Although Shopify gives you access to free templates, none of the themes are considered to be complete. Even if you go ahead and use free templates, one day you’ll think of buying a premium template. In my perspective, using free themes is a waste of time and effort. Most of the premium themes available in the Shopify marketplace cost over $100. A theme called Ella is the cheaper and better alternative to most of the templates you’ll find in the marketplace of Shopify.
Ella costs one third or half the price of the Premium Shopify templates and it offers many features. It powers 18000+ websites and is built using CSS3, HTML5, and bootstrap framework. Ella has a responsive design and it supports Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers.
Review
Installation
If you think installing Ella is rocket science, you’re wrong. Installing this Shopify theme is a breeze. Once you download the Ella theme’s zip file on your PC, you should extract it. Then, you should upload the file named “sections-ready.zip” to your Shopify store. To do so, navigate to the “themes section” of your admin area. Once you install the template, enable/activate/publish it.
Features of the Ella theme:
Lazy load
Adding the lazy load feature manually to a website is not easy. Although there are several scripts available on the web to accomplish this task, the scripts may not work as per your expectations. The Ella Shopify theme provides an option to activate the lazy loading effect.
Why use the Lazy Load feature?
As online stores display several images of products in the product/category pages, the site may take time to open up in the browser. This is because the server will have to transfer the files from your Shopify website’s directory to the visitor’s computer.
Lazy Loading ensures that only the images that should be visible to the user should be requested by the client i.e if only the header section is visible to the user, only the pictures that are embedded in the header section will be requested. Remaining images i.e. pictures that are added to the body or footer section will be shown when the user scrolls down.
Download or see the demo of the Ella template
Layouts
To be honest, a Shopify theme is of no use if it doesn’t support different layouts. No one would like his site to resemble the website of other users. As Ella theme supports 10+ home page layouts, you can make your site look unique. The template gives you access to watch, bicycle, jewelry, etc store demos. For inspiration or to get an idea of what a good homepage should look like, you can see the demos. Ella supports 8+ product page layouts and 6+ category page layouts. It offers 15+ child themes.
Blog
If you’re the type of person that wants to take advantage of everything Shopify has to offer, another thing you should consider is a blog. The Ella theme lets you use tools like DropInBlog for Shopify, so you can add a sophisticated and easily customizable blog to your Shopify store.
Newsletter form in a popup
Some people may like your store. To make sure that these people convert into regular costumer or buy the products you list for sale, you can use the Newsletter popup module of the Ella Shopify theme.
What does this module do?
Well, the Newsletter module supports integration with the free Mailchimp email service. Once you set up MailChimp and when the user enters his email in the form and subscribes to your newsletter, MailChimp will send emails to the users on the date/time specified by you. You can configure MailChimp to send the latest deals, offers, etc on your Shopify site to the subscribers.
Download or see the demo of Ella theme
Ajax Cart and drop-down cart
Instead of reloading/refreshing the entire page when the website visitor clicks the “add to cart” button, Ella will only refresh the cart icon which displays the number of items in the cart. This feature provides a great experience to the user. It also prevents the browser from requesting the entire page when the user clicks the “add to cart” option.
One more special feature of the Ella Shopify theme is its drop-down cart. When the user clicks the cart icon, the template will display a list of cart items in a drop-down menu. The user can either modify their order or continue to the checkout form with it. You can also activate the sticky “Add to cart” button in Ella.
Infinite Scroll
A user might find your product interesting and he’ll scroll down. To impress the user, you can enable the infinite scrolling feature of Ella. The infinite scroll feature of the Ella theme is SEO friendly.
Play with colors
The Ella Shopify theme allows you to change the background, foreground, border, hover effect color of its various elements. You can experiment with the colors to know which color button/links/menus, etc received the most clicks.
Sliders and galleries
Images and videos play an important role in the success of a Shopify based eCommerce website. Ella lets you create a flexible video as well as image sliders. It also allows you to display images from your Instagram albums with its Instagram gallery module.
Download or see the demo of the Ella template
Cookie Popup
Some countries require you to display a notice to the website visitors that your site is using cookies. If you don’t follow the rules of the country, you won’t be able to sell your products in that country. With Ella, you can enable the cookie popup within a few seconds.
Out of stock
If an item is out of stock, Ella can display a form that the user can fill and submit to get notified when the item is in stock again. This feature makes sure that you don’t lose customers when an item is sold out and you’ll re-add the items to your inventory soon.
Currency and languages
If you’ll ship products out of your country, you can configure Ella to show options to change the language and currency to your online store visitors.
Bought together items
Popular e-commerce websites show the “Frequently bought together” items on the product page. You can enable this feature in the Ella Shopify theme.
Other features
- RTL support (Right to Left languages)
- Customizable mega menu (over 7 layouts).
- Layered navigation module powered by Ajax.
- Powerful real-time filters.
- Grid and List view support.
- Product quick view/hover view, quick shop option.
- Option to let customers post reviews.
- Size chart system.
- Product image customization.
- And several more features.
Download or see the demo of Ella theme
Screenshots
Pricing and support
As mentioned earlier, Ella is cheaper than many templates available in the Shopify marketplace. It is priced at $79 on ThemeForest.com. The developer of Ella i.e. HaloThemes has sold over 12000 copies of Ella. Ella is the highest-rated and best-selling Shopify template on ThemeForest. HaloThemes offers ticket/email-based support to its customers.
Pros
Feature-rich and intuitive: Ella offers several easy to use features to the users. As it has many features built-in, you won’t have to waste your precious time in finding apps and installing them.
Easy to customize: Customizing the Ella theme is a piece of cake. The user should just adjust the settings to customize the template.
Cheap: Ella is priced at just $79.
Cons
- None
Download or see the demo of the Ella template
Final thoughts
Ella is a powerful Shopify theme. It offers several features for just $79. It is easy to customize and has a mobile-friendly design.
