Bridge Theme Review PROS & CONS (2023) | Best All-In-One Solution For Any Business?

The Bridge is one of the most popular WordPress themes on Themeforest marketplace, with over 130,000 sold copies. Its popularity is due to the fact that it can be used to create all kinds of websites. That includes blogs, corporate sites, e-commerce stores, portfolio sites, online magazines, etc.

It’s an ideal theme for many different industries. The Bridge is the first choice for many bloggers, writers, photographers, musicians, designers, lawyers, small business owners, restaurant owners, and agencies.

Bridge theme can be used to create professional and personal websites. You’re only limited by your own imagination. I will take a look at all of the many appealing features that the theme has to offer in this Bridge theme review.

 

Bridge Theme Review – What Does It Offer?

The Bridge is a feature-rich WordPress theme developed by Qode Interactive. It includes a vast collection of over 400 demos that are ideal for many different types of niches.

This theme can help you set up and run a profitable eCommerce store, build a blog site, promote your products and services, and professionally display your portfolio.

 

 

Bridge provides several convenient options that put you in complete control over your website’s design. A nice assortment of premium plugins, elements, modules, theme panel options, and an impressive drop and drag front end builder are just some of the many helpful functions that the theme provides.

 

Features of Bridge Theme

Bridge has a wide variety of features. You can use it to create just about any website that you want without having to know anything about coding.

Even though Bridge is best known for its design, it’s not the only feature that people like about this theme. It has 115 different shortcodes that can be used and styled easily. You also have access to over 800 Google Fonts and an impressive amount of hover and animation effects.

The Bridge has a lot of widget options, and you can create your own custom widgets. Bridge theme is responsive and looks great on any screen type.

The theme includes convenient automatic updates using the Envato Market plugin. There are 18 different header options that you can customize, and you can even create custom headers.

Bridge theme uses its own wide menu. Users can create mobile and standard menus. A normal or wide sub-menus can be designed with minimal effort. You can make wide menus with or without icons, add widgets to any column of that menu, and design any kind of layout that you want.

Setting custom pages is easy thanks to Bridge’s custom page templates, which are available for landing pages, blog pages, content pages, and other areas of your site.

 

Bridge Custom Plugins

Bridge theme developers, Qode Interactive, created several custom plugins (modules) that are included with this theme. They can be found in the theme’s plugins folder. You can access them by downloading a zip file of the theme, extracting the file, and then opening the plugins folder.

There you will find the necessary Bridge Core plugin, custom plugins, and several third-party premium plugins that come bundled with the theme.

 

 

The custom plugins’ functions range from simple tasks such as custom widget functions to more complex tasks, including the ability to create your own learning management system.

Here’s a closer look at each of the custom plugins that are included:

• Qode Instagram Widget – This plugin allows you to connect your Instagram account with your website so that you can display your latest posts. It also adds a custom Instagram widget to your site.
• Qode Listing – This plugin adds extra functions to your WP Job Manager plugin. This feature can come in handy for creating job boards.
• Qode LMS – A plugin that allows you to create your own educational courses to sell online. You can create lessons, quizzes, questions, and anything else that has to do with learning management systems.
• Qode Membership – A plugin that lets you create a membership section on your website.
• Qode Music – A feature that allows you to add many music functions to your site. You can add a music player, your own custom events, albums, and more. The perfect option for bands or musicians.
• Qode News – This feature lets you create your own magazine or news pages easily.
• Qode Quick Links – You can use this plugin to create your own “quick link” custom posts.
• Qode Restaurant – This plugin can be used to design and promote your restaurant’s menu. You can display photos of your delicacies, as well as your address and hours of operations.
• Qode Tours – A plugin that can be used to create a booking website or a booking section on site. Features such as destinations, tours, checkouts, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a booking site can be created using this plugin.
• Qode Twitter Feed – Plugin operates the same way as the Qode Instagram Widget. The only difference is that it connects your Twitter account to the website.
• Qode Woocommerce Checkout Integration – This feature will add extra functionality to your WooCommerce store’s checkout page.

