Changing themes from Avada to a Genesis child theme

[GenesisNewb]

Hello everyone,

My name is Grant and I recently started using Genesis. I love it so far and have found this forum and it's members to share very informative posts.

I am looking to convert an existing WP site utilizing the Avada theme (which I found really terrible) to a new Genesis child theme I have been customizing. My question is how to safely change themes. Avada utilizes a page builder so most content on the current site was built with short code components and what not.

What would the best approach be to replacing the current site on the root domain? I thought about installing on a sub domain or sub directory and just redirecting my DNS accordingly? Just not sure how to proceed correctly to avoid broken pages and site downtime. A point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

[wptheme88]

THANKS for the feedback about AVADA, I almost purchased that myself and after reading some online discussions, I decided that Genesis will serve me better in the long run despite the steep learning curve in the beginning for newbies like myself.

I know nothing about WordPress and only started learning Genesis (with Dynamik) last month on a part time basis, so far I really like it. It is very empowering every time I learn a new trick here and there, feel like I can almost build any layout, any design I want.

I read an article that says shortcode can be quite a challenge when it comes to theme migration, I will see if I can find that article , perhaps it has some tips on how to safely resolve the shortcode issues without incurring too much downtime. I do remember it talks about asking the developer of the shortcodes whether he/she can provide a plugin that will allow you to carry the shortcodes over to the new theme. The developer may charge a fee but that will be well worth it IMO.

As far as migration is concerned, I am in the process of migrating one of my sites too. Like you, I want to avoid downtime, so I am having someone develop everything on another server that I can access with my browser, this way I can easily check and verify the migration process, and once I have approved everything, I will authorize him to upload everything to my current site/server. That is the approach I am currently taking, would love to hear from others too if there is a better way to do this.

BTW, can you share some of the things that you do not like about AVADA? Every now and then, I am still tempted to just simply purchase one of those ready made themes hoping that will be an easy way out. Would love to learn more about the pros and cons of different platforms. I hope I will never have to do that as I like Genesis+Dynamik more and more each day.

Good luck.

[GenesisNewb]

Avada has certainly not been anything easy from my experience with it thus far. The theme is insanely bloated, (typical of such themes) it was difficult to cache or minify without breaking the entire theme, the form builder for page layouts is clunky and will sometimes not publish correctly and you are forced to recreate, etc. There are also a lot of browser compatibility issues.

The biggest hurdle I had personally was performance issues. Mobile responsiveness is there, but the load on mobile is incredible if not optimized. You also need to go in and set a lot of things up to have anywhere near an acceptable page score from google or yahoo's yslow. For an out of box solution, the time I spent getting it anywhere near something I could get by with was way more of a time sink then recreating the site off of the Genesis sample theme so far.

At the end of the day I feel Avada theme is just trying to capitalize on the "bootstrap" style everyone seems to associate to responsive site development.

A theme like Avada obviously takes a good amount of work to put together, but they seem to have to do more maintenance to keep it working, then they do making drastic improvements. Just my two cents. 🙁

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