Avada theme VS Genesis framework comparison

Avada theme is a multipurpose theme and it features more than 20 predefined themes. It is very similar to the Genesis framework in terms of what it can provide to the web developer. However, you must buy the Genesis child themes to get as many predefined themes as in Avada.

Theme options panel

Avada has a very advanced theme options panel which let the web developer modify the header, the menu, content, sidebar, footer. Typography and fonts can also be customized without using CSS. On the other hand, in most of the times, a web developer has to use CSS and PHP functions to modify a Genesis theme. There is no official theme options panel for Genesis.

Page builder

The Avada theme has its own page builder named “fusion builder”. It helps to customize pages and posts using elements in the back end. The Genesis framework has no page builder

License

Avada requires a license for every new installation. On the other hand, a Genesis theme can be installed several times with one license.

Design

It is a bit difficult to compare the layouts from the Genesis themes and the Avada predefined demos. Nevertheless, from my experience, I have found that the Genesis themes required more CSS / PHP jobs to be up and ready compared to a website using Avada.

HTML code comparison

Unfortunately, the Genesis framework is packed with useless pieces of code. Those are attributes in HTML tags. We think that it may cause a Google penalty. On the other hand, the Avada theme has very few microdata markups. Long story short, Google mentions that there are penalties when they find structured data (microdata in Genesis) that is not in compliance with their guidelines.

As you can see below you can see many itemprop attributes. Those attributes are located into a category page. This means that there are many microdata attributes for every link to a blog page. Those microdata attributes are useless. there is a list of structured data types.

First of all, the following schema (itemtype attribute) that you can see in the code below: webpage, WPHeader, WPsidebar. are not taken into account by Google or any search engines. I suspect that it could be considered to be spam by Google.

On top of that, links on category pages count a useless attribute rel=”bookmark” in the HREF tags. Some people think that this attribute leads to the error “crawled – currently not indexed” in google search console. Once again, this attribute is useless. We looked for it in the Google webmaster blog and we didn’t find anything about it.

You still wonder whether those attributes are important for SEO? Check the code of big news websites like foxnews.com you will find no rel=bookmark and not itemprop.

On the other hand, the HTML code of the Avada theme is really clean and compressed. It only contains what it needs, The A tags contain a HREF attribute and a CLASS attribute. That’s it. The following code below is an extract of a category page. As you can see there is only a HREF and a CLASS attribute.

Woocommerce

Both Avada and the Genesis framework are compatible with Woocommerce. Nevertheless, Genesis requires an additional plugin to make it work (genesis connect for woocommerce).

Conclusion

Genesis has better typography than Avada. The readability is better on a Genesis theme. It requires to dive in the CSS styles to increase the size of the Avada fonts. It looks like Avada was made for screens that had a small resolution as today. However, I think that for SEO, the Avada theme is better thanks to its clean code. So, it is better to choose Avada for the long term.