 

 

As you can see, there is a wide variety of custom plugins and options they bring.

 

Bridge Built-in Features

The Bridge includes several built-in theme features like custom testimonials post type, custom portfolio post type, masonry gallery, Qode Slider, and Qode Carousel.

These features can be useful, although it takes some time to get accustomed to them. Be noted that you can only use the slider and carousel options to create simple sliders and carousels.

Fortunately, the theme comes with premium Slider Revolution and Layer Slider plugins for any advanced needs in slider creation.

 

Admin Interface

Bridge’s interface is fun and easy to use. Its intuitive interface allows you to customize your website quickly. You can embed parallax sections on your site, add custom sliders to different pages, and show images in your site posts, for example. When you reach the theme options page, you’ll find hundreds of options to choose from, spread out in 20 different categories.

Many options can be disabled or enabled with a click of the mouse. There are text boxes that can be used to add SEO and CSS information. There are also color pickers to customize colors for every area of the site, including portfolios, blog pages, footers, headers, etc.

Bridge theme comes with its own Social Media icons. You can add a social media share bar to certain areas of the website. There’s even an option of enabling a maintenance mode (check best coming soon page WordPress themes). This feature can come in handy if you want to keep your site visitors intrigued while you work on the site. You can use this option to display “site under construction” or “coming soon” messages before you’re ready to launch a new update or design.

The reset button allows you to reset all options that you’ve changed to their original settings if the need arises.

The parameters for each element type are separated into their own tabs. Each setting allows you to alter your theme’s general configuration. You can change the organization, navigation, and appearance of each page’s content.

Most setting changes can be made at the page level. Qode settings are shown when you’re using the page editor to make changes. This allows you to create and design pages that are unique from each other on site.

 

Bridge Theme Options

There are very few things on your website that can’t be customized using the Bridge theme. The only disadvantage is not having a live preview option as you won’t find customization options in the customizer.

When you go to the theme customizer, all you’ll find are basic settings such as homepage settings, widgets, menu, logo, and the WordPress built-in additional CSS option.

To customize your site, you’ll need to go to the Qode Options section in the admin sidebar menu. Here you can change, for example, font size or element color. Then you need to save changes and then check the site by refreshing to see if modifications were applied.

 

 

The number of customizations that you can make compensate for the theme lack of a live preview option.

In Qode Options, certain items will only appear once a particular plugin has been installed and activated. For instance, extra customization options will be available for WPBakery Page Builder (check WPBakery review), WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, and Elementor (see differences between Elementor free vs pro).

Some Qode custom plugins will have their own customization options. Certain settings have a full page of customization features, and it can take a while to scroll through these lists to see all available options.

The quick access shortcut at the bottom of the page makes things easier. You can use it to scroll to the options that you’re looking for. If you want to see everything, it usually takes a few scrolls to reach the bottom of the customization list, which is impressive.

There are also brief text explanations that appear underneath each setting, telling you exactly what each does. This is a nice convenience because you don’t have to go to documentation to see what single small options do.

 

Default Customization Options

I’ll briefly discuss all of the default customization options that are available with Bridge Core:

– General: Here, you can set up general site settings such as layout, content width, fonts, main and gradient colors, etc. You can also find settings for Google Maps, search engine optimization, smooth scroll, loading, and transition animations.

 

Here are just some of the available options found under the General settings tab.

 

You can choose any of 33 different jQuery scripts to use, which is excellent for reducing the number of scripts and improving the overall performance of the theme. You can also add JavaScript and CSS custom code here.

 

– Logo: This section can be used to upload different versions of your company logo. You can choose one version for headers that use dark skin, and another for headers that use light skin. You can also add logos for mobile headers, sticky headers, and other options.

