As more and more site owners focus on speed and performance due to Google and their Core Web Vitals updates, efficient and fast-loading themes are more important than ever.
One of the least talked about options is Carbonate, a WordPress theme by MoneyLab creator Matt Giovanisci.
Unlike other themes built with custom frameworks and often bogged down by fonts, CSS needs, and under-the-hood code, Carbonate is built using Bootstrap 4.
Bootstrap is well known in the web world as a solid platform to build near any website with a good appearance and lightning-fast load time.
This site itself ran on Carbonate up until the end of 2022 as I needed a sidebar and some additional functionality at easier reach.
What Sets Carbonate Apart From the Crowd?
There are a few key reasons why I feel Carbonate is very different from all the other themes most affiliate marketers use.
These things can all be leveraged to get better conversions and, often, better overall performance.
Content First Approach
Many themes diverge from the primary content, providing scrolls, sidebar, and other things that can sidetrack a visitor from fully engaging in the content directly.
This theme’s default page and post layout is one column, centered content only. This keeps the readers on target reading and engaging better with the links and data presented.
This means not being dazzled by some random image, video, or animation presented to them in a sidebar, pulling their eyes away and possibly causing them to lose interest and click away.
High-Speed Performance
This theme directly out of the box will score you as near to 100/100 as possible without any huge trickery, though as normal, you must pay attention to any plugins you install as most of them load resources that can drag scores down hard.
Carbonate and Matt’s approach focuses on the quality of plugins to serve a need. Adding plugins to do one thing on one post is a way to tank your site performance over time.
Limitless Customization
Being built on WordPress allows for some amazing work, but adding Bootstrap allows you a wide array of functionality by just learning some of how Bootstrap functions; this makes adding call to action and unique layouts simple and easy to achieve.
You can easily add new code segments into your templates for how posts, pages, and other pages load, and since there are no “updates” to the theme, you have a stable code to grow from as you mature.
This is much like how he has used this theme on his affiliate sites, unlike many other theme developers.
Video From the Creator
Pros
- Page Load Speeds
- Content First Approach
- Email Subscription Built In
- Related Posts Built In
- Massive Support Documentation
Cons
- Manual Coding Required
Carbonate Theme Review
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