OptimizePress is a very popular theme that transforms a WordPress website into something like a Swiss army knife for marketers. With it, you can easily create sales-pages, launch-pages and lead capture pages.
However, it is not the only theme of this kind and neither is it the newest. Is OptimizePress the best option, or is there an alternative that’s better suited to your business?
Read this review to find out which of the following solutions takes the crown: Authority Pro 2, FlexSqueeze, InstaBuilder, OptimizePress, Premise, ProAffiliate Theme, ProfitsTheme or SalesPress Pro.
Overview
First, here’s a feature comparison for all the products in this review:
Glossary (click to expand)
Sales-Pages: you can jury-rig something resembling a sales-page using any WordPress theme. This criteria is about whether there’s a feature dedicated for making sales-pages only and making them easy to create.
Opt-in Pages: to get a green tick here, the product needs to have dedicated lead-generation page templates and some form of autoresponder integration.
Launch Pages: this is about whether a product comes with dedicated features for creating a launch event. This typically consists of a series of videos, comments, very simple navigation and social media sharing options.
Evergreen Launch: an evergreen launch is a launch event that starts individually for each new visitor. Each new visitor sees the first video in the launch sequence and the others as locked or not yet published. The locked items then become unlocked for that user, after a specified amount of time. This can make a launch seem like it’s happening right now, even though it’s actually already wrapped up.
Member’s Area: does the theme or plugin come with templates for creating a member’s area or download area for your customers? If so, it earns a green tick, here.
Membership Feature: it’s one thing to offer a design template for customers, but another to actually integrate with payment processors and affiliate systems, so that you can create basic memberships and make sure only paying customers get access.
Number of Templates: I added this to give some measure of the variety in a product. The problem is that different templates in a theme or plugin can be dramatically different or very similar. I only counted templates that are at least somewhat distinct from each other (e.g. template with header and the same template without a header count as one).
Responsive: are the pages created by the theme or plugin mobile-friendly? Do they automatically scale for smaller screens or are they one-size-only rigid designs?
Test Page Load Time: I created a dummy sales page with some typical elements such as images, headings, content boxes, bullet lists and guarantee boxes (the one shown in the screenshots below). I converted this page as best I could for each of the products tested. I then ran it through GTmetrix, to test the performance. It’s not a comprehensive test, but gives a rough idea. Note that since it’s a relatively short page, the times are all quite similar.
PageSpeed/YSlow Scores: Also from the GTmetrix test, these are the scores that the test page received from PageSpeed and YSlow. The numbers give some indication of how well optimized the pages are for fast loading times. These are the results with just the theme/plugin installed and no further plugins added or optimization steps taken.
Next, some details about each of the products, listen in alphabetical order.
Authority Pro 2
Example of a sales page in Authority Pro 2 (click to view full version).
What I need to get off my chest first is that Authority Pro features what is possibly the worst sign-up process I have ever witnessed. After three upsells and three separate prompts to enter your name and email address, you finally arrive in the member’s area… which isn’t very well put together.
Once you’ve located the download link, you then need to install a theme as well as two plugins, to be able to use the theme. If you activate them in the wrong order, the site becomes inaccessible until you delete the offending plugin via FTP. Then, a theme options xml file needs to be imported…
Not a great way to make a good first impression. But all can be forgiven, if the product is good.
The Bad Stuff
Unfortunately, there is no redemption. The Authority Pro menu conflicts with the WordPress admin bar, the options are plentiful, convoluted and cryptical, the short code generator is clumsy and confusing, most of the graphical elements like bullet points and testimonial boxes are amateurishly designed and the whole thing is just very unpleasant to work with.
I could go on, but a picture says more than 1000 words, so here’s a picture:
Spot the 20 differences between this and a good squeeze page…
On what should just be a simple squeeze page, with Authority Pro 2 you get the following issues:
- The call to action arrow is misaligned with the top of the page, for unknown reasons.