 

– Header: The header area offers many settings. You can create a unique header just by selecting a few simple options. You can choose the header skin (light or dark), type, background color, menu position, transparency, border colors, and other selections.

You can decide to include menu search, adjust menu customization, and mobile menu options as well as top header area, side area, and fullscreen menu.

 

– Footer: The footer section doesn’t provide as many customization choices as the header menu, but there are still plenty of appealing options to choose from.

Here you can set top footer area, footer bottom area, animation, and background images. Additional choices will appear if you enable footer top area or the bottom area. Some of the selections in that section are alignments, columns, display types, background images, colors, etc.

 

– Title: You can use this section to display or hide the title area. You can add animation, change colors, backgrounds, text and text sizes, alignments, etc. You can also set up title scroll animations and breadcrumbs here.

 

 

– Fonts: Here, you have cast options for font customization for every part of the site.  This includes fonts in your headers, footers, animations, paragraphs, titles, breadcrumbs, etc. You can select your font sizes, colors, weight, font family, letter spacing, and more. You can also choose how you want your fonts to look on tablets, cell phones, and other mobile devices.

 

– Elements: This section offers a vast number of settings. You can customize options for over two dozen different sections of your website, such as accordions, buttons, separators, social media icons, pie charts, input fields, testimonials, blockquotes, tabs, tags, and pricing tables.

Each element’s customization choices will vary, but you will be able to modify borders, backgrounds, text, colors, width, icons, and more.

 

– Sidebar: This section is very self-explanatory. It can be used to adjust your widget link, widget text style, and title styles.

 

– Qode Slider: Here, you’ll find all of the customization options for the theme’s built-in Qode slider. You can set your cursor navigation style, button style, button V2 style, and other general style settings.

 

– Page: This menu gives you the option of adding a navigation section to the bottom of each page on your site. You can also change the background layout, color, order, etc.

 

– Search Page: Here, you can determine how many columns you want for your search results page to have. You can also set the spacing that will appear between each search result item.

 

– Blog: This section allows you to customize your blog pages You can adjust the page layout, background, colors, pagination, sliders, text style, author, likes, sidebars, post info styles, text styles, etc.

 

 

– Portfolio: Here, you can add or adjust comments, columns, lightbox, likes, fonts, slug, text, titles, and sidebar layouts for all of your custom portfolio post types.

 

– Vertical Split Slider: You can choose the navigation style and size for your vertical split slider in this section, among other customization options.

 

– Social: Everything you need to customize your social-related items can be found here. You can select what social media icons that you want to appear and where they should appear on site (on media pages, on regular pages on your site, on blog pages, etc.).

If you add one of the Qode custom plugins (such as the Qode Instagram widget), their settings will also appear in this section.

 

– 404 Error Page: You can set up a 404 error page’s “back to home” message, page text, titles, and any relevant subtitles.

 

– Contact Page: Any changes made in this section will only affect pages that were created using the contact page template. You can activate or deactivate the contact form, customize, add a Google map to it, etc.

 

 

– Parallax: Here’s where you can set your customization preferences for any parallax images that may appear on your website. You can activate the parallax option for mobile sites and set their minimum image height in pixels.

 

– Content Bottom: This is the place to go if you want to add custom sidebars to the bottom of your pages.

 

– Panel Area: You can set labels and background colors for your panel areas in this section.

 

– Maintenance Mode: If you’re working on updating your website and don’t want your site visitors to see it in its current condition, all you have to do is toggle this option on.

 

– Import/Export Options: You can import or export Bridge theme settings.

 

– Reset: This section lets you return all of your current settings to Bridge’s default settings.

 

If you have installed WooCommerce, WPBakery Page Builder, Contact Form 7, or Elementor, you will see here options for them also.

 

Additional Customization Options

Now that we’ve learned about the Bridge theme’s default customization options, it’s time to discover the extra customization features that the theme provides. I decided to separate these options from the default because these options aren’t always available.

