Zakra, a great WordPress theme?

What, you don’t know yet the WordPress Zakra theme with “endless possibilities to create your site in no time” (its creators say so)?

Alright, it’s time to get you up to speed and discover a great theme that delights its users.

In this new test, we’ll give you a presentation and a detailed opinion about this very interesting theme, which has a lot of things to please the beginners.

Obviously, we will cover the topic from A to… Z. Without further ado, let’s discover all the secrets, under the tip of my pen, of a Z that means… Zakra.

This article was written based on the 2.0.4 version of the free theme, and on the 1.3.4 version of Zakra Pro.

Your best WordPress projects need the best host!

WPMarmite recommends Bluehost: great performance, great support. All you need for a great start.

Try Bluehost

What is Zakra?

Zakra is a flexible, multipurpose freemium WordPress theme that comes with ready-to-use, one-click installable templates dedicated to different niches (blogging, ecommerce, portfolio, business etc.).
It is compatible with most page builders, especially Elementor, with which the vast majority of its site demos are designed.

Launched in February 2018, Zakra had 60,000 active installations at the time of writing this test, giving it some popularity.

Another notable detail is that it had almost exclusively 5-star reviews left by its users (out of nearly 500 reviews submitted), an extremely rare occurrence. Its overall rating is excellent, since it is rated 5/5.

Behind this theme, which has built a solid user base, is ThemeGrill, a company specialized in theme creation.

In addition to Zakra theme, it offers 18 themes for download on the official directory. If most of them don’t exceed 10,000 active installations, some of them stand out, like:

• Colormag (100,000+ active installations), which allows you to create a news site (mag type).

• Spacious (50,000+ active installations), dedicated to small businesses that want to create a showcase or ecommerce site.

• Flash (30,000+ active installations), a versatile theme that is similar to what Zakra offers.

We also find the Zakra team behind WPEverest, which publishes 2 plugins: User Registration (to create registration and connection forms to your site) and Everest Form (to design contact forms).

Zakra is a WordPress theme that can be used in two ways:

1. Start with its free version, to be installed and activated from the administration interface of your WordPress site.
2. Go further with its premium version, Zakra Pro.

Before jumping in, let’s discover all the features of this theme, both free and paid.

Let’s start with its handling.

How do you get started?

Once the theme is activated, a notification will prompt you to install the ThemeGrill demo importer plugin.

Do it by clicking on the blue “Get started with Zakra” button.

This plugin adds a submenu to your WordPress dashboard containing all the demo sites offered by Zakra. So it’s very convenient.

You can find them by going to Appearance > Demo Importer.

That’s it for the installation aspect, so to speak. All this was done very quickly, in just a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

In terms of user experience, it’s perfect. Technically, it should be noted that Zakra is a WordPress theme that does not offer to make any settings on your dashboard.

The customization of the theme takes place on the Customizer, as you will discover in detail in the next section.

Once activated, the Zakra theme adds 3 submenus on your admin, in Appearance.

1. “Demo Importer”, where all the demos of sites proposed by the theme are organized.
2. “Demo Importer Status”, this is where you can find data about your system (PHP, MySQL and WordPress versions, etc.), your theme and your plugins. You can’t configure anything inside, the data is for information purposes.
3. “Zakra Options”, which is a kind of dashboard presenting the premium features of the theme, as well as links to useful resources (Documentation, Support, Facebook Group, Site Demos).

As you can see, Zakra has chosen to focus on simplicity to make it easier for the user to get started with the theme.

There are no huge settings menus and, finally, everything is concentrated in one place: the “Zakra Options” submenu.

Personally, I like this minimalism: it’s easy to find your way around and you’re immediately immersed in the action, without any dead time.

To discover the details of the proposed settings, you have to go to the Customization Tool, accessible through Appearance > Customize. See what it contains just below.

Customization options for the WordPress Zakra theme

General settings on the Customization Tool…

On the Customization Tool, no surprise there either. Zakra remains in line with what you have seen before, focusing on simplicity and sobriety.

Zakra offers its settings in 4 menus:

1. Global
2. Header
3. Content
4. Footer

At first glance, this may seem like a lightweight option. But you will see that appearances are deceiving. When you navigate through the settings, you are pleasantly surprised to find most of the basic settings to get you started on the right foot.

