Excellent
A confident, well-rounded pick.
At a glance
Native is a well-rounded, fairly priced WordPress theme that delivers genuine value for creative professionals and small agencies who want a polished, multi-purpose foundation without assembling their own plugin stack. The bundled Slider Revolution and WPBakery, combined with DFDevelopment's active update record, make the $49 price easy to justify. Buyers who prioritize block-editor workflows or need a lean, performance-first build should evaluate alternatives, but for the core creative audience this theme targets, it earns a confident recommendation.
Best for

The review
4 min readWhat Is Native and Who Is It For?
Native is a premium WordPress theme developed by DFDevelopment and sold in the Creative category. It bills itself as a stylish multi-purpose theme, meaning it is designed to serve a wide range of projects — from agency and portfolio sites to corporate pages, blogs, and small shops — under a single purchase. The primary audience is creative professionals, freelancers, small studios, and businesses that want a polished visual identity without commissioning a theme from scratch.
If you run a design agency, work as a photographer or illustrator, manage a boutique brand, or need a flexible base for client work, Native is clearly targeting you. Its bundled toolset leans toward visual storytelling, making it less suited to pure editorial or news-focused projects and more at home on sites where the work itself needs to be front and center.
Standout Capabilities
WPBakery Page Builder
Native ships with WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer) included in the license. This is meaningful for buyers who do not already own WPBakery, since it normally carries its own cost. The drag-and-drop system lets you build and rearrange page layouts without touching code, which lowers the technical barrier for site owners managing their own content. The trade-off — covered honestly below — is that WPBakery adds page-builder shortcode lock-in and can affect load times if not configured carefully.
Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution is one of the most widely used premium slider plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, and it is bundled here at no added cost. It supports animated hero sections, full-screen sliders, and layered content presentations that are difficult to replicate with free alternatives. For creative and agency sites, an eye-catching above-the-fold section is often the first thing a visitor judges, making this inclusion genuinely valuable.
Blog, Portfolio, Gallery, and Shop
The marketplace highlights "advanced blog, portfolio, gallery, and shop" as core feature pillars. This broad content-type coverage is what justifies the multi-purpose label. A creative studio can showcase client work through the portfolio module, publish thought-leadership through the blog, display images in gallery layouts, and even sell digital products or merchandise through WooCommerce-ready shop templates — all within one theme framework. Buyers building a single-purpose site may never use most of these, but those running a full creative business will appreciate having the infrastructure ready.
Active Maintenance
The theme was last updated by DFDevelopment in May 2026, which is the current period. Regular updates matter for WordPress compatibility, security hardening, and compatibility with new versions of bundled plugins. An active update history is one of the clearest signals that an author is still supporting their product — and DFDevelopment's update cadence here is a genuine positive.
Pricing and Value
At $49 one-time, Native is priced competitively within the premium WordPress theme market. The bundled value of WPBakery and Slider Revolution alone would cost more than $49 if purchased separately at their standard rates. Factor in the multi-purpose template library and shop support, and the raw dollar-per-feature calculation is favorable for buyers who plan to use more than a fraction of what is included.
It is worth noting that the one-time price covers a standard license for a single end product. Extended licenses, support renewals beyond the included period, and future support plan upgrades carry separate costs on most marketplaces. Buyers should factor potential support renewal fees into their total cost of ownership if they anticipate needing ongoing author assistance beyond the initial support window.
Reading the Rating and Sales History
A 4.82 out of 5 from 420 verified reviews is a credible signal of sustained buyer satisfaction — not a handful of early five-star reviews that can skew a small sample. Across 5,500+ sales, that score holding above 4.8 suggests the theme genuinely delivers on its promises for a wide range of use cases. Our editorial team treats any score above 4.7 from 300+ reviews as a meaningful quality indicator rather than noise.
That said, high average ratings on multi-purpose themes sometimes reflect buyers who only used a portion of the feature set. Complaints in low-scoring reviews on themes of this type typically cluster around two areas: bloat from unused features slowing page performance, and a learning curve when customizing complex layouts. Neither makes the theme a bad choice, but both are worth weighing against your specific project scope.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
Native is not the right pick in every situation. If you are building a performance-critical site where sub-second load times are non-negotiable — such as a high-traffic news blog or an e-commerce store where conversion rates are highly load-speed sensitive — the overhead of WPBakery and Slider Revolution may work against you unless you invest in careful optimization. Builders who prefer modern block-based editing via the WordPress Site Editor (Full Site Editing) will also find Native's WPBakery-centric workflow feels like a step backward. Finally, developers looking for a lean, single-purpose base to customize heavily from code will likely find the feature density an obstacle rather than an advantage.
The trade-offs
What works, what to weigh
What works
- Bundles both WPBakery and Slider Revolution, saving buyers significant additional plugin costs
- Broad multi-purpose feature set covers portfolio, blog, gallery, and WooCommerce shop in one license
- Strong buyer confidence signal: 4.82/5 rating sustained across 420 reviews and 5,500+ sales
- Updated as recently as May 2026, indicating active author maintenance and WordPress compatibility
- Competitive $49 one-time price relative to the volume of bundled functionality
- Well-suited to creative agencies and freelancers needing visual flexibility without coding
What to weigh
- WPBakery shortcode lock-in makes it harder to switch themes later without rebuilding content
- Multi-purpose feature breadth increases page bloat risk — performance optimization is required
- No native Full Site Editing (FSE) or Gutenberg-first workflow for block-editor enthusiasts
- Support is time-limited by default; extended or renewed support carries additional cost
- Single-site standard license scope may not suit agencies needing multi-client deployment
Signal by signal
Editorial scorecard
Strongest: features
Watch: performance
Scores are our editorial team’s assessment from marketplace data, feature scope and update history — independent of the affiliate relationship.
Our verdict
Native is a well-rounded, fairly priced WordPress theme that delivers genuine value for creative professionals and small agencies who want a polished, multi-purpose foundation without assembling their own plugin stack. The bundled Slider Revolution and WPBakery, combined with DFDevelopment's active update record, make the $49 price easy to justify. Buyers who prioritize block-editor workflows or need a lean, performance-first build should evaluate alternatives, but for the core creative audience this theme targets, it earns a confident recommendation.
Topics & features
About the author
DFDevelopment (@dfdevelopment) has been selling on Envato since October 2013, accumulating nearly 37,000 total marketplace sales — a track record that places them among the more established theme studios on ThemeForest. Our editorial team has reviewed their catalog to help you decide whether their themes are a good fit for your project.
- Reviewed by us
- 2 themes
- Avg editorial score
- 8.5/10
- Marketplace sales
- 37K
- Selling since
- 2013
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