These options will only be available if a certain plugin is installed, such as the WooCommerce plugin, for example.

Here’s a quick rundown of the additional customization choices:

– Tours: These settings are specific to the Qode Tours plugin. Here you can set up your booking email information, connect your site with PayPal, set checkout page, currency options, search function, sidebar, reviews, and more.

– Course: These settings are for the Qode LMS plugin. You can configure single course pages and the course archive.

– Albums: These settings are exclusive to the Qode Music plugin. Here you can find customization options for album type, album skin, navigation, and comments.

– Events: Customized settings for event post types can be found here.

– Quick Links: These settings are only for the Qode Quick Links plugin. You can establish your quick links typography, toggle quick links on and off, change button logos, and decide how many links will be displayed.

– Listing: These settings are for the Qode Listing plugin. Most of them are toggles to turn certain features on or off.

– Restaurant: Settings that are specific to the Qode Restaurant plugin. You can set your working hours and more.

– Membership: These settings are for the Qode Membership plugin. You can set up your terms and conditions page, add social media logins, and configure your navigation style.

– VWPBakery: These settings are used with the WP Bakery Page Builder plugin. You can set element styles and turn grid elements on or off.

– Elementor: Settings designed for the Elementor plugin. You can set the font sizes and toggle to override Elementor’s line-height settings.

– Contact Form 7: These settings are specific to the Contact Form 7 plugin. Setting element background styles, text styles, hover styles, element margins, padding, and borders are just some of the options that you can choose from here.

– WooCommerce: Custom settings for the WooCommerce plugin. The possibilities include configuring product lists and product information, product single page styles, buttons, cart page, background colors, and text.

 

Post & Page Level Customization Options

All global customization choices that you make can be overridden on either a page by page or post by post basis. This gives you more refined control over how each of your pages and posts will appear to your site visitors.

When you’re in the content editor section for most post types, you will see meta boxes for Qode Header, Qode General, Qode Page Options, etc. The Qode General meta box will appear underneath a post editor.

Most of these options are the same ones that you’ll find in the Qode Options section. The only difference is that the changes that you make here will override the ones set in the Qode Options area for that particular post or page.

 

24 Unique Layouts

The Bridge theme includes 24 different layout concepts. This gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility in making each page unique. You can create the perfect layouts for your site, no matter how simple or complex you want them to be.

The layouts are divided into categories, which include a blog, classic, full screen, grid, landing page, left menu, one page, and shop. A single click of the mouse will add any layout that you like. You can also customize these layouts even further to meet your needs better.

 

400+ Unique Demos

The Bridge was created as a multi-purpose theme. It’s ideal for almost any kind of WordPress site and niche. It includes 430 demos, each equipped with its own unique design and content.

A common complaint that you’ve probably heard about other popular premium themes is that the site doesn’t look anything like the demo that was shown. The Bridge theme allows you to build a website that looks just like the demo. All of the demo design and content can be added to your site.

Every demo that’s included can be downloaded. Each one is fully customizable. It’s all included in the theme $59 price. If you can’t narrow down your choice to a single demo, elements from different demos can be combined so that the look and feel of your site match your branding and industry niche.

 

 

With so many demos to choose from, it’s a safe bet that almost every kind of industry and specialty is covered. You can find demos for photography websites, bar, and restaurant, hair salon sites, new or coming soon designs, etc.

In addition, more demos are being added by the day, so you can count on finding something that meets your needs.

Once you’ve found a demo that you like, just click on the “import” button to add it to your website. All elements of the demo, including content, design, and widgets will be installed.

Replace the demo content with your own unique content, and you’ll be ready to go live with your site. You can also use the drag and drop page builder to customize a demo for a look that matches your company brand or identity. Each demo is responsive, which means that they adapt to varying screen sizes on different devices.

 

Page Builder Compatibility

When most people think about WordPress, they usually associate it with page builders. Just about any premium theme on the market nowadays either has its own page builder or has deep integration with one or more popular page builder plugins.