- A “broken image” icon shows, unless you find an option far down the page and select or upload an image. Not showing an image is not an option.
- The button does not fit the dimensions of the opt in box, even though they are both default choices.
- The button doesn’t have a transparent background and the background color doesn’t match the color of the box it’s supposed to be in.
- On each pageload, you first see a blank page, then a light grey page and finally the actual squeeze page.
- The bullets and overall design are kind of ugly.
Note that this was set up using standard options and settings. I didn’t try to break this page or make it look bad. I didn’t deliberately create the mismatches on the page. In fact, I couldn’t even find out how to fix most of them.
And yes, this example is representative of the overall quality you can expect from Authority Pro 2.
Bottom line: it boggles my mind that this is a product someone is charging money for.
FlexSqueeze
From what I can tell, FlexSqueeze was originally built as a theme for review sites and affiliate niche sites and later expanded to also support the creation of sales pages and squeeze pages.
The user interface also gives the impression of a product that has been expanded many times, with options tacked on to more options, tacked on to more options.
With this theme, you can create many visual variations of one particular kind of website: a blog that has a large featured area at the top of the main blog page and another featured area at the bottom of each post or page. This can be used for affiliate sites, to present the top rated products in an attractive way.
Example of a FlexSqueeze sales page (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
My favorite thing about this theme is that the content editor shows all the styles and boxes, as they will appear on the front end. Usually, you only see your short codes in the editor and you have to preview the page to see how those short codes will actually translate into boxes, dividers, headlines etc.
With FlexSqueeze, a big headline actually looks like a big headline in the editor, a content box shows up as a content box etc. Unfortunately, the styles are implemented via in-line HTML, which is not a good way to design web content.
The Bad Stuff
In stark contrast to the features of the editor, almost everything else in FlexSqueeze is done by blind editing. The main options menu features more than 350 different input fields for numbers, colors and other options. The only way to really see the changes these fields make is to save the changes and reload a page on the site. Yes, it’s nice that you can choose a font, color, size, width and drop shadow for every element on every page, but with FlexSqueeze, I think they might have gone a bit too far with the amount of options.
What’s worse is that while there are all these options and there are also massive amounts of graphics and style elements to choose from, it doesn’t quite add up. The most difficult thing is trying to create a FlexSqueeze site that doesn’t look outdated. All the available templates look like they were designed 10+ years ago and there’s mostly too much going on: too many colors, too many gradients, too many background images and textures, and so on.
The sales-page templates are also rather strange. There are different templates for different niches, but you can’t edit them (unless you fire up Photoshop). That “guru” headline in the screenshot is a fixed part of one of the templates. You can’t edit or change it from within the theme.
In the end, FlexSqueeze seems overloaded, rigid and somewhat antiquated.
InstaBuilder
After testing some of the other candidates, InstaBuilder was a breath of fresh air. It comes with many options and features, but it manages to keep everything very simple and organized in an easy to use interface.
InstaBuilder is a plugin that works with any WordPress website and you can still use your regular theme for your blog any any other pages, if you so choose. To turn any of your pages into an InstaBuilder sales page or squeeze page, you simply tick a box in the page editor. Leave it un-ticked, and the regular page (based on your Theme) will be shown.
Example page created with InstaBuilder (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
Ease of use is a big strength of this product and with very few exceptions, you can easily get a hang of all of its features without ever needing to look at instructions. The template designs and page elements look stylish and all the pages created with InstaBuilder are fully responsive.
On top of all that, the plugin comes with many nice extras, such as a feature that let’s you add a social sharing “lock” to your content, an exit-redirect function and a rudimentary but functional split-testing feature.
Overall, InstaBuilder makes a very good impression and it’s a joy to use.
The Bad Stuff
It’s a good thing that most users will probably not need instructions, because the tutorial videos are slow and narrated by a text-to-speech robot. They’re almost unbearable, quite frankly.