The Global menu

In this first menu, you will be able to choose the type of display of your content, with the possibility to activate it in full width. An essential criterion if you want to use the theme with a page builder.

We also appreciate being able to adjust the width of the sidebar, the content and the container to the nearest pixel, with a simple mouse movement.

In the same way, you can set the display of your sidebar (left, right, without sidebar) in different places (globally on the whole site, on the Blog page, on the posts, on the pages).

The Global menu also allows you to act on:

• Colors. You have classic options to change the main color of the site, the text color, and the links color (on mouseover too). Zakra is a WordPress theme that doesn’t offer options to create your own color palettes, and then apply them to your site in one click, like some competitors like Astra, GeneratePress and Blocksy do.
• The background. It is possible to change the color and the image of the background of your site.
• The typography. Zakra uses the Google Fonts library to offer you a large choice of fonts. You can choose the weight, and define a font size according to the screen used by your visitor. It is also possible to choose a font for each title level (h1 to h6).
• The buttons. Finally, this last submenu lets you control the colors, the margin and the border of your buttons.

The Header menu

For a free theme, the Header menu is already quite complete and offers several nice settings:

• You can easily upload your logo, and in particular add a Retina logo.
• You can add a video in your header.
• It is possible to activate what Zakra calls a “Header Top Bar”, i.e. a notification area at the very top of your site that can be useful to add contact informations, for example (address, phone, email).

• An option to add a search bar.
• Three display styles for the header (left, right and centered logo).
• The possibility to add a button, useful to create a call to action (e.g. add your phone number, redirect to a strategic page, etc.).

The Content menu

This is where you will be able to adjust the display and the elements appearing in general on your pages and posts:

• At the level of your pages, you can choose 5 display formats for their title, and activate breadcrumbs.

• On the Blog page, you can for example display an excerpt of the article content and a “Read more” button.
• For the Blog page and the individual article pages, you can change the order of appearance of some metadata (Front Page Image, Title, Content, Author, Comments, etc.) with a simple drag and drop.

The Footer menu

At last, the Footer menu has several options, including one that is often appreciated by novice site creators: the option to change the copyright text.

Zakra allows this welcome fantasy (otherwise you have to go through the code), but that’s not all.

You also have 2 formats for the display of the footer content (left or centered), with the possibility of acting on the style (colors of the background, text and links).

Moreover, you can display up to 4 widgets, and are even able to activate an arrow Back to top.

That’s it for the general configuration, which will be applied to your whole site. But that’s not all: Zakra also offers individual settings for each type of content (article and page), to be found directly in the content editor.

… And page by page settings in the content editor

Open the post editing interface, for example, and look at the bottom of the screen: you’ll see a box called “Page Settings” containing 4 menus:

• General
• Header
• Primary Menu
• Page Header

If you don’t touch anything, your article or page will have the same settings as in the Customization Tool.

On the other hand, you can use the options provided to propose a different layout for a given content.

For example, you can enable or disable the display of a sidebar, change the style of the header, or customize the colors of the menu items.

However, it’s a pity that you can’t disable the header and footer, which is very useful if you want to design landing pages, for example.

Zakra does offer an option to disable the page header in the “Page Header” submenu, but what is called the page header here is the title of your content, and a possible Breadcrumb.

Are you ok so far? In that case, let’s continue the discovery of the Zakra WordPress theme with the presentation of these site demos, very useful to customize a WordPress site without having to start from a blank sheet.

Join the WPMarmite subscribers

Get the last WPMarmite posts (and also exclusive resources).

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Zakra’s website demos

A variety of demos

At the time of writing, Zakra offers 69 site demos. As a reminder, you can find them in Appearance > Demo Importer, and they can be imported in one click.

These demos are site templates composed of several pages (e.g. Home, Blog, Services, Contact).

30 are available with the free version of the theme, which is already not bad. As the designers of Zakra detail, their WordPress theme is “designed to accommodate the ample requirements of very vast set of different website archetypes”.

That’s why you’ll find website demos categorized in different ways (Blog, Business, Ecommerce, One Page, Portfolio etc.) and aimed at different niches.

For example, the demos offered in the free version set up sites in the fields of travel, health, education, construction, health, business, law, or even catering.

