ListingPro Review – Top Selling WordPress Directory Theme

People looking for the best services and enterprises investing to promote their businesses has resulted in tons of directory startups. These startups cover every listing stuff – food, restaurants, bars, shopping malls, clubs, jobs, home services, or anything – you name it. Yelp, FourSquare, and Zomato are a few of the directory startups worth mentioning.

Advanced search, user experience design, performance, and proper listings are a few factors which contribute to the success of a directory listing. While searching a WordPress directory theme for a client, I encountered this amazing theme ListingPro. With ListingPro, creating a site like Yelp is just a couple of clicks away.

After using ListingPro for a while now, I’m quite overwhelmed to share this incredible theme with you. In this extensive review, I’ll be diving into the features which makes it a best-selling WordPress directory theme. Let’s get started.

⚡ ListingPro

ListingPro is a premium WordPress directory theme developed by the super awesome developers at Cridio. The company houses a team of WordPress passionates like Sam, Imran, and Naseer with expertise in the directory listing, video sharing, and classified themes.

Till now, it has gone through 30 updates, which shows seriousness and concern of the developers. Check out the update log at ThemeForest. So, kind of pretty awesome stuff by Cridio folks. 👏

👉 ListingPro uses WPBakery as a page builder to provide drag and drop page building functionality. WPBakery is a premium WordPress page builder but comes in the package with ListingPro for free.

👉 For the backend, ListingPro doesn’t use the native WordPress API to provide options and settings. Instead, it uses Redux Framework to provide a unique settings experience which is totally fine. In fact, most of the themes at ThemeForest including some big names like Avada relies on Redux for Theme Options.

So, It was great to check this out. 💯

💰 Pricing

ListingPro is exclusively available on ThemeForest for $69. it includes future updates and up to 6 months support. You can additionally buy 12 months support for $21.38.

🍕 Features

ListingPro is jam-packed with tons of incredible features. I will try to cover most of the features that make it stand out from a directory theme perspective.

→ Smart Search

One of the primary features of a directory theme is search capability. The more you streamline the search process, better will be the user experience. The search options which this theme offers, are literally dope.

❓ What you want to search – food, restaurants, real estate, etc. Or just skip it and search for every listing for a particular location.

🤞 Where you need the listings? It includes auto detect location feature as well as allow manual entry.

🔍 Advanced Filter Options: You can filter your result through advanced filter options. It includes filtering by open hours, near you, by price, by category.

👓 Sorting Options: You can sort the results by its views, reviews, and ratings.

🌏 Google Maps: Last but not least is, it provides you the location of a particular listing on Google Maps.

→ Listing Features

ListingPro offers a great variety of listing features. It includes almost every detail that you can think of.

🖼 Video & Gallery: You can add a YouTube video and even image gallery to describe your listing.

🗒 Description: Describe your listing in as much detail as you want.

📌 FAQs: Ability to add FAQs regarding the listing.

🏷 Price Range: You can add your price ranges to perform better at search results.

✅ Verified Listing: If you’re a business owner, you can claim ownership to add more authenticity.

📇 Contact Details: You may add contact details including email, contact number, WhatsApp number, website, and social media handlers.

⏰ Multiple Working Hours: In its recent update, multiple working hours feature was introduced. It lets you add multiple working hours for a single day. For example, it allows you to add working hours like 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM and then 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM for a single day.

🗺 Google Maps: You can manually add longitude and latitude or pinpoint the location on maps to add in the listing.

🗣 Reviews: Users can add reviews to your listings and even report if something looks wrong.

Check out GIF of a sample listing which I created with ListingPro.

→ Monetization

ListingPro provides an end to end directory solution. This means advertisers/business owners can join your directory and get their own dashboard to handle the things. 

Now the thing here is, you can offer free as well as paid listings. For the paid listings, you can offer different packages. Users can choose from the packages and post their listings. ListingPro allows payments through Paypal and Stripe out of the box.

→ Intuitive Dashboard

ListingPro provides a minimal and intuitive personal dashboard to your users. In their dashboard, users can see stats, reviews on their listings, invoices, packages they have subscribed, and see saved listings.