I was surprised to see that there are no pre-styled headlines or headline short codes, either. Instead, you have drop-down menus that let you select from a variety of fonts and font sizes. Content dividers are also missing from the picture, as are dedicated testimonial styles.
These are not catastrophic omissions, as you can still get the result you want, but they do mean that it can be a bit tricky to get the formatting and styling of a page just right, using this plugin.
In the end, these are minor issues with an otherwise very good product, though.
OptimizePress
After the installation, OptimizePress presents the user with settings menus and options that I wouldn’t call particularly intuitive. Thankfully, many detailed tutorials are provided, to help new users find their way around the software.
There are four main aspects to OptimizePress, each with their own set of options:
- Squeeze pages
- Sales pages
- Launch pages
- Membership pages
Initially, it can be a bit confusing, because the various options for these four types of pages have a lot of overlap. You define the type of page you’re creating by selecting a page template in the WordPress editor. Below the editor, there are hundreds of options for all four categories of pages, that you can expand and collapse. It can take a while before you find your way around all of these options.
Example page showing off some of the OptimizePress elements (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
There is an advantage to all this complexity, which is that OptimizePress can probably do almost anything you can think of. From a built-in video player to social sharing icons and delayed content, OptimizePress is very feature rich indeed. It also comes with a wide range of short codes, which let you add boxes, styled bullets, testimonials and more to any page.
It’s worth pointing out that all of the style elements in OptimizePress look polished and well-designed. It really is quite easy to make a good looking page, using this theme.
Also included is an option to run launches and evergreen launches on well-designed pages with social sharing and comments sections included.
The Bad Stuff
The user interface in this theme is far from ideal. You’ll often find yourself scrolling up and down a seemingly endless page of options, trying to find that one field you want to change. Apart from that, the biggest drawback with this theme is the lack of visual variety combined with its popularity. You can change some basic visual elements like fonts, colors, background colors or images and header images, but unless you dive in to the code, your OptimizePress pages will look very similar to every one else’s OptimizePress pages.
Technically, there are many different page templates to choose from, but in practice, many of them are so similar you can barely tell them apart, at all. This is not catastrophically bad, but it can be a bit of a branding issue, when your sales page and member’s area look practically identical to hundreds of other sales pages and member’s areas out there.
Overall, OptimizePress is a good product and its quality seems to justify the great popularity it enjoys.
Premise
Like InstaBuilder, Premise is a plugin rather than a theme. Once the plugin is installed, there’s a new content type you can create, called “Landing Pages”. You can create and edit different landing page styles from the options menu and create and edit as many different landing pages as you wish (which can be lead generation pages, sales pages or membership content pages).
The landing page content editor is a version of the WordPress content editor, extended with a few additional options.
Example of a Premise landing page (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
Premise comes with hundreds of different graphics you can use for your pages and offers far more variety than any of the other products, in this regard. The graphics include the usual buttons and badges, but also include many hand-drawn arrows and all sorts of icons. This is a great addition for any non-designers who don’t have the budget to hire designers and/or pay for commercial use rights for various images.
While some of the graphics are a bit tacky in my opinion, for the most part, the design pre-sets and images will make your landing pages look good.
I also like the fact that they’ve built in a social share gating feature. As a further bonus, you can load example copy for your landing pages to use as a guideline and you get access to some copywriting tutorials.
The Bad Stuff
There are two main points that I disliked about Premise:
The first is that there’s too much “blind editing”. For example, when creating a landing page style, you’re simply presented with dozens upon dozens of input fields. Some of these input fields are not very well labelled either, so that it’s unclear what you’re supposed to input or what exactly is going to change when you do so. The only way to figure out is to make a change, change to a tab with a page loaded and reload it to see what the change looks like.
Trying to create a nice design using this method is not a pleasant task.
The second issue has to do with expectations vs. reality. Personally, I really like the design of the Premise website. I assumed that Premise would allow me to create similarly stylish looking pages.
