We are thrilled to introduce the Hello Elementor theme version 2.9! This version includes improvements made to enhance the control over your website capabilities, and improve site performance by giving you the freedom to disable built-in theme features, as per your preference.
New Settings Page
Hello theme 2.9 brings a range of exciting theme features that improve navigation, readability, SEO and more. Themes sometimes add features that your website doesn’t need, or are redundant. Previously, in order to remove these features you would need to modify your Theme’s code using code snippets, or create a custom child theme.
This version includes a new Settings page available in the WordPress dashboard, that enables you to disable these features with the click of a button, resulting in the reduction of website size, unused CSS, and the removal of unwanted features.
Fine-tune your Hello theme’s settings, improving your website’s performance according to your specific needs.
Disable Description Meta Tag
Hello theme 2.7 extended excerpt support to pages. Hello theme 2.8 introduced the <meta name="description" content="..." /> tag for singular content pages that contain an excerpt. This addition allows search engines and social media platforms to gain a better understanding of the HTML document, utilizing meta data to improve the overall visibility and presentation of your content.
Lean sites that only use Hello theme and Elementor improved their SEO, and optimized search engine visibility. However, websites that use SEO plugins may prefer using the plugin’s meta tags, and disable this from the Hello theme to remove duplicate description meta tags.
Previously you could disable the description meta tags in the Hello theme with a filter hook, but it required using code, which not all users are capable of. With Hello theme 2.9, you can disable the description meta tag easily from the settings page.
Disable Skip Link
Hello theme has a “Skip to content” link, which improves your website’s accessibility by allowing keyboard-using visitors to skip the header, and navigate directly to the main content with the click of a button. For keyboard-using visitors, the skip to content is the first focusable element on the page, helping them to navigate to page content quickly.
With the 2.9.0 release you can disable this feature. It will remove the following HTML markup from your pages: <a class="skip-link screen-reader-text" href="#content"> Skip to content </a>. This is useful when you want to apply your own skip links, or use an external plugin that implements this functionality.
Disable Page Title
Like any other theme, the Hello theme displays the page/post title (<h1> heading) above the content area. When you edit the page with Elementor, you can edit the content area, but you can’t remove the page title. Elementor offers several workarounds for this, like switching to canvas template, or enabling the “Hide title” option, which hides this element using CSS. But the code remains in the markup.
Users that want to use Elementor to add a custom <h1> element, may experience SEO issues due to multiple <h1> headings.
You can remove this page title completely from your markup with a filter hook, but as of this release you can do that from the theme settings page.
Unregister Hello Style.css
Hello theme loads several separate CSS files, one of them is the style.css. This file contains CSS reset rules that make sure different HTML elements are displayed correctly across multiple browsers.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://example.com/wp-content/themes/hello-elementor/style.min.css" />
Yet, some developers may prefer to use a child theme and use their own reset rules. To avoid loading two reset rules, one by Hello theme and the other by the child theme, you can disable Hello theme style.css from loading. This has the potential to improve performance by eliminating unnecessary resource, reduce HTTP requests, decrease unused CSS, lower page size and generally improve page size.
Unregister Hello Theme.css
Hello theme loads another CSS file – theme.css. This file contains CSS for different WordPress elements like the comments area, pagination box, post password forms, image align classes etc. WordPress themes are required to add these styles, however if you have a small website that doesn’t use these elements, or you want to style them yourself, you can disable these styles.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://example.com/wp-content/themes/hello-elementor/theme.min.css" />
Disabling this CSS will improve site performance even further. The site will load one less resource, if most of the features are not in use you will reduce unused CSS, the total page size will be decreased and the loading time will shorten.
Minimum Required WordPress Version Updated to 6.0
Previously, Hello Elementor Theme required WordPress 5.9 or above, the new version requires WordPress 6.0 or above. For consistency, we aligned this requirement across all our products (Hello Elementor, Elementor and Elementor Pro). All Elementor products adopt the WordPress threshold version at approximately the same time, to enable you to update all products at the same time.
Translate to your Language
We believe in providing a localized experience for all users. Hello Elementor is already available in dozens of languages, right out the box. However, we are always looking to expand our language support. That’s why we encourage all of you to participate in translating the theme into your native language.
If you’re interested in contributing, you can play a vital role in our translation efforts. Whether it’s helping with new translation strings or improving existing ones, your contribution will greatly impact the global accessibility of the theme.
To Conclude
This release is focused on website performance. The new Settings page enables you to disable many features based on your needs. With a few mouse clicks, you can optimize your website, remove unused features, disable unwanted scripts and styles and make your website super fast.