The Bridge WordPress theme is no different. The Bridge is compatible with both Elementor and WPBakery Page Builder.

The first versions of Bridge only supported WPBakery. There are many custom shortcodes in Bridge that were designed to be used with WPBakery as a result. For example, certain shortcodes will only function after the page builder has been installed and activated.

 

 

Over 90 different custom elements added to WPBakery in Bridge. These include items such as accordions, CTAs, an interest rate calculator, icons, pie charts, product lists, scrolling images, and many more.

Elementor integration happened relatively recently. Bridge theme’s newest version includes several demo versions made exclusively using Elementor. There are currently about 50 Elementor demo sites, but new ones are being developed regularly.

Qode’s developers have added over 100 different custom design elements in Bridge for Elementor. These elements work with the free and pro versions of Elementor. The pro version isn’t included in Bridge, but the free version should be all you need.

Each custom element created will provide a premium Elementor experience.

 

Premium Plugins Included

A nice bonus to the Bridge them is that it comes bundled with four additional premium third-party plugins added at no extra charge. These plugins are:

• WPBakery Page Builder ($64 ) – This is one of the most popular WordPress page builders. Its intuitive drag and drop interface lets you create effective and appealing pages in minutes. You don’t need any technical knowledge to use it, either.
• Layer Slider ($25) – This feature-packed slider plugin allows you to create fantastic image sliders with CSS animations and 2D and 3D effects.
• Slider Revolution ($29) – This slider lets you create powerful presentations on the website. You can design hero images, carousels, video scenes, and sliders. The plugin’s drag and drop interface lets you do everything without any technical knowledge.
• Timetable Responsive Schedule ($26) – This convenient WordPress plugin allows you to make timetable views of your events. You can create PDF versions of your time tables and accept online reservations for your events.

Be noted that you actually don’t own these plugins, and you will not get an activation license for them, so you will often see a message in your site dashboard to activate them. Also, updates for those plugins will be received only if new versions are added to the Bridge plugin folder.

Licencing of the plugins falls under special Theme Forest licencing rules and neither theme that is sold on Theme Forest provides activation license for bundled plugins.

Even if you’re using a non-activated copy, it still has excellent features with almost unlimited capabilities.

Certain extra features and services are only available to direct buyers. For instance, if you receive LayerSlider in your theme bundle, keep in mind the fact that it’s an extra item that you received for free and will only receive updates for it if they come included in the next theme update.

 

Integration With Other WordPress Plugins

One concern for many people interested in buying premium WordPress themes is whether or not the theme will be compatible with a plugin that they plan to use or are already using. Bridge already supports many of the premium and free WordPress plugins right away.

All shop demos are based on WooCommerce plugin and specifically made for it. Bridge’s ready to use shop templates can instantly integrate with your shop and improve its look and feel.

The Bridge can even be used with the WPML (check WPML review), a WordPress plugin that’s used for creating multilingual websites. Bridge also includes styles for Google Maps, Contact Form 7, and Gravity Forms (see differences between Gravity Forms vs WPForms).

 

Performance

Bridge theme has tons of features, but you might be wondering if its creators focused only on features and not performance?

–Page Load Speed: The theme has minimal redirects, uses minified CSS, Javascript and HTML and prioritizes visible content well. Its page load speed is impressive when you consider all of its functionality.

–SEO: Bridge theme can help you optimize your content for search engines. You can set meta descriptions and meta keywords for posts and pages. These descriptions and keywords can be overwritten on page and post basis. You can also add Google Analytics by entering your account ID.

Despite the SEO option available, I recommend using a third-party SEO plugin. You can use Yoast SEO (check Yoast SEO vs All In One SEO), RankMath (see Yoast SEO vs Rank Math Comparison), SEOPressor Connect (see SEOPressor Connect review), All In One SEO Pack, SEOPress (check SEOPress vs Yoast SEO comparison), etc. because they offer far more SEO options.

