Building an online store will usually mean you choose between themes that load fast or themes that offer extensive customization. I’ve reviewed and tested more WordPress themes for e-commerce sites than I’d care to count, but Blocksy is a standout because it refuses to make you choose between speed and functionality. I’ve given greater depth to the entire feature set in my full Blocksy review. However, this Blocksy discovery is going to give you a slimline overview of the theme.
Once you’ve finished up here, head over to our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to grab a huge discount—40 percent—on Blocksy (and many other WordPress themes and plugins)!
Blocksy Discovery: Where the Theme Fits in Your E-Commerce Workflow
Despite the name, Blocksy works through the WordPress Customizer rather than the newer Site Editor. This gives you access to familiar WordPress tools while providing more control than many other themes offer. While there’s a free version available, the premium companion plugin extends the functionality, including for WooCommerce.
The multi-purpose design means you can build personal blogs, business websites, or full e-commerce stores. You get clean layouts for portfolios, professional elements for agencies, and WooCommerce integration for online shops. The theme handles news sites with custom post layouts and can also work with membership plugins for exclusive content areas. As such, Blocksy is super flexible.
Performance is central too, as I’ve found the lightweight codebase loads quickly regardless of the functionality you activate or the page builder you choose to integrate.
Blocksy Discovery: A Brief Look at Its Functionality
Most WordPress themes treat WooCommerce as an afterthought in that they ensure compatibility but leave the heavy lifting to you. Blocksy’s approach builds e-commerce capabilities into its companion plugin rather than forcing you to install additional tools.
- For instance, there are some simple additions that can make your life easier:
The granular message controls let you customize WooCommerce’s communication elements. This includes customization options for containers, fonts, buttons, info boxes, and more. - Blocksy can also display percentage discounts instead of generic ‘sale’ text, which will give customers clearer information about savings.
- The quantity input system replaces WooCommerce’s default field with two available designs, which improves the shopping experience by making it easier for customers to adjust quantities without confusion.
There are plenty of other aspects of Blocksy that can have an even stronger impact. Something as simple as product wishlisting has a surprising amount of customization and flexibility. Here, you can choose which pages to add the wishlist buttons to: archives, for example, or single posts.
However, while Blocksy’s variation swatches and product filtering are more complex to setup, they offer a much greater impact for your User Experience (UX). With swatches, you can assign them to product attributes and choose the presentation of the selectors. In fact, this goes quite far as you can set color indicators, tooltips, and way more than I can cover here!
As for filtering, you have lots of scope: ideal given that filters are practically necessary for any e-commerce store. There are a raft of options to choose from here, right down to control over taxonomy and attribute filtering. Both of these options are within the Shop Extra extension, which gives you a lot more tools to design to your exact requirements.
Checkout and Cart Enhancements
Blocksy’s checkout page refinements include showing product thumbnails in the order summary table, adding quantity inputs directly on the checkout page, and displaying coupon forms at the top.
There’s also a change to WooCommerce account pages, mainly surface-level design choices such as the placement of customer avatars, real names displaying instead of usernames, and quick navigation links that provide one-click access to orders, downloads, and logout functions.
There are many instances of these enhancements, such as on cart pages, which all serve to reduce friction during the shopping process.
Additional Capabilities for Building Your Store With Blocksy
Of course, Blocksy provides more than WooCommerce functionality. For example, the header and footer builders use drag-and-drop functionality to create custom layouts with multiple rows. You can add logos, navigation menus, search boxes, shopping cart icons, and buttons almost anywhere in your header.
The conditional logic in these builders means different pages can show different layouts. So, your home page might display a full-featured header with promotional banners, while product pages show a streamlined version that keeps focus on the merchandise. Blog posts could use yet another variation.
The global color palette manages your site-wide colors while typography controls give you extensive integrations and options. There are a multitude of layout choices and even support for dark mode.
What You Pay for Blocksy’s Capabilities
As I noted, there’s a free version of Blocksy, but I do think the premium version is the best value. There are three tiers available:
- Personal ($69 per year or $199 lifetime) covers a single site with a small level of WooCommerce functionality.
- Business ($99 per year or $299 lifetime) supports up to ten sites and includes all premium features.
- Agency ($149 per year or $499 lifetime) gives you all the site licenses you need and adds white labeling.
The lifetime options deliver significant savings if you plan to use Blocksy long-term. Of course, with it being Black Friday, you have a deep sale. Our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals mean you could net a 40 percent discount off of the typical price.
Support Resources When You Need Help
Support is accessible through the WordPress dashboard and gives you quick access to ticket submission, knowledge base articles, video tutorials, and the Facebook community.
The documentation is extensive and covers pretty much every part of Blocksy in depth. Screenshots accompany most instructions and the organized structure makes finding specific information straightforward. The level of detail in these guides means many of your questions could be answered without contacting support.
My Thoughts on Blocksy’s Approach for E-Commerce
Blocksy is a solution for almost any WordPress site type, but especially for WooCommerce store owners who need both speed and extensive customization options. This integration goes deeper than most other themes. Although the Customizer-based approach is slightly dated, it does mean you can work with familiar and ‘battle-tested’ WordPress tools rather than learning a new interface.
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The next step after reading this Blocksy discovery post is to head over to our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to grab this theme with a 40 percent discount!