On this total of 69 demos, 62 were designed with the Elementor page builder, 2 with Brizy, and 5 with Gutenberg (which is not a page builder).

In other words, this means that you will have to use Elementor, Gutenberg or Brizy to be able to modify them.

What does it look like?

If each demo has its own personality, we can nevertheless highlight several points. In overall, these templates remain rather clean and minimalist, with a predominance of the white color.

We can also notice a common denominator in many of them: the presence of a background image, in full screen, in the header.

The rendering is rather pleasant and tends towards efficiency. In short: the design will not make you climb the curtains, but it is still more than enough to make a good impression and give a clear idea to your visitors.

During my test, the process of importing the demos was quite long (more than 3 minutes to install the Agency demo, for example), on a local installation.

You are now done with the discovery of the free version of the Zakra theme. To go further, and have even more features, ThemeGrill also offers a paid version of its theme.

We will describe it in the next part.

What do you get with the Premium version?

The premium version of Zakra comes in the form of a plugin, called Zakra Pro.

Activate it on your WordPress site to benefit from additional options, to be found directly in the Customization Tool. Here is a good overview.

A supercharged Customization Tool

A boosted Header and Footer

First, the header and footer have new settings. As far as the header is concerned, I could mention:

• The possibility to create a double menu and to add a shopping cart icon, if WooCommerce is activated on your site.
• The presence of a sticky header, that you can activate or not.
• An option to activate and create a menu specifically adapted to navigation on mobile. For example, you can change the icon of the button that triggers its opening (Toggle button), the texts and colors of the elements that appear.
• Additional settings for your “Header Top Bar” in terms of its style (colors, borders, full width or not), and its visibility according to the type of screen used by your visitors.

• New options for the main menu. You can change its background color, apply a background image and change its margins.

For the footer, you will now be able to:

• Display your widget area and your copyright area in full width.
• Disable the area containing your copyright.

Expanded blogging options

Another area to benefit from Zakra’s premium features is the Blog. First on the general Blog page (the one that lists all your articles). It is now possible to:

• Change the style of each post, especially the color of the title, content and background.
• Change the length of the article’s excerpt, to the value of your choice.
• Activate or deactivate a “Read more” link, fill in the text of your choice and its color.
• Choose between two types of pagination (number or not).

As for the settings for single articles, you can:

• Enable an insert to present the author’s biography.
• Display related posts, and choose for example to include them before or after your content.

• Embed a text box or widget before or after your post. This can be useful for displaying a warning message, a promotion or any other call to action.

New layout and typography

On the free version of Zakra theme, you can change the layout of your Blog page, as well as your pages and posts.

Zakra Pro goes a step further by giving you 6 layout options for the following pages:

• The page listing your categories.
• The page listing your tags.
• The 404 page.
• The Search page.

Finally, you have additional typography options, such as paragraph formatting.

More page-by-page settings

Beyond the Customization Tool, Zakra Pro also offers access to more individual settings on each page.

Open a new page, take a look at the “Page Settings” box, and you’ll see. For example, here we appreciate the possibility to directly:

• Change data (in pixels or percentage) related to the width of the content.
• Disable the widgets of the footer and the area containing the copyright.
• Not display the header and all its components (menu, top bar, etc.).

Thus, it is possible to individually configure each page of your choice, to assign it the parameters you want. This can be useful if you want to design specific pages with a specific purpose (e.g. a landing page).

Access to premium site demos

Let’s continue our overview of Zakra Pro with its site demos reserved for premium customers.

You’ll find 39 additional demos in a menu that is familiar to you (Appearance > Demo Importer).

If you’re observant, you may have noticed that the “Premium” mention that used to appear on the demos of the free theme has now disappeared, obviously.

So, you see what I mean: the added value of Zakra Pro is the number of additional website demos it offers (more than double compared to the free theme), with an even wider range of niches than with the free version.

For the rest, the design and construction of the pages remains the same as with the demos offered in the free version.

In order to enjoy the premium demos, you need to purchase at least the Personal Plus package of the Zakra theme. It is also necessary to activate the Companion Addons for Elementor plugin, which automatically comes with a Personal Plus (or higher) license of Zakra.