If you’re going to use a third-party SEO plugin, just make sure to disable the built-in search engine optimization first that the theme provides.

–Mobile Responsiveness: With mobile browsing increase, it’s important to have a responsive website. Bridge theme is retina ready and works on all screen sizes. Its page load speed on mobile devices is very similar to that on laptop and desktop computers.

 

Documentation and Support

Good documentation and support options are essential for any product. The Bridge theme includes extensive documentation. It has simple step-by-step instructions on how to use each feature that’s included and how to set it up. They also have a growing library of video tutorials available to their users.

The Help Center can provide additional assistance. It contains tutorials, video tutorials, FAQs, a full-knowledge base, how-to instructions for more advanced plugins such as Slider Revolution and other information.

 

Bridge Theme PROS and CONS

Here are advantages and disadvantages of using Bridge theme:

PROS:

• Over 400 theme demos available
• Qode custom plugins add even more possibilities
• A vast number of theme settings and options
• Comes bundled with premium plugins
• You can override global settings for each page and post
• Integration and available demos for Elementor and WPBakery page builders
• 24 layout options
• Affordable price

CONS:

• No live preview option for theme general options
• Can be challenging to set up for beginners as the theme has a massive number of options
• You don’t have the actual license for third-party premium plugins bundled with the theme, so you will often see messages to activate them, and updates for them come only if included with a new  theme update

 

Bridge Theme Review Conclusion

The Bridge has all of the tools, features, and functions that make it a perfect pick for anyone in need of a fully functional, multipurpose theme. The theme can be purchased for $59 on Themeforest.

This includes a half year of theme support and lifetime updates. For an extra $17.63, you can extend Qode support from six months to twelve months.

Bridge works incredibly well for just about any kind of specialty or industry. Its simple customization process and an impressive amount of demos make it easy to create a fantastic website rather quickly.

Building your website with Bridge lets you craft an impressive, professional site that accurately reflects your brand.

I was rather impressed with Bridge. The vast amount of features can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but the ready-made templates that are included with the theme give you a less intimidating starting point. There’s virtually no limit to the amount of customization you can do.

Every item that can be customized includes its own very detailed options. You can customize element backgrounds, colors, sizes, typography, width, and many other aspects. Its integration with Elementor and WPBakery allows for even more customization choices.

The Bridge is a great theme, but some work needs to be done to improve optimization. Installing a plugin like WP Rocket (check WP Rocket review) to ensure optimal performance is a good solution.

Another downside is the fact that there is no live customization preview when using WPBakery. However, you won’t have this problem when using Elementor. This is an issue with the page builder, which explains why Elementor has been introduced as an alternative page builder.

But still, there is also no live preview when editing theme Qode Options. This is because the theme doesn’t use the Customizer function. In these situations, you’ll have to save your settings and then refresh the page to see changes.

The Bridge is a great overall value for the money. The customization possibilities are almost infinite. I don’t know another theme on the market that offers such extensive customization possibilities.

It also integrates seamlessly with many of the most popular plugins on the market today. It works well with WooCommerce, and there are over 400 demos to choose from that can help you get your site up and running in no time.

If you ever run into a problem, Bridge’s support team is available to help. They’re ready to assist you at any step in the website design and creation process, no matter if you’re having a tough time trying to choose an initial theme or just have questions about how certain functions or elements work before you go live with your site.

With all this theme has to offer, you have a solid foundation for building bold, impressive websites. Choosing WordPress theme for your business is not easy task, but Bridge theme can be used for any type of niche or industry. The features and functions that this theme provides can help you achieve the goal of creating a site that you’ve always wanted. A solid investment at an affordable price.

As alternative choices you can check Newspaper theme review, GeneratePress review, Themify Ultra theme review, Astra theme review, Deep theme review, OceanWP theme review posts.