X Theme Review: Is it really the best Wordpress theme ever?

Key Takeaways

hey what's up everybody I'm Jim Nez Ricky and today we are reviewing the X theme from theme Co it's available on theme forest and I have tried well over a hundred light or WordPress themes over the last seven years I've a little bit obsessive about getting the websites to look and function just right and when I discovered X theme I guess about a year and a half ago I have switched completely and entirely to X theme it's the only theme I use on all my new sites so we want to show you some of the websites that we've built with X theme to show you some of the different different ways that they can look all with the same theme okay so let's go to the computer it's a little bit bouncy there sorry so this website is income school this is our website and what we like about it on this website is that it has this strip of what is this called at the top um the carousel yeah the post carousel at the top so which is to me I look at the slider below it and I think that's the carousel because carousels kind of like oh yeah a carousel goes in in a circle so that don't get confused that is the slider yes carousels across the top so like I use this on my knife website I bought this website a couple years ago enough and I made a couple tweaks that dramatically improved it right off the bat and then I installed X theme on it and it saw a 20% increase in my affiliate sales because I put this post carousel at the top you know the best pocket knife best survival knife best multi-tool etc and so it's putting all these main articles right at the top so if you come into this like this is how the website gets all its Vitz traffic is this it's the knife laws for all the states so what I saw is way too many people were coming in seeing the knife laws for their website and bouncing but now with this design the very first thing you see is additional pillar content and it I like I said 20% bump just by making that one tweak just switching the theme and bang which is cool because I never see that nobody really cares and that makes a lot of sense for a site like this where people are coming in from there's looking at they're looking for specific content when they search it on google and so they're coming into an article that that article isn't going to point them to any sort of product to buy and so now what you've done is you've just you've intrigued them by putting your you know your best articles with your best products right across the top and you know that draws them in it may not be so necessary if your site has you know if the articles that are drawing people in are are the paid ones are the ones that are gonna actually earn you some money right but we love this for knife up and and several other sites including as you saw income school because it fits our philosophy with it a lot of people when they're creating these niche sites they're making every single article about making money it's like best float tubes best fly rods best waiters and it makes a super spammy website that Google never really trusts because it's just heavy affiliate and that's not our philosophy our philosophy is to make really super useful websites and about 20% of the articles or the money makers that are recommending products so it works really really well for us but the cool thing about X theme is it's not I mean it hits one theme but they have something called stacks that's basically just different designs within the theme right that would just with one click you can do so let's take a look I'll send you the computer again so both of these websites are very similar built with X theme you can see the the design is pretty similar but then let's go also to this this is my subscription website for photographers it's also built with X theme and it looks completely and totally different see like these counters and stuff that's built in like this this button here it's built in so you don't have to it all these little icons and stuff built-in everything all of this stuff is built into the plugin so you can do really cool beautiful looking designs without like coding different things and installing a million plugins is I think it's super cool and then you can also design what each page looks like with a drag-and-drop editor so this is just an example is you know it's the same theme here but you look down here I've set up this this this block grid ya block grid just using X theme and so it's pretty cool that you can do things like that just on the fly without installing like oh I need to do this new plugin need to do that new plugin and so I really like that now the fear I always have when you get something like this that controls a lot of your website you're designing articles and stuff with it is what happens five years from now when you decide to switch WordPress themes do you now have to go back to all of your posts and totally redesign them the awesome thing with X theme is no because their plug-in called cornerstone comes with a theme and so you can just keep cornerstone change your your theme and you're good to go so I really like that I don't feel locked into X theme even though I've kind of locked myself in because I just put it on my website yes well and and cornerstone cornerstone is that it's it's a plugin that comes built-in to X theme it's made to work perfectly with X themes you'll have to worry about it breaking down or causing problems but um that is the drag-and-drop editor that Jim was talking about writes the cornerstone plug-in and it really is drag-and-drop you make your grids you make you know whatever you want to again in a drag-and-drop style which is awesome for people who you know either you don't want to make get another weird plug-in or you don't know how to do you know HTML code to create tables and things like that we don't want to mess with that so I love it I love that it's totally built-in yeah last thing that I have to say at least about X theme is the speed I really obsess about this my websites are getting I've lots and lots and lots of traffic and so if if they're too heavy too bulky too slow I definitely notice it and I when I tweak everything when I get a site going I can get it to load under one second using ex-demon so that's really exciting to see because often the most feature-rich themes are also the most bloated and slow themes and I I don't know exactly what they're doing but it's loading fast so it's really cool we're just gushing about this or they're negative I I keep thinkin this is gonna sound like a paid ad that's not it's not at all the paid ads they're not paying us at all to say these things um but I really do love X team I haven't found anything a next thing that I really hate um my first blog I paid for a theme I paid too much for a theme honestly a lot of good themes out there you're gonna pay a hundred bucks or more and that is one of my favorite things about X theme it's like 663 664 dollars yeah it's just it's fantastic and and you get all the updates yeah you get all the updates the only negative to that $63 is its per site you can't use it on multiple sites but still I mean to get all the updates and future versions I'll take it yeah I don't have a problem with that and to me it just it looks crisp it looks great I I do I guess I would say the one thing I don't like and maybe this is something that's that you know I can I can change on my site um but I don't necessarily love like on your blog post the way that they say spaced out from one paragraph to the next it's not I don't love how its spaced on some of our articles yeah so because of that to me it's not as easy to read because it doesn't look like they have like a one and a half spacing between paragraphs that may be something that I that we can customize I just haven't done it yeah no I don't think that's available in the customizer I think you got to put code in that for it but the cool thing with their support is they're very very attentive to their support and so you can go in and ask something like that and they'll just say hey put this custom code in just this is where to paste it and I've done that more than a dozen times and they always come back with like an actually helpful response but I agree with you I wish they would allow you to much more easy way to control that that space between paragraphs I found that annoying as well but really I love that you can do so many different things there's the different stacks and even for any individual stack I mean if I remember right your improved photography plus that's a single page navigation is on the ethos stack which is the same stack as all of our other sites but it's it's a different setup on that stack I mean you can go any direction you want to I could be wrong maybe it's not eco so yeah they it's just like look at these these are all demos of totally they look completely different but it's all the same theme and they all have the the sample content so often you'll you'll see a theme you're like oh this looks so cool you'll buy it and then it never really looks like that because they don't give you the sample content this will give you the sample content so you can make it look exactly like this with the same text and everything and then you just start editing it okay well we didn't really succeed in stopping but I really do like the theme if you want to read our full review it is at income school.com slash X and we got a lot there for you if you're interested in starting a blog to earn income from it that's what income schools all about you can read I have an article on there about how I earned almost $150,000 last year just from Amazon Associates and if you're interested in starting a blog that's going to make money go to income school.com slash start that's income school comm slash start we wrote at like a ten page like step by step by step this is how you build the blog get traffic and and start earning money from it passively so pretty cool solutely see ya