Yesterday, I went for a ThriveThemes annual membership for $240. It looked like a really good choice. Then, after signing up, I noticed that their website ran dog-slow. Whaaaat?!! I've spent ages trying to get this site super-fast. The last thing I want to do is have the WordPress section to be slow. I looked at the source code for the ThriveThemes homepage and it looked very heavy and inefficient. Huge blocks of css rather than separate files. It was messy. On Googles Page Insights, their hompage mobile score was 9/100 and their Desktop score was 46/100. OMG!
So then I had another look at Divi. When you get more knowledge, you have a different vantage point. What I liked about ThriveThemes was it is a website conversions based approach, where the software is geared to getting people to act. But then I thought perhaps Divi could do something similar, even if they are not marketing it that way. Poor page load speeds affect conversions for a start! Checking the Divi homepage Page Insights scores, at the time of writing they are 64/100 for mobile and 99/100 for desktop. Yes!! Looking at the page source code, and they don't have these huge blocks of css. Everything is much more efficient.
Next, I checked the Alexa scores for Divi vs ThriveThemes. Divi appears to have a way higher Alexa rank, which means much more traffic. Then I used builtwith.com, which can give some excellent insights. I found this:
https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Divi
The framework is on the up! 1.4M websites using it.
Then I looked at ThriveThemes:
https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Thrive-Themes
They have 112K websites.
So, given this, I figure going with the big player might be the wise thing to do. I also used the site Uncle mentions when comparing AWF vs our competitiors, SimilarWeb. Divi gets 3.6M visitors pm while ThriveThemes gets 619K.
Divi charges $250pa for lifetime access, while ThriveThemes charges $240pa. Today, I went to the Divi site and a popup said buy through their affiliate link and get a 20% discount, so it is down to $200 for lifetime access. I will do a bit more research but there is a very strong chance I will seek a refund from ThriveThemes and switch to Divi. I hate asking for refunds but I was shocked when I saw how poor their page speed scores were.