Unfortunately, this is no the case. Even if you dive deep into the customization options, I don’t see any way in which you could replicate the Premise website using the Premise plugin. And that’s a shame because what I’m saying is: pages created with Premise will never look that good. The showcase page gives you a fair idea of what can be done with the plugin, though.
I was also surprised to see that while there is a huge selection of images to choose from, other styling options such as content boxes, testimonial boxes, content dividers etc. are either very limited or completely missing.
Premise is a decent product, but it struggles to justify its steep price.
ProAffiliate 2.0
ProAffiliate 2.0 is a theme that adds options to create sales letters, squeeze pages and so-called offer pages to WordPress. The offer pages were created for affiliate promotions, where you can feature several different products and present review content and affiliate links on an appealing looking page.
Everything in ProAffiliate looks well designed and is pretty easy and straight-forward to use. There aren’t many customization options, but the upside of that is that there aren’t any complicated setup menus, either.
Example of a ProAffiliate sales page (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
When you edit a page in ProAffiliate, you are presented with a drag-and-drop builder. Using the builder, you can create your pages in a modular fashion, adding headlines, boxes, testimonials and more. There’s still a feeling of blind editing, as the builder shows a very abstract representation of what the page looks like to a visitor. However, I do find that a list of modules containing your content is a lot easier to manage than a page chock-full of short codes.
For anyone who doesn’t like the drag-and-drop builder, it can easily be deactivated as well.
As a nice little bonus, the theme also includes a simple popup/lightbox feature. It doesn’t compare to the likes of Popup Domination or Hybrid Connect, but it gets the job done.
The page styles are all very distinct, appealing and modern looking. It’s too bad that there aren’t more templates to choose from.
The Bad Stuff
With ProAffiliate, you can create exactly one kind of sales page. It’s quite a nice looking sales page, but there are virtually no design editing choices. Short of going into the theme’s CSS files, you can’t change fonts, colors or the dimensions of anything.
The same simplicity applies everywhere: there’s one kind of testimonial box, one kind of guarantee box etc. Whereas some candidates in this review overwhelm the user with too many options in too many places, ProAffiliate 2.0 represents the other extreme and leaves you wishing for more control.
There are several squeeze page designs to choose from, but the final results don’t compare to nicer templates as provided in OptimizePress or InstaBuilder.
ProAffiliate 2.0 is neither bad nor broken. It does what it does quite well and the drag-and-drop builder is cool. It just falls a bit short in this comparison because of how inflexible it is.
ProfitsTheme
In terms of its feature set, ProfitsTheme is probably the closest competitor to OptimizePress in this roundup. Like OptimizePress, it comes with templates for creating sales pages, squeeze pages, launch pages and membership area pages. It also comes with a built-in membership system.
The theme integrates with PayPal, ClickBank, Aweber and GetResponse. And ProfitsTheme even comes with a built-in membership system which lets you create multiple products and multiple membership levels and protects the membership content pages from being accessed by non-members. For anyone looking for more membership features, it also integrates with DigitalAccessPass and Wishlist.
Example of a ProfitsTheme sales page (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
ProfitsTheme does an amazingly good job at packing all of its features into a user-friendly interface. Only InstaBuilder delivers a better user experience, but ProfitsTheme comes close while having a considerably larger feature list.
Each of the templates comes with multiple color options and in addition, you can edit many aspects of the designs. The result is a great balance: you can dive into large options lists if you want to, but they’re better organized than most and thanks to the templates, they’re optional.
Quickly setting up an entire marketing website is made especially easy with the page building option. ProfitsTheme is not the only theme to offer this, but the selection here is extensive: you can have drafts for squeeze pages, sales pages, launch pages, login pages, confirmation pages and even privacy policy and disclaimer pages created at the click of a few buttons.
The Bad Stuff
The only things I can complain about are design-related. First, the theme would benefit from some additional short codes and design elements. This is one area where it falls short in comparison to OptimizePress. Secondly, the design of all the templates and elements looks a little retro and lacks polish. Pages created with ProfitsTheme look good, but they lack a certain wow-factor.
