Sydney Theme Review (2026): Elementor-Friendly, Under a New Owner

Who sells Sydney now, and why the 2025 sale matters to a buyer

Sydney reached wordpress.org in April 2015, the work of aThemes, a small shop founded by Charlie Livingston. More than a decade and 5,008,787 downloads later, by the wordpress.org count, it holds a 98 out of 100 rating from 794 reviews. Those are the marks of a theme that kept ordinary owners content for a long time, mostly by doing one job well: putting a respectable business site online without a designer on the payroll.

Then the shop changed hands. WPBeginner announced on April 15, 2025 that Awesome Motive had fully acquired aThemes, and the aThemes Starter Sites plugin is now listed under Syed Balkhi's wordpress.org profile. For a buyer this cuts two ways. A large owner can afford support staff and steady releases. A large owner also has a long product list, and a modest classic theme can slide down its priorities. We found no announced plans either way, so the fair reading is to watch the changelog and the support forum, which is where a shift in priorities shows first.

A theme sale changes nothing on your site the day it closes. It changes who decides what your site gets next year.

What you are installing: a Customizer theme with a header builder on top

Sydney is a classic theme. It does not use the Site Editor; you set it up in the Customizer, where the current Header & Footer Builder arranges separate desktop, mobile and off-canvas layouts and adds a sticky menu. Starter sites do the heavy lifting on day one. Three are free and seventeen need Pro, and an import hands you pages, menus and demo images to rewrite. Version 2.67 added a Pattern Library module of ready-made block patterns, and Sydney Pro's Templates module lets you design custom headers, footers, archives, single posts, 404 pages and WooCommerce pages.

Builder fit: Elementor first, blocks second, SiteOrigin still in the box

aThemes says Sydney is fully compatible with the block editor and Elementor, and the theme's code supports the Elementor half of that sentence. It loads Elementor-specific CSS and JavaScript when Elementor is active, and when you first activate it, it turns Elementor's own global colors and type settings off so the palette and fonts flow from the theme. Pro adds Elementor widgets such as Timeline, Pricing Tables and Food Menu. The theme even carries SiteOrigin Page Builder support, a fossil of its early years. Our advice: pick Elementor or blocks and stay there. Mixing builders is how a site ends up with three different ways to draw a button.

Sydney Pro's three yearly prices, and the renewal line in the FAQ

The first-year figures carry a 20 percent introductory discount, and the FAQ states plainly that all renewals are at full price. So the true yearly cost of a one-site license is $79, and that is the number to use when you compare Sydney with other themes. Refunds run for 14 days, no questions asked. That is a short window, so install Pro on a staging copy in the first week, not the third.

Then add up the rest of the stack. Most Sydney sites run Elementor, and Elementor Pro is a separate license from a separate company with its own renewal date. A caching plugin, an SEO plugin and a forms plugin follow. None of these choices is foolish. But the cost of a Sydney site is the sum of four or five subscriptions, not one, and each renewal is a day someone has to notice an invoice. If a rebuild is what the budget cannot stretch to, WordPress project financing spreads it out.

Sydney scored in plain words, row by row

We do not hand out numbers we cannot defend. These are the verdicts we would give a client who asked about each area, with the reason in a line.

The pattern is a theme that is easy to start and harder to keep tidy. Most of its strengths show on launch day. Most of its risks show at the third or fourth update.

Speed: the vendor's grade, the theme's files and your own test

The Sydney sales page says the theme is fast by default and shows an A at 99 percent for desktop and 96 percent for mobile. It does not name the testing tool or the page tested, so treat those grades as advertising. The more useful evidence is in the theme's own functions.php, which anyone can read in the wordpress.org repository.