Additional WooCommerce options

WooCommerce compatible, Zakra is not a WordPress theme that stands out for the options it offers with the famous ecommerce plugin.

Quite poor in the free version (you can simply modify the layout of your Store and Unique Product pages), it doesn’t go much further in premium.

Zakra Pro simply adds additional layout options (5 in total) for the following pages: Shop, Product Categories, Product Tags, as well as the one listing the search results of your products.

You can’t display discount badges on your products, a floating shopping cart, or even customized messages on the products in your store.

About twenty in-house widgets for Elementor

Let’s finish this overview of the Pro version with a look at the home-made Elementor widgets offered by Zakra (they will be available as soon as you activate the Companion for Elementor plugin).

Zakra’s designers offer 21 widgets for various uses. For example, you can add a slider, a pricing table, filterable galleries, a countdown, tables, etc.

This is an interesting added value if you only use the free version of Elementor.

However, there is nothing new in this if you are already using Elementor Pro, which has very similar widgets.

The Companion for Elementor plugin is only available in the Personal Plus version of Zakra theme.

And since we are talking about Elementor, it’s a good time to mention the famous page builder again in the next part.

Build your website with Elementor

Design easily the look and feel of your WordPress website with the famous page builder.

Try Elementor

What adaptation to page builders and plugins?

The integration with page builders of the WordPress theme Zakra

Zakra “works with Elementor plus other major page builders“, says the theme presentation page.

A sentence that sums up quite well the position of Zakra’s creators with page builders: first there is Elementor, then the others.

A page builder is a tool that allows you to create rich and complex layouts for your content, without touching a single line of code, especially through the use of ready-made templates. Editing is often done in drag and drop and in real time. We present you 10 of them in this article.

In other words, there is a definite dependence on Elementor, which can already be understood from a “commercial” point of view. Elementor is the most popular page builder on the market, by far (5+ million active installations).

It is therefore more “selling” to offer demos of sites created with it, rather than with Live Composer, for example (20,000 active installations). That would be shooting yourself in the foot.

With Elementor, of course, there is already a strong demand and a very, very large base of followers.

In the figures, here’s how this translates into usage. Of the 69 demos offered by Zakra, 62 are compatible with Elementor, which is almost the entire panel.

For the rest, Zakra is a WordPress theme that offers only 2 templates editable with Brizy, and 5 with Gutenberg (but the WP content editor is not a page builder).

In short, it’s better to use Elementor to be able to customize one of the theme’s site demos as well as possible – and as quickly as possible.

Of course, you can also edit a demo with another page builder, but you will lose all the initial layout of the demo, which will force you to rethink the structure of your design.

Integration with plugins

That’s it for Elementor, which is one of the most famous plugins of the ecosystem. For the other plugins, Zakra theme indicates that it is compatible with the main ones.

I couldn’t test the theme with the almost 59,000 plugins present on the official directory. On the other hand, I can tell you that I didn’t encounter any integration problems with several famous plugins during my test (WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Jetpack etc.).

So you shouldn’t have any problem with them.

A quick word about Gutenberg, to close this part. Zakra says it is compatible with the content editor, and it better be. 😉

In fact, for the moment, there are only a few demos that are compatible with the content editor (5). However, Zakra is adding demos of sites as we go along, so this category could and should grow in the coming months.

Want to discover more free themes that you can’t miss? Head over to our dedicated page, which shows you the must-have themes.

Let’s now focus on the user experience of the theme, both for the webmaster and the visitor.

Performance, SEO, responsive: zoom on 3 major aspects

Performance

In order to provide your visitors with an optimal user experience, your WordPress site’s pages must be displayed quickly. This factor is very important, especially since it also has a major impact on conversions (an action you want your visitor to take on your site).

For example, if you have a WooCommerce store, your sales volume may be reduced if your pages take 3 hours to load.

Many factors come into play when it comes to the loading speed of a site: the hosting used, the number and quality of the plugins activated, the weight of your images, if you are using a cache plugin, etc.

Not to mention your theme. Zakra has a role to play in the loading speed of your pages.

In their sales pitch, its designers highlight the fact that it is “very light”, “super fast in loading”, and “fully optimized for performance”.

On its homepage, it greedily displays excellent results in speed tests:

So far, it makes sense: can you imagine if Zakra’s designers had said, “Zakra is slow as a tractor and will penalize your conversions”? Everyone would run away from the theme.

