Elegant Themes - Review / Truth with Proof - DO NOT TRUST

Hi Everyone! In this post I share with you the problems with Elegant Themes and their DIVI builder and advise everyone to stay away from them with the exception of if you really need only a few pages built - but definitely not the entire website!

Insider (customer) view

I am sharing with you the complaint that was made inside the customer area of Elegant Themes forums followed by 1 additional customer complaint confirming the issues and note that there has been no reply whatsoever from Elegant Themes - they basically completely ignored the 2 customers' complaints. Date of complaints was 23 Aug 2019 and date of screenshots is 15 Sep 2019.

Customer #1 Post

Fri Aug 23, 2019 3:09 am

So you release a broken update for Divi Builder which completely destroys my website, i.e. none of the pages made with it load.

You do not allow any way to roll back the update.

(the way i know that it was you who released a broken update is because when i de-activate the Divi Builder all the pages load).

So I contact your technical support explaining the situation and pro-actively providing the TOKEN for them to check/fix.

After 6 hours!!! Zain from support replies with "please update to the latest version released today (the one that broke my site) and then check, also disable all active plugins temporarily and then check, the problem could be caused by a third party plugin"

- he did nothing but copy/paste a template answer
- he ignored the ticket completely and did not bother to check anything

That's already 6+ hours that I am losing both visitors and money.
And now waiting for more hours to probably get another template reply.

Is Elegant Themes going to compensate me for my damages? I guess you will not. How can you be trusted when you release a broken update destroying my website and do not respond for hours to customer support and when you respond you send a useless template copy/paste without checking anything?!

Furthermore, I now understood that Elegant Themes has the power / ability to destroy my entire website with a press of a button, because I was stupid enough to put my entire trust in Elegant Themes using their Themes and their Divi Builder (as if you try to de-activate the builder ALL the pages become totally useless filled with trash code, so they would have to be all re-constructed 1 by 1).

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For other customers like me: this is sharing experience / knowledge

For Elegant Themes if they read this:
- you must allow roll back of your updates to be used when you issue broken updates
- you must fix your broken customer support
- and address the issue of trust (where for example you trash the whole website if Divi Builder is deactivated)

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UPDATE:
1st ticket 2 days not a single reply from the incompetent support of Elegant Themes
2nd ticket several copy/paste template replies over the span of 2 days!
ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!

Further proof that the fault is due to Elegant Themes apart from their INCOMPETENT and NON-EXISTENT support. I deactivated ALL plugins on my site and kept only Divi Builder active and the site is not working (i.e. only pages made by Divi). It ONLY works if I deactivate Divi Builder.

Customer #2 Post replying to this topic

You are not alone, I just had the most horrid interaction with their chat person since I got DIVI and I am completely destroyed, because my site is supposed to launch on Tuesday.

Just like with you, my troubles started when I updated DIVI to 3.27.2. I was lucky to have updraft plus so I could roll back to 3.26.1, but even with that update completely messed up my site, I had to upload images again, re-do forms and not all plugins function normally. On top, I got warning from google search console about numerous server 5xxx errors on my site.

Conversing with support was a nightmare, I was also told to disable plugins and after my staging site was completely destroyed by all that, the chat person mockingly asked me, so what are we going to work on next?

The worst thing of this all is that I completely lost all confidence in DIVI and my entire platform is built on it. I had no idea that an update could destroy my site like that and their support will be openly mocking me. I worked on this site for a year, what should I do now? Keep 3.26.1 and never update? Work another year to move the site completely away from DIVI?

I cannot convey how devastating this whole experience has been for me, so I can relate to every word you wrote.

Picture Proof

And here is the full page picture of this complaint against Elegant Themes from inside their member area:

Note: it is a very large picture, click and zoom in to see fully.

Conclusion

So to conclude:

• Stay away from Elegant Themes and their DIVI builder.
• Most things can be built with the Wordpress's new Gutenberg builder enhanced with advanced modules.
• If your site is already using the DIVI builder on all your pages then you are in trouble as it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to deactivate the DIVI builder as they turn all your pages into trash. Start thinking to slowly transition away from the DIVI pages by re-constructing the pages with the Wordpress's new Gutenberg builde.
• Think ahead - think long term. If there is any error by Elegant Themes such as releasing a faulty update which they have done a number of times then your site will go down and you will lose both money and visitors. And since they lock you in they make it near impossible to leave.
• All that would be fine if they had fantastic customer support quickly fixing things if your site is down, but they do not. Far from it. Their support is absolutely horrible as illustrated in this post. There are numerous other cases of them not replying for a long time or when they do reply sending copy/paste template replies.

So I hope this article helps everyone who is thinking about signing up for Elegant Themes or is already a suffering customer.

Note: there are of course many happy customers of Elegant Themes. This is a normal phenomenon as they are happy because they have not yet encountered the problems that other customers have. For the happy customers I offer these questions:

• Are you aware that you are locked in and cannot leave them?
• Are you aware that if you switch off the DIVI builder all your pages will turn into trash?
• Are you aware that if Elegant Themes sends a faulty update they have the power to crash your entire business and their non-existent customer support would not help you?
• Are you aware that you cannot convert DIVI pages and you would need to completely re-construct all the pages if you wanted to leave Elegant Themes?

