Highend is one of the popular WordPress themes sold more than 48K customers in Mojo marketplace. Like many other premium themes, customizing Highend theme as per your need is a tedious task. If you have purchased the theme recently, here are 6 simple tips to customize Highend WordPress theme.
Why to Customize Highend Theme?
The sales page of the theme says, you can build a website using drag and drop elements. However, after purchasing the theme, you will be surprised that making a good looking site with Highend theme needs lot of customizations. The theme offers limited options under “Highend > Highend Options” section. Unfortunately, the theme does not even offer options like the simple themes like Astra or GeneratePress. You can manage some useful settings in theme options and use additional customizations to improve the speed and visibility of your site.
1. Show Social Sharing Icons on Mobile
The theme offers inbuilt social sharing option with small sharing widget. The problem is the social sharing widget will not be visible on mobile devices.
If you want the social share buttons to appear on mobile then add the below code under “Highend > Highend Options > General Settings > Custom CSS“.
.share-holder{display: block !important;}2. Disable Unused Modules – Cleanup Admin Sidebar
Highend comes with lot of custom post types like gallery, portfolio, team members, FAQ, pricing tables, testimonials and clients. Each module will create a menu item with sub menu items in your WordPress admin panel. We are sure, you will not use all these custom post types on a single site. Just go to the theme options and switch on “Enable/Disable Highend Modules” option. Then disable the modules you are not using on your site. This will help to remove the unnecessary menu items and cleanup your admin panel.
Note: If you are using Yoast SEO, ensure to enable or disable the custom post types and categories in the XML Sitemap.
3. Show Last Updated Post Date Instead of Published Date
The theme by default shows the published data as a metadata under blog post title. When you are continuously updating your post content, it makes more sense to display last updated date instead of original published date.
Go to “Appearance > Editor” or use FTP and modify the “hb_blog_enable_date” function like below in “single.php” file.
<?php if ( hb_options('hb_blog_enable_date' ) ) { ?>
<span class="post-date date updated">Updated on <?php echo get_the_modified_time('M j, Y'); ?></span>
<?php } ?>4. Use Excerpt in Portfolio to Showcase on Archives
The theme uses the content entered in the “Excerpt” metadata box to show on the “Portfolio” archives. Therefore, we recommend using excerpt especially on portfolio pages so that the archive page will look more attractive.
5. Improve Page Speed with WooCommerce and Other Scripts
Highend comes with integrated shop using the customized WooCommerce plugin. This plugin will slowdown your page due to long Ajax call for collecting cart items. You can disable the Ajax call by de-enqueuing the functions in “functions.php” file. Read this article to improve your page speed with WooCommerce.
Highend theme will load lots of jQuery scripts and there is no option to combine or defer the scripts to improve page loading. With the heavyweight plugins like WooCommerce, Slider Revolution and Visual Composer, your site will take long time to load.
Login to your FTP account and navigate to “/wp-content/themes/HighendWP/includes/core/” folder and locate “class-highend-enqueue-scripts.php” file. Here you can dequeue all the scripts not required for your site. For example, if you don’t use Google maps on your site then just dequeue relevant scripts.
After dequeuing the scripts check your site is loading properly and check the page speed in Google PageSpeed to see the render blocking issues are improved.
6. Disable Featured Image Showing on Blog Post
Featured images are very useful when sharing content on social networks. But it is not necessary to show the large image at the very beginning of your post content. Especially on mobile, the featured image will occupy the complete above the fold content when the page is loaded. Switch off the featured image showing on the post content under “Highend > Highend Options > Blog Settings > Featured Image“.
This will only disable showing the featured image on the post content area below the title. You should still be able to upload featured image on blog posts and share it on social networks.
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