→ Simplified Listing Submission

Submitting a listing with ListingPro is as simple as it can get. Click on the Add Listing button in the top left corner, add the details, drag and drop images, and you’re done. 🎯

→ Translation Ready

ListingPro contains the .pot which you need to get started with translation. In short, it supports translation to other languages.

→ Documentation

As far as theme documentation is concerned, then ListingPro has decently covered this part as well. They are offering a well-consolidated Help Center to its customers from where they can seek guidance about their queries.

💯 Another unique feature which I really liked about their documentation is the way they have created sections for query types. People can easily get directed to Knowledge Base, Video Tutorials or Help Desk according to their queries.

Also, if you visit the YouTube channel of ListingPro you’ll find a complete playlist of tutorials on it. It contains 14 videos to help you get started with ListingPro.

🔥 Setting Up ListingPro

Considering the fact that ListingPro is an all-purpose WordPress listing theme. Its setup is pretty much simple and straightforward. Follow the quick steps below to get started.

→ Step #1

Go to WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes > Add New. Click Upload Theme button, select the .zip theme file, install, and activate it.

→ Step #2

After activation, it will take you through a quick settings wizard. It will install required plugins and import dummy content on your site. All the required plugins are built in, you don’t need to purchase or install them manually. 

So, just two steps and your site is ready. 🚀

→ Step #3

ListingPro adds a couple of menus in the dashboard to manage data and a theme settings menu. Theme settings menu contains a very long submenu for different settings.

⚙ Adding a Listing

Follow quick steps below to add a listing.

→ Step #1

You can add listing from the dashboard or from the frontend. If you’re not adding as an admin then first you need to be a member. Click on the Join Now button and Register yourself.

→ Step #2

Go to your dashboard and then Listings > Add New  Add title, description, images, and all the other details. Once you’re done, hit Publish button.

And your listing is live. So, with ListingPro adding a new listing is just two steps away.

Check out the GIF in features sections to see how to add listing from the frontend.

🤔 Is It A Perfect Theme?

It’s pretty amazing to see what ListingPro has to offer and what it has achieved during a short span of its life. Tons of sales, honors, pretty long changelog, and a major update on the way. However, there are certain grey areas which need attention.

→ Redux Framework

I have mentioned earlier, ListingPro uses Redux Framework for its backend settings’ design over native WordPress API. It’s pretty fast and quite good for prototyping and testing. If you check it’s GitHub repository it has an ample community and growing well.

But the question here is, is it really a good idea to use a third party framework over native API in a mature product like ListingPro? I mean how do they plan to cope up with the updates and new functionalities in the core?

→ Documentation

ListingPro offers quite a good documentation. But if you go through the videos, you’ll find out some significant inconsistencies. Not all videos are recorded by the same person, the difference in quality, missing voice-overs, and use of bad quality of mic in few videos.

I can understand that startups struggle in the start, but when you have achieved this much should not you improve it? Through quality documentation, you definitely build a credible user base and save them from a lot of efforts.

→ Settings

The users’ dashboard of ListingPro is pretty awesome. Here, you’ll find two type of settings – Sample Options and Theme Options. At first, they are little confusing, theme options are the actual theme settings, while sample options look more like documentation for customizing the theme.

The good thing is, once you figure out these little things, you will realize features and performance of ListingPro outclass all these shortcomings. ListingPro has not yet reached its anniversary, things are evolving and I hope folks at Cridio might be considering these things.

Another thing is, with Gutenberg is coming to the core soon, it could be just the right time to refactor the codebase.

🆕 UPDATE: ListingPro v1.3

Also, while talking to Sam, he told that the team is working towards a major theme update which they plan to release by the end of April which also marks the first anniversary for ListingPro. It’s going to be version 1.3 for ListingPro and some key highlights of the beta version include:

• Two new pre-built niche designs.
• Dynamic Menu for Restaurants.
• Deals & Coupons + Expire Counter.
• Custom Lead Form Generator for Quotes or Bookings.

The new version is still in the making. Once it goes live, I’ll update you what’s new in it.

🙌 Final Thoughts

So, if you are looking for an extensive listing/directory theme to sell your product with a fully matured dashboard then ListingPro is the best choice available in the market. If you have ever used ListingPro or any other directory theme, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.