Those are very serious questions and source of great concern for any serious person running their online business.

How to exclude a page from Yoast SEO sitemap - Google Console Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’

Hi Everyone! In this post I share the fix in Google Search Console for "Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’".

What cased this error?

I had a checkout page where was marked as noindex and there was no reason to add that page to search engine indexing. However, the default setting for creating XML Sitemaps added all the pages on the website to the sitemap URLs. So Google was confused as one one side the sitemaps asked to index all pages and on the other side 1 page was set as noindex.

How did I fix this?

There are 2 possibilities. Either allow the page to be indexed or find a way to remove the page from the auto-generated sitemap URLs. I chose the 2nd option.
Steps:

1. In your Wordpress site go to your Pages.
2. Find the page in the list.
3. Click on it to enter the Editor.
4. Scroll all the way down to the Yoast SEO box.
5. Click on Advanced.
6. Select "NO" for "Allow search engines to show this Page in search results?"
7. And I also selected "NO" for "Should search engines follow links on this Page?"
8. Then click to UPDATE the page.
9. And finally, go to the Google Search Console and click Validate Fix.

Here is the picture:

Products - Missing field "name" + Validation

Hi Everyone! In this blog post I share how I fixed the Google Search Console Products - Missing field "name" and started Validation to complete the fix. I also share the picture from my Console.

What caused the issue?

• This has to do with the schema language. On my product pages there was insufficient technical information (that is not visible to visitors) where the main issue was that Google could not understand what is the name of the products even though it was defined in multiple locations.
• When looking into the code I found at least 3 mentioned of the "name", but for whatever reason Google had an issue finding it.

How did I fix it?

• First I tried to manually insert the required schema code, but that proved to be too difficult or time consuming. I just wanted to do it for 3 product pages and not for the entire blog whereas the code was recommended to be placed in the <head> section which I did not want to change just for the 3 pages.
• I then installed a Schema Wordpress plugin which promised to fix the issue but it did not. While it did add general schema definitions, the free version only had an "Article type", but to fix the "Product" issues we need "Product type" schema language. So I removed this plugin.
• I then found the Schema & Structured Data for WP Wordpress plugin which had all the features I needed but it did require that I manually create the Product Type and insert the "formulas" or "rules" of where it should take the various names/definitions from.
• That's manual work, but it is only 1 time and it worked out really good in the end because I not only defined the "name" which was a "red" error, but I also defined the vast majority of "orange" warnings, so now my pages are fully in compliance and I am happy about that.
• I then went back to the Google Search Console and clicked to Validate my fix.
• After a few minutes of a quick check that the fix was indeed done the Console approved my request and the Validation started. It will take a number of days until it is fully finished (i don't know why it takes so long), but I am confident that this issue is now solved.

Unparsable structured data - Incorrect value type "@context" + Validation

Hi Everyone! In this blog post I share how I fixed the issue reported by Google Search Console called unparsable structured data - incorrect value type "@context". I also share the picture from my Search Console when I fixed the issue and started the Validation.

What caused the problem?

This has to do with the schema language and Google's need to see the "https://" in a particular place on the page. The problem was that my HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin was removing all those parts of the URL so all the links in the code were visible as "//whatever" without that starting part.

This was not a problem at all for my visitors or anyone. It was just a technical issue / problem that Google wanted done another way.

How did I fix it?

• I was forced to deactivate and delete the HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin in order to make the "https://" part visible in the URL. After that I had to query my database to find any old leftovers of "http://" which was the first reason I had installed this plugin in the first place.
• Now that I don't have the plugin I have to do the manual work of changing all the old "http://" into "https://" so that the website can remain secure.
• In my case I did this first by manually looking where those old leftovers exist. I found them both in WP-options as well as WP-posts and finally I used the Better Search Replace Wordpress plugin to do the replacement. I was doing this very slowly and carefully and I backed up my database before doing so because it is not possible to undo this action and doing something wrong can break the website.

What else did I do?

• After replacing all into "https://" I cleared cache and went to do random page checks on my website to make sure everything is working. Random checks are not a guarantee but it's still good to do.
• I then looked into my site code to double-check that in the place where Google had an issue with the full URL is now showing instead of just "//whatever". It naturally was as the HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin was now removed.
• I then went back to the Google Search Console and clicked the button to Validate my fix. Google did a check for a few minutes to make sure the fix was done and accepted my request. The Validation then takes a number of days to complete. Currently it is saying "Validation Looking good" and I am confident that this issue is now resolved.

UPDATE

Hi again. It's been a few days (~ 5 days since validation started) and I just wanted to add an update.

Now 68 out of the 155 URLs have passed the validation but Google has put them under the "Other" category rather than "Passed". This is because Google could not find the original error since I have fixed it so in those cases it puts in the "Other" category. But you see on the picture I added below that this is considered same as "Passed".

Again, I don't know why it takes so long for the validation to finish, I would think Google could do this in minutes, but as you can see it has been 5 days and it only processed 68 URLs.

Anyhow, I am not worried because clearly the fix has worked and the URLs are passing validation so I am sure the issue of "Unparsable structured data" / "Incorrect value type "@context" " has been fully fixed.