One of the most important factors for ranking on Google and other search engines is your website’s page speed.
If your website isn’t loading as fast as it can, you’re losing organic visitors each and every day…
That’s why it’s crucial to get your site loading fast, or else the rest of your SEO efforts will be useless.
Recently, the guys over at Income School decided to develop the world’s fastest theme*, Acabado!
Once I saw they finally released it, I knew it was something I needed to purchase and try myself.
After extensive testing, here’s my honest thoughts of the Acabado theme.
Here's what we'll cover...
What is the Acabado Theme?
The Acabado Theme is a WordPress theme developed by Jim and Ricky from the Income School team.
As they teach others how to build affiliate niche sites, they wanted to develop a lightweight theme their Project 24 members can use right away, without any tweaking or custom development!
This theme is built to load fast and efficiently, so you can rank higher and keep your visitors happy…
After testing their sites and a few of my own websites using this theme on the PageSpeed Insights, the results were incredible: I was in the 90-100 range for all of my sites, which is almost perfect!
Take a look at this quick video from Jim and Ricky below where they explain why this theme works so well.
Who’s this theme designed for?
Since the Income School team has a paid membership course, Project 24, this theme is developed specifically for those users. Even if you aren’t a paying member of their course, you can purchase lifetime access!
If you’re building niche blogs in any form, this theme is one you have to consider.
Not only will you start to give your users a better experience and rank higher, but you’ll have a conversion-focused theme that’s meant to drive visitors into paying customers!
This theme comes ready-to-use right after you purchase, so it’s a great option for complete beginners as well.
What I liked about the Acabado theme
You can use it straight out of the box
Acabado is engineered so you can install the theme, and use it right away.
There’s no crazy bells and whistles needed, it’s a simple theme that you can use straight away!
That’s something that beginners will love, mainly when you compare it to much more complex options out there.
It’s a conversion-focused theme
Acabado is designed specifically to convert visitors into paying customers, so you can generate more revenue from your blog.
Most blogs are too over the top and built for design, not conversions. That’s something that seperates Acabado from the competition!
Pages load lightning-fast with it
Acabado is one of the fastest themes I’ve ever used. It’ll have your website loading as fast as possible, even if you don’t know the ins and outs of technical SEO!
If a lean, mean website is important to you, Acabado is going to be a great option.
Built-in SEO features
This theme is loaded with built-in SEO features. You’ll no longer need an “SEO” plugin like Yoast or RankMath.
They have the functionality to build sitemaps, meta description, schema and much more inside!
Having this built-in will help you keep your website even lighter, since additional plugins will slow your site down.
Mobile first theme
More than half of your visitors will likely view your website on mobile, which is why it’s crucial you choose a theme that’s designed for mobile users.
Nearly every theme out there is built with a desktop first approach, which is an outdated way of building themes for performance.
The Income School team designed Acabado to perform extremely well on mobile and desktop, so you have no limitations!
What I didn’t like about the Acabado theme
It doesn’t integrate with many plug-ins at all
One major issue I had with Acabado (and the reason I ended up switching) was the inability to create pop-up forms on my blog.
I had no ways of collecting emails from my visitors, which is something I couldn’t deal with.
After contacting their support team, they said they weren’t able to add this functionality in and couldn’t identify a plugin that enabled lightboxes.
NOTE: They gave me a complete refund after I explained the issue, and were super professional!
You can’t customize your website nearly as much as other themes
Similar to my other complaint with Acabado, I couldn’t get it to do everything I desired. While theres a bit of customization, it’s a conversion-focused theme with minimal room to edit!
After switching to Astra, I haven’t had this issue since you can build anything you imagine!
I understand that this theme is built to be lean and simplistic, but it would be nice to have the option to customize the theme to my liking.
Is the Acabado Theme really as fast as they claim?
The Acabado Theme claims to hit 100 on Google PageSpeed Insight’s (mobile and desktop), but this won’t always be the case.
Since Jim and Ricky can’t control what plugins or host you’re using, sometimes you’ll fall a bit short of this expectation!
If you’re using a bloated plugin or cruddy shared hosting, it will obviously hinder performance.
But to answer the question… this theme is as fast as they claim!
On my own blogs, I was able to hit “100” consistently with Bluehost, which isn’t the best hosting for fast performance.
Disclaimer – I haven’t used the theme recently (it doesn’t fit my needs at all), but it performed fantastic when I used it on certain projects!
Real-life Test Results
A few of their official demo sites are running Acabado, and here’s how they score on Google PageSpeed Insights:
It’s not what I expected, but I ran one test on each site and here are the results I got. There’s a lot of reasons the scores may be lower, but still, it’s worry-some!
How much does the Acabado theme cost?
Acabado is fairly affordable for a premium theme, with a straight-forward pricing model so you won’t be overpaying.
For unlimited access on all of your WordPress sites, it will cost $50/year or $99/century to get access!
If you’re looking to pick it up, I’d highly recommend grabbing the “century” license since it’ll last you for life.
$99 for lifetime access to a premium theme is super affordable, so it’s worth grabbing if your serious about your blogging!
Final Thoughts
Acabado has a lot of limitations for more advanced bloggers, but it’s a great starter theme for beginners out there.
The lack of customization and plugin integrations were a deal breaker for myself, since I couldn’t show lightbox popups to my visitors to collect leads!
That’s something I need on all of my blogs, and they weren’t willing to fix that functionality after I contacted support, so they ended up offering a refund.
So if you’re looking to really customize your blog and maximize your efforts, you may want to look at something like Astra (which is what I use on this website).
Not only is it a lightweight premium theme like Acabado, but you can customize your website in ways you couldn’t even imagine!
Regardless, you need to determine what your needs are and make a decision based on that:
Are you looking for a lightning fast theme that’s easy to setup but lacks customization? Go with Acabado.
Are you looking for a lightweight theme that allows full customization & functionality? Go with Astra.
I hope this Acabado Theme review helped you out, feel free to drop a comment with any questions or concerns you may have!
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