So, everybody is excited about the theme called OmniEngine which will help you to earn thousands of dollars, right? I have recently read those reviews and good comments of OmniEngine. And because I already used the theme (and switched to another one after one month), I also should write a post about this.
I used normal license (they also offered an advanced one but I did not purchase it). There are some good things and bad things about this theme. And, of course, from my personal experience and opinion.
What is OmniEngine WordPress theme for?
OmniEngine WordPress theme is perfect for content-curated websites. These are websites that do not offer unique content, users can just curate them to fill their websites with lots of viral content from somewhere else, for example, CNN, BBC, ESPN, Bloomberg, and so on, depending on your niche.
What is good about OmniEngine?
I thought it is unfair if I only complain about the bad sides without mentioning its good points. So let’s praise it first.
Good performance
I forgot to take screenshots of the web speed tests, but overall the results were good. Even when I was using a shared hosting, OmniEngine was still loaded fast and smoothly. Nothing broke on mobile size. At that time, I didn’t use Cloudflare CDN but whenever I visited my website, it was fast.
Optimization for advertisements
Since OmniEngine was made to help you earn passive money, the design was optimized for advertisements. You can simply input your advertisement codes into 5 boxes, and the ads would appear on your website at places that had high convert possibility. Simply saying, the click-through rates (CTR) should please you.
Documentation
OmniEngine is a super easy-to-use theme. The developers of this theme make several video tutorials to ensure that you can handle the theme even though you know nothing about IT. Besides, there are a lot of websites and Youtube videos talking about this, so I think you can use it easily even without written documentation.
Easily filling your website with contents
OmniEngine lets you easily curate content from various sources over the Internet. It will help you find content that was shared the most. Depending on your niche, you can choose which one is suitable for your site and start modifying for example the title to create a unique article.
Unlimited use for one license
With one license (about $45 at the time I post this article), you can use OmniEngine theme on as many sites as you like. Suppose that you have 10 sites, this only costs about $4,5 per site. Good deal!
That’s all I like about this theme. Now come to the negative comments.
What I don’t like about OmniEngine
Unimpressed designs
The theme offers three designs and they are quite simple. I can’t say they are ugly, but they look boring and unimpressed. The design looks like from several years ago. Not sure if they plan to offer more modern demos in the future, but this truly disappointed me. And much more depressed is the next reason:
Limited theme customization
Actually, I should say OmniEngine offers no theme customization, even to change fonts or colors. I can understand that because this theme was made for non-IT people, it should be as simple as possible. So, you can be assured that what you see from the video advertisement is what you get, no further design possibility.
So, in this case, every site that uses OmniEngine will look somehow the same.
Still under construction?
This is maybe a good thing. But, the first time I found out that their 404 page still had OmniEngine logo even though I already replaced with my own logo, I felt that $45 was a bit pricey.
Yes, I can change it by fixing the code a little, but it starts scaring me. I wonder if there was anywhere in the theme that was still under construction? With $45 it should be completed to a certain level.
Slugs
Shortly, I don’t like the way posts are placed after /article/.
The developer creates a new custom post type (Article) to store the blog posts. See my early review on Newspaper WordPress theme to have a clearer explanation of this slug system.
Later, when I changed to another theme and start importing my old posts from OmniEngine, it had errors. Not sure where the errors came from but I had to manually re-add all articles. Luckily at that time, I had only 30 blog posts.
Then, the next work is to redirect all the old posts, because the new theme comes without /article/.
This is all about content curation
I realize that buying this is like buying a curating software, rather than a WordPress theme.
Yes, it should work for you if your site only curates content from other websites. This is a circle of repeating the same content all over the Internet. If you plan to create unique articles that offer some values, go find another theme.
Is money that easy to earn?
OmniEngine is right when they advertise that the theme provides high CTR and gets viral content.
But this is only good when the visitors already land on your website. The main question is: how to drive visitors to your website?
So, after a time of using OmniEngine, I learned the lesson: the right way to use this theme is that to curate hot content, then spread it over your social profiles such as Facebook and Twitter.
In other words, your visitors don’t come from organic (search engines), but rather through social. That also means you should have a big fan base where there can be a lot of views on one post. I think if you have a Facebook page of about a million members or Twitter accounts with several thousand of followers, this should work for you.
For search engines, of course, when there are thousands of sites curating the same content (and look the same), you should do a lot to even get yourself in Google Top 100.
So, if you start from the beginning, the efforts you have to invest to get lots of visitors will not be any less with OmniEngine than any other WordPress themes.
Pricey
Depending on your view about money value, this theme can be a deal or overprice. For me, it is rather expensive.
OmniEngine costs $45. I guess a big part of the price comes from the mechanism of sourcing hot contents over the Internet. Not sure about the Advance version because I haven’t tried yet. But for that price, I should get a theme with much more functions and better customization than OmniEngine.
Additionally, viral content is a rather ambiguous concept. Some can get it hot on their profile, some never reach a retweet.
Conclusion
The main reason that I changed the theme was that I didn’t trust it.
If you are somehow a web developer or designer and want to build up a website that offers some values, I recommend not to buy this.