In my opinion, the design is just not up to the extremely high standards set by the rest of this product.
Ultimately, ProfitsTheme is still a very well-rounded product and it’s definitely worth a recommendation.
Sales Press Pro
SalesPress Pro is a theme with many similarities to OptimizePress – both positive and negative.
After installing the theme, you also need to install a separate plugin, to make the squeeze page features work. The plugin is a free addition to the theme, so it’s just a minor inconvenience that the lead generation options are separate rather than integrated.
With SalesPress Pro and the plugin, you can create sales pages (with each template available as a video and non-video version), squeeze pages and membership content pages.
Example of a SalesPress Pro page (click to view full version).
The Good Stuff
SalesPress Pro comes with many templates and styling elements as well as a wide range of graphics. Also included is a countdown timer feature, which closes or redirects a page after a countdown expires, to add some real scarcity to an offer.
SalesPress Pro pages are responsive on mobile devices, which is sadly a rare trait among the products tested here. It’s also worth noting that along with the theme, customers receive the aforementioned opt-in plugin as well as a video plugin. The plugins can be used separately, even on non-SPS sites, which is a nice bonus.
The Bad Stuff
I encountered many bugs and glitches, while working with Sales Press Pro. There are many smaller issues like misaligned graphics, which just make the sales pages and squeeze pages look a bit unprofessional. I also encountered a bug that would send the page into an endless redirect loop and I couldn’t figure out what caused it. In the end, I had to delete the page and create a new one, to make it work.
In some aspects, SalesPress Pro copies OptimizePress’ user interface – and that’s not a very good thing to do. In other aspects, the SPS interface is even worse than the one in OptimizePress. As an example, to set up a lead generation page, you need to:
- Create the main content in the WordPress editor.
- Scroll down several pages to find and adjust the general settings for the page.
- Open a completely different page in the menu of the necessary plugin, to set up the opt-in form part of the page.
Of course, you have to know where all these options are in the first place and you’ll be left wondering why three different options for one short page can’t just be displayed in the same place.
You’ll also find that you are limited to creating a maximum of five different opt-ins (to five different lists or autoresponders). This may be enough for most users, but it’s still strange, as there’s no technical reason to limit the number of opt-ins you can run on your site.
I could go on, but the bottom line is that while SalesPress Pro has some merits, it also has a few more weaknesses that it can get away with, in a comparison like this.
Conclusion
There are very clear losers and winners in this comparison. Let’s begin with the losers:
- Authority Pro 2 is horrible and broken in every possible way and it’s the worst product I’ve seen in recent memory. Do. Not. Buy.
- FlexSqueeze is overloaded with options and it looks antiquated. In addition to that, it’s one of the more expensive solutions, so I can’t see any reason to purchase this over some of the alternatives.
- Premise is decent, but in many regards it pales in comparison to the competition. In a vacuum it might be good, but compared to the alternatives, it is not worth its hefty price tag.
- ProAffiliate 2.0 is quite nice, but very limited and inflexible. Unless you want it specifically for the offer/review page feature, your money is better spent elsewhere.
- SalesPress Pro looks like a failed cloning experiment performed on OptimizePress. It has some, but not all of the same features, some, but not all of the same style elements and a similarly clumsy user interface. The only reason to get it would be if you wanted it for the two plugins that it comes bundled with.
- Get InstaBuilder for a great feature set, good design, ease of use and is one of only two products in the roundup to feature responsive, mobile-friendly pages.
- Get OptimizePress if you want launch pages with a polished design and the rather cumbersome user interface doesn’t bother you.
- Get ProfitsTheme if you want everything that OptimizePress does, plus a built-in membership system and you don’t mind the less polished look of the design elements.
That’s about as to-the-point as I can make it. I hope you found this roundup useful and it helps you pick the right WordPress marketing theme or plugin for your business.
Do you have any questions or feedback? Agree or disagree with my conclusions? Let me know by leaving a comment!