In reality, is Zakra a really fast WordPress theme? From the point of view of the site creator, first of all, I can confirm that Zakra is fluid to use, both in the back office and in the front office.

Apart from the fact that the process of importing its demos is a bit long, the rest of the manipulations I did with it went without slowing down (with or without Elementor).

From the user’s point of view, Zakra is also excellent since it loads very quickly. Tests conducted by the WP Rocket team ranked it among the fastest themes they tested, alongside the famous Astra, Neve or GeneratePress.

This corroborates the information given by the creators. Phew, now you’re reassured? So take a deep breath, we attack the SEO aspect of the theme.

If the performance rating services are useful, you should not focus on that either, but rather on “the actual loading time of your site” and “the impression of smoothness”.

SEO

To begin this subsection, let’s briefly weave a link to the previous one. No, the loading speed of a site does not improve the ranking of your pages in search engine results (at least, at the time of writing).

To have a chance to rank well on Google and others, you must schematically:

• Create excellent content optimized around keywords searched by your target.
• Get backlinks (inbound links) of quality related to your field of expertise.
• Take care of your on-page SEO, i.e. optimize the SEO of your site’s content.

Concerning this last point, you can already act on the Title tags of your pages (called hn in the jargon, for h1, h2, h3, etc.) with the help of the page builder you will use, or Gutenberg.

In fact, you will probably have to make some optimizations on this side. A quick look at the Agency demo’s homepage showed me that it doesn’t have h2 titles, although this is not dramatic and penalizing in terms of SEO.

For the rest of your on-page SEO, I recommend using an SEO plugin like Yoast. It will help you for example to fill your Title and meta-description tags without going through the code.

Responsive

“Zakra is carefully developed to suit any device of any screen size” it says on the Zakra homepage. “It’s a fully responsive theme that will make your website look beautiful whether it’s viewed on a desktop or any mobile device.”

We would expect nothing less from Zakra, as the responsive aspect of a theme is simply indispensable today. There are at least 2 excellent reasons for this:

1. Since the first half of 2021, Google indexes and ranks all sites using their mobile version (and not the computer version, as was the case before).
2. In the U.S., the number of smartphone users is estimated to reach 294.15 million (in 2020).

To verify that Zakra is a responsive WP theme, as announced, you have several cards in hand. When you edit your pages with Elementor (or another page builder), you can already use its option to preview the display on different devices.

If we take the Agency demo, for example, we can see that all the elements of the page fit correctly one under the other, as soon as we reduce the screen size.

You can of course do the same from the WordPress Customization Tool, which has a similar option.

To go further, you can use the Google Optimization Test (free) to check the responsive display of a page. I did the test with Zakra’s Agency demo, nothing to report.

Finally, whatever the results are, don’t hesitate to test your pages on different browsers and devices to make sure the display is correct.

It is very likely that you will have to make small adjustments to make sure that everything is nickel chrome. For this, basic knowledge of CSS language will be welcome.

Documentation and support

You are approaching the end of this post. Before I put my keyboard to rest, we’ll speed to the finish line by talking about user support in the broadest sense, on Zakra theme.

Even if the theme is characterized by its simplicity of use, it is possible to navigate at sight or to encounter blocking points when you start to tame it. It’s normal: when you don’t know it, you always feel your way around a bit.

The main thing is not to get drowned and to be able to get help, directly or indirectly.

Indirect help can be found first of all through Zakra’s documentation. It covers a wide range of topics, from the simplest (how to install the theme) to the most technical (how to use hooks).

It’s easy to find it thanks to an organization by categories, the presence of a search bar, or an area at the top of the page presenting the most read articles.

This will be very useful to start untangling the knots of a possible problem. If you can’t manage and use the free version of the Zakra theme, you can ask your question on the public forum of the theme, on the official WordPress directory.

However, you will have to be patient to get an answer. If most of the topics are handled by the theme’s support team, you may have to wait several days to get a feedback.

If you want more reactivity, you will have to buy one of the premium licenses of the theme. These licenses give you access to direct help, i.e. a dedicated support team (by email or chat), which provides response times ranging from “a few minutes” to “24 hours” at the most on working days (note that the support is also active on weekends).

