburger menu on desktop
• Anti-bounce protection (not a pop-up) enable/disable
• Display entry meta on posts (author name and category) enable/disable
• Sitewide post comments enable/disable
• Featured images on posts enable/disable
• Adding custom CSS
• Adding custom JavaScript
• Custom menu label
• Custom heading, text, link and button colours
• Custom footer
• Homepage hero image with button
• Homepage featured tiles
• Homepage category excluder (book reviews, product reviews, recipes, video reviews)
• XML sitemap and HTML sitemap feed
• Google Analytics code placement
• Organisation schema
• Post schema (products, books, video, recipes)
• Hidden Pinterest Images
• Social media buttons (selection from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, email, print)

I might have missed some but I think the most important ones are there.

Features that might be lacking on Acabado theme

The only feature that I really miss on Acabado is a built-in sticky widget option that lets your product or text move with the screen. You can implement this by using two plugins. The first is to add the sticky widgets and the second is to enable jQuery for the sticky widgets.

Unlike some other themes that I tried, Acabado has an element at the end of the sidebar (id: ‘colophon’) that you can use as the stop id. So while this is fairly simple to implement, it might not be that obvious to beginners.

On the other hand, a new blogger on a brand new website is probably not going to start monetizing right away. But I would still like to see this feature added in the theme itself.

Other than this, I don’t really feel that I’m missing anything that should be a feature without a plugin. Some other reviews have stated that Acabado has limited features but they didn’t say which features they felt they were missing.

The only thing that I could think of is a highly custom homepage with sliders, cover images etc. But you can make your own custom homepage with a page builder plugin. I haven’t used them before because I think my homepage looks acceptable.

Update: I think adding an opt-in for <meta name=”robots” content=”max-image-preview:large”> would be somewhat beneficial at a theme level.

Also, you can just make a normal page and set it as your homepage. You can use Advanced Gutenburg Blocks (plugin) to make cover images, sliders and probably a bunch of other stuff as well.

I think the reason that such features aren’t built into the theme is because it lets new bloggers waste their time on unnecessary things and also because not everyone will use these features. Remember that you are trading off site speed for anything you add.

But this is my own opinion and it might be worth getting some feedback from other users of Acabado. If you are one of these users you can participate in this quick survey.

When you should or shouldn’t use Acabado theme

If you are writing a blog with articles or reviews, Acabado is a great option because it’s easy to use and very fast while featuring schema that many other themes don’t. The layout is clean and easy to navigate, although, new bloggers often stuff their pages with almost anything that they can find. But that’s part of the learning experience.

In our local community, we use the Acabado theme for our local news site and it works great. In case you were wondering, we did add an additional Google News XML sitemap to it with a plugin (so this is possible).

If you have a product site where you aren’t really writing articles, I might suggest using something else like Divi or Hestia. I personally use Hestia on my product store because users just click through from my blog and it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s a bit slower. Plus Hestia is free and looks pretty good, but I wouldn’t use Hestia theme for my blog.

Update: I now use Acabado on my product site (sales page) as well. It’s a combination of reasons…

The same could be said for someone who just wants a simple website for their business. I would just use Hestia or some other free theme to make a poster website. That’s when you just basically want people to get your business address or contact details when they search for you or your services.

In conclusion, I don’t find Acabado lacking in features and I don’t feel that I need something more than what it offers (but a built-in sticky widget option would be cool).

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Answering some FAQs

These are just some general questions that I thought people might want answers to before they consider buying Acabado.

Will Acabado still be useful for larger websites?

At the time of writing, I have only 99 articles and I don’t see any reason why I would need to move to something else when I have more content. Page speed makes a difference on big websites as well, so I don’t think I’ll sacrifice that for a few extra features.

How fast is Acabado really?

When I started my blog, I got around 95 to 100 on PageSpeed Insights for both mobile and desktop. But since then I’ve added a lot of custom CSS, changed all the image sizes to be twice the resolution that they were and now run 17 plugins. My page speed for mobile now averages around 70 and desktop averages around 85. I consider my site quite heavy in comparison to other Acabado sites, but the site speed is still very acceptable.

Update: I found that jQuery has a huge negative impact on my site speed. Try to do without it if you can…

Is Acabado an ugly theme?

What many people don’t realise is that most of the Acabado sites they come across are made by new bloggers who just started out. Like writing, the skills for building a good looking website will improve. I’m not saying that my website looks awesome but it certainly looks much better than what it looked like a year ago.

Does Acabado offer support?

They mention that they don’t offer support but I recently came across a beta support page that they were building. It’s kind of a self-help guide if you would need it. I’ve personally never felt that I needed support on the theme. But they also mention that in most cases, the plugins you install is what causes the problems, so try not to use plugins that are unnecessary.

What are the best plugins to use with Acabado?

These are plugins that I have used on Acabado and would recommend if you would need additional features:

• GDPR Cookie Consent by WebToffee
• Lazy Load for Videos by Kevin Weber
• ManageWP – Worker by GoDaddy
• Q2W3 Fixed Widget by Thomas Maier, Max Bond (use with Code Snippets)
• Really Simple SSL by Really Simple Plugins
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer by ShortPixel
• Social Warfare by Warfare Plugins
• Ultimate Category Excluder by Marios Alexandrou
• W3 Total Cache by BoldGrid
• WPForms Lite by WPForms

The two that really stand out for me is Really Simple SSL and WPForms Lite.

After you have obtained a free LetsEncrypt SSL for your site (from your hosting provider), you can install Really Simple SSL and then just toggle 301 redirect in the settings. Then you’re done!

I recommend WPForms Lite instead of Contact Form 7 because it’s easier to use and Contact Form 7 doesn’t resize correctly in mobile view.

Do you have any good tips for new Acabado users?

These tips can be used by anyone, but new bloggers using Acabado might forget to change this setting in WordPress settings.

• If you are starting a new niche site, change your permalink settings to https://yourdomain/%postname%/
• If you are starting a new site that you want to continually grow over many years, you can change your permalink settings to https://yourdomain/%year%/%postname%/
• If you are starting a news website, keep the permalink settings as it is with the full date.

Final words

Do you know that feeling when “experts” in the industry just screw around spinning bull to finish their 500 word “unbiased review”? That’s what I felt when I read the top-ranking review of Acabado. So I just said “fine, I’ll do it myself”. This is my first theme review (on a motorcycling website) and most likely the last one as well. I’d be surprised if this page actually ranks. Anyway, I hope this was helpful in some way.