• A main stylesheet plus split pieces. styles.min.css loads everywhere, and separate files cover the hero slider, comments, Elementor and SiteOrigin, some only when that feature or plugin is active.
• Bootstrap, enqueued on its own. A function named sydney_enqueue_bootstrap adds a separate Bootstrap stylesheet, and the readme still credits Bootstrap 3.1.1.
• Two icon sets. Font Awesome arrives in version 5 and in legacy form.
• Fonts by generated URL. Google Fonts load through a built fonts URL, with an option to host them locally. aThemes support confirms that option skips fonts chosen only inside Elementor.

None of that dooms a site. A five-page brochure with one font and compressed images can do well on Sydney. It does mean speed depends on how carefully everything else was built, and starter sites are designed to impress in a demo, not to be light. Our Sydney speed guide shows which of these files you can switch off and which you cannot, and WordPress theme mobile speed explains why phones feel the weight first.

SEO: what the claim covers

aThemes calls Sydney lightweight and optimized for search engines. A theme's real contribution to search is speed and sound markup; titles, schema and sitemaps come from your SEO plugin. One item worth checking on your own pages: forum feedback flags duplicate navigation IDs and a scroll-to-top link that need accessibility work, and clean markup serves screen readers and crawlers alike. What a theme can and cannot do for rankings is laid out in the best themes for SEO.

Selling on Sydney: what WooCommerce gets free and what it costs

The free theme is WooCommerce-compatible and carries the e-commerce tag, so shop pages look like part of the site instead of a bolted-on catalog. Pro is where the store features live: a wishlist, product swatches, a multistep checkout, a sticky add-to-cart bar, advanced reviews, AJAX product search, and styles for the shop header and product tabs. The Templates module can also redesign WooCommerce pages, and Agency buyers get Botiga Pro features on top.

For a small catalog that is a sensible package at $79 a year. The limits are the usual WooCommerce ones. Every feature is another script on product pages, and checkout speed depends on the whole stack, not on the theme. A store that lives on margins and repeat orders should read WooCommerce vs Next.js commerce before committing. A store that has already broken should start with WooCommerce layout broken or call our WooCommerce repair team.

Headers, phones and the updates that rearranged them

Sydney's header is its best feature and its most frequent complaint. The builder gives separate desktop, mobile and off-canvas layouts with a sticky option, and Pro adds a mega menu, a language switcher, a login and register modal and a separate mobile logo. The trouble lives in the handoffs between versions.

• Sites still on the old version 1 header have no Header Builder section in the Customizer at all. Support enables the builder with a PHP snippet that switches on the hf-builder module, and in one thread that snippet scrambled the owner's header and footer.
• A fresh install reported the header and footer builder options missing, with no resolution when we checked on October 6, 2026.
• Version 2.69 made one owner's sticky header switch background colors as the page scrolled. Going back to 2.68 was the cure.
• The 2.67 Pattern Library was reported to hang the block editor on WordPress 7.1. aThemes could not reproduce it, and the owner turned the module off.

Taken together, the advice is plain: never update Sydney on the live site first. Copy it to staging, update, tap through the header on a real phone, then push. If you are already in trouble, Sydney header not showing, Sydney mobile menu not working and Sydney CSS not updating cover the three calls we get most. Problems that start inside Elementor belong with Elementor repair. The theme's style.css still says tested up to WordPress 6.6, so assume nothing about the newest core release until you have tried it on a copy.

Who should buy Sydney, who should pass, and what to read next

Shopping around? Astra and OceanWP are the other long-running Customizer themes that pair with Elementor, OceanWP with cheaper Pro bundles. Neve has a free header and footer builder, and its Pro plans cover unlimited sites. Hello Elementor suits owners who want Elementor to do everything and the theme almost nothing. Every review lives in the WordPress themes section, and head-to-heads sit under theme comparisons.

If the site needs to do more than any theme can, the argument is set out in Sydney vs Next.js, and the move, including what happens to Elementor pages and the slider, in Sydney to Next.js. Staying put? Our theme troubleshooting team fixes Sydney headers and menus, and our hosting and maintenance plans include tested updates, so the next 2.69 surprise happens on staging instead of in front of customers.