Zakra specifies in its FAQ that premium support “covers installation, problems using certain features, bug fixes, and simple CSS customizations”.

Finally, whether you are a user of the free or paid version of the theme, you can also find answers to your questions on the Facebook group dedicated to the theme (nearly 250 members).

How much does the Zakra theme cost?

As you know, Zakra is a WordPress theme available in two versions:

1. The free version – accessible from the administration interface of your WordPress site, for example – gives access to the theme, free site demos and free support on the theme’s public forum.
2. The paid version offers 4 licenses, which we’ll detail a bit more below.

There are some notable differences between the licenses, which are worth noting before you pull out your wallet:

• The Personal license is the most affordable financially ($69/year). However, it can only be used on a single site and does not give access to the Companion for Elementor plugin and premium site demos.
• To have access to Companion for Elementor and to the premium site demos, you will have to start with the Personal Plus license ($89/year). It can be used on up to 3 sites.
• The Personal Plus, Professional and Developer licenses offer exactly the same options. The choice between one or the other will depend on the number of sites (domain names) on which you want to install the Zakra theme. The limit is set at 3 sites for the Personal Plus license, 10 sites for the Professional license, while the use is unlimited for the Developer license (which also gives access to future plugins).

Note that Zakra offers a 14-day money back guarantee, as well as a Lifetime offer (you buy the theme once and for all) for all its licenses, for prices ranging from $199 (Personal) to $699 (Developer).

Please note that the special rates offered on Zakra’s website are only valid for the first year. You have to be particularly careful to notice this information, which is indicated by a small asterisk below the mention of the money-back guarantee.
This means that if you wish to renew your license after one year (to continue to benefit from support and updates), you will pay full price.

Overall, we can point out that Zakra is still a more expensive theme than many of its competitors (we are talking about its yearly offer, not the Lifetime offer).

Look for example at this small comparison with other famous themes:

• Astra: it will cost you $47 for use on an unlimited number of sites.
• Neve: from €69 (about $69) for a use on as many sites as you want.
• OceanWP: this very popular theme starts at $54 in premium, for use on up to 3 sites.
• Blocksy: you’ll find it for sale starting at $49 for use on 1 site.

Our final opinion on Zakra

Zakra is a very nice and efficient WordPress theme, which I enjoyed using during this test. It combines a lot of advantages that can make it a great ally for the beginner WordPress website creator:

• It is very simple to use and easy to get started with.
• Thanks to its demos, it allows you to design websites adapted to all kinds of niches, without starting from scratch.
• You can find a lot of basic features in the free version of the theme.
• It is powerful and light, which is a real plus for the user experience.

In short, you can activate it without any hassle on your WordPress installation. 😉

Download Zakra:

There is one last question: can you use it as a base theme for your future creations? I would say “yes”, but you have to keep in mind some limitations:

• The theme is very dependent on Elementor. Basically, you need to know how to handle this page builder properly if you want to take 100% advantage of the vast majority of the site demos offered by Zakra. So you’ll need to plan a learning curve if you’ve never set foot in Elementor before.
• The number of site demos is already interesting (almost 70 in premium), but we can underline that other themes are more provided on this side (e.g. Astra). Be careful, though: quantity is not everything, and you’ll already have plenty to do with what Zakra offers.
• The options dedicated to WooCommerce are not very important. In this matter, Zakra is lagging behind the competition, especially OceanWP, to name only one. This is something to keep in mind if you have an online store.
• If there are of course additions compared to the free version, the premium version of the theme will not make you jump to the ceiling.
• Finally, Zakra Pro is more expensive than many major competitors.

Personally, if I were to put myself in the shoes of a new WordPress user who has no experience with a theme, I would advise him/her to go for the unavoidable Astra, Neve, Blocksy or even Kadence, to name a few.

These themes are cheaper, just as easy to use, and more complete in terms of features.

And you, what do you think about them? Share your opinion on the Zakra theme by posting a comment.

Receive the next posts for free and access exclusive resources. More than 20,000 people have done it, why not you?

Register

About the author

WPMarmite Team

WPMarmite helps beginners get the best out of WordPress with in-depth tutorials and honest reviews. Meet the founder, Alex, and his team right here.