The JNews Theme
The JNews Theme was launched in 2017 and has been doing very well ever since on Themeforest. This theme has recently had a major upgrade and is now completely full of the so-called builders and I can already say that the theme must be one of the best for creating blogs and news websites.
JNews' Rating
JNews has since been sold 17k times and is therefore doing good business. I think this theme will rise in the rankings on Themeforest. It has a very strong rating there of 4.86 out of 5. Few themes exceed that.
Its Loading Speed
Below you can see that the values for speed in Google Page Speed are 99 for mobile and 100 for desktop. I have not tested myself, the builders of the theme indicate this themselves. I assume that at least an elite cache plugin was used for this.
JNews' Page Builders
JNews Theme Review: Header Builder
You can see in the image below how easy it is to place everything in the header in the places you want. All good themes have a header builder and so does JNews. In addition, you can also choose from a large number of standard headers that you can set.
JNews Category Builder
You see, the category builder uses Elementor. Customize your category pages with the greatest of ease. Styling requires no technical knowledge.
Mega Menu Builder
Again with Elementor as the basis, the Mega Menu Builder. You can literally fill in all the boxes with the content you want there. It just doesn’t come easy. A cool tool.
JNews' Style Editor
Right click on any item on the page and you will get many options that you can adjust, for example: margin, background, padding, position, animation and much more.
Demo Websites 67+ and Homepage 150+
The number of 67 for full website demos is more than enough. In the case of JNews, practically all of these demos are for blogs, news websites, podcast websites or video websites. The theme has beautiful layouts available that you can install with a few clicks. There are also 150+ different homepage layouts, so only homepage. You have more than enough choice with JNews.
A Video-Based Site
JNews makes it easy to create a video-based website. This theme includes a lot of features that will allow you to create a video-focused site inspired by Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo.
- Thumbnail Preview Video
- Frontend Uploader
- One Video Template
- Video Modules New
- Profil of the User
- Subscribe to User
- Video Playlist
- You can find many more here
Paywriter System in JNews
Let others write for your site. WordPress makes it easy to manage author payments. JNews+ Pay writer system makes it easy to track author’s payments. I would say, this is perfect for the type of website one is going to build with JNews.
Paywall now with Woo-subscriptions
JNews has added a paywall to WooCommerce Subscriptions. This was requested by everyone. JNews Paywall now accepts WooCommerce Subscriptions payments. JNews clearly pays attention to their customers.
JNews Theme Review Conclusion
The Jnews theme is packed with special features for blogs and news sites, which makes this theme simply one of the best of its kind. I can’t show all these features here, you can see the rest on their own website. It should be clear that JNews is an absolute must for people who want to build and run a blog or news website.
Let’s continue this X-Store vs JNews comparison with the X-Store Theme.
The X-Store Theme
In this XStore review we investigate why this theme has risen so quickly in the rankings. In their own words, the XStore theme is the perfect theme for building webshops. Unfortunately, it’s sold through the infamous Themeforest marketplace, but I’m not going to count any negatives for that. That wouldn’t be fair.
XStore Theme's Rating
An average rating of 4.85 out of 5 is of course brilliant. There are therefore only a handful of themes that score a better rating than the XStore theme. Users of the theme are therefore very satisfied with it, good to know.
XStore Theme: Loading Speed
I grabbed a random page from their demo for the test. The loading times are more than good. I assume that a very good cache plugin is installed on this demo, it almost has to be.
XStore Theme Review Demos
The XStore theme gives you more than 110 demo websites. They are practically all editable with one of the two very good page builders that you get, namely Elementor and WP Bakery. That is a number that exceeds that of most themes. Also keep in mind that most of them are layouts for shops which makes it all the more beautiful.
XStore Page Builders
I mentioned it before in the chapter “Demos”, you can choose from 2 page builders. The Elementor Pagebuilder which is definitely the better one but you don’t have the full version available unless you order it with it which isn’t a bad idea. Elementor is my favorite page builder. In addition, you have the full version of WP-Bakery with the XStore theme with even a plugin that provides many more widgets in the plugin. I must say, a very neat package that is offered here.
XStore Theme Free Plugins
What immediately struck me while writing this XStore theme review was the huge number of extra plugins that you get completely free. Together they are worth over $500 if you were to buy them. What I have to say in all honesty is that themes such as Divi do not need all those plugins because all that functions are already present in the theme itself.
XStore Theme Elements
The number of design elements or widgets that you have available in the page builder is very large. You can count them yourself, and that’s not all.
The theme’s website does not indicate whether it is for Elementor or WP-Bakery.
But I assume the latter because in the previous chapter I saw the extra plugin “Massive addons for Visual Composer” which is the old name for WP-Bakery is.
XStore Theme HeaderBuilder
The Header Builder is a great thing and looks good. Many themes now come with all these gadgets that have in principle been invented piece by piece by “the king of themes”: Divi.
XStore Single Product Builder
Plugins used to have this feature, nowadays every self-respecting theme is equipped with a decent WooBuilder. Everyone has special requirements for their shopping layout, so nowadays I wouldn’t work with a theme that lacks this.
XStore Theme Review Conclusion
This is already the end of this XStore Theme review. There is much more to say about it, but I want to keep the review short and sweet. More info is of course available via the button above on their own website. I have to say, all the points discussed are beautiful and there is actually very little missing from this theme. The only flaw I see is the way it is sold. The Themeforest marketplace requires themes to require a separate license for each of your websites. This gets expensive quickly. Someone with multiple websites would do well to work with Divi or Astra where they conduct the “Unlimited Website Usage” policy.
X-Store vs JNews Conclusion
I like JNews better, it is just a bit better overall specially for blogs. But there is a small problem, these themes want to see a separate expensive license for every website you want to build with it. This will quickly cost you a lot of money. You are better off with Astra or Divi that can be used on an unlimited sites and are also even better and more stable themes.