Basel – Responsive WordPress WooCommerce Theme Review

Basel is a popular WordPress eCommerce theme offered on the ThemeForest marketplace, with an excellent user rating. The theme is meant to be minimalist, but it features a lot of elements and customization styles. It comes with 34 pre-made demo layouts that you can import in seconds. Now let’s head to the details…

Theme’s Basic Info

Pre-Packed Premium Plugins:

GTMetrix Score:

Getting Started & Importing Demo Content

The theme has its own “Dummy Content” menu in the WordPress settings panel, which makes importing the demo data very easy.

You’ll have the demo look you picked in seconds, and then you can start exploring and changing things to match your own taste. That’s what I suggest doing to save time and get things moving fast.

The process is made of two steps – Basic import and Demo versions import.

The basic import is the required minimum to see how the theme looks and move on to the specific layout you want.

On the next step, Demo Versions import, you can choose the demo you want from the dropdown. For our test I chose the Organic demo.

Basel really does a great job with the demo import – you get everything (except the original images) exactly as it looks in the demo on ThemeForest.

One thing to keep in mind, and it applies to every demo-import theme: the demo content is a starting point, not a shortcut past having actual products and copy. Importing 34 layouts and then filling none of them in is the most common way people stall out on a new store.

Theme’s Shortcodes

As mentioned above, the theme uses the WPBakery page builder (called Visual Composer at the time) and it comes with plenty of its own design elements.

Single Product Page

As for the most important part of any eCommerce theme – the single product page, where all your revenue comes from – Basel offers some extended options on top of the basic WooCommerce view.

You can make unique product pages with built-in product settings. See the list below:

From here you get a feel for all the different layouts and unique pages you can build.

Another cool thing I enjoy in Basel is the 360° product view.

Please note: to get this looking right, you’ll need pictures of your product from plenty of angles.

A good-looking 360 view requires around 18 photos of your product, shot at different angles. Budget for that before you promise it to yourself – it’s a photography job, not a theme setting.

Category Pages

For the category pages you also get a wide variety of options. You can set products in a grid view and choose different hover and button options. The quick shop works well, but there’s nothing extraordinary here.

A major con is the absence of Ajax Add to Cart or any other dynamic way of adding a product to the cart. On a store where people buy several items in one visit, a full page reload on every add is friction you can feel.

Browse the demos and explore more of Basel’s functionality in the official demo below.

Is Basel still a good choice today?

This is the question that matters most if you’re reading this review years after it was written, so let me answer it honestly rather than leave a glowing 2017 verdict sitting here forever.

The big consideration is WPBakery. Basel is built around the WPBakery page builder, and that was the sensible choice when this theme launched – almost every serious ThemeForest theme was. WordPress has moved a long way since. The block editor handles layout natively now, block themes exist, and a builder-based theme means your content is wrapped in builder markup. If you ever switch themes, that markup doesn’t come with you, and you’re rebuilding pages by hand.

That’s not a reason to panic if you already run Basel and it works. It is a reason to think twice about starting a brand-new store on a builder-based theme in 2026.

Check these three things before buying any older ThemeForest theme

• The “Last Update” date on the item page. This is the single most useful number on ThemeForest and most buyers scroll straight past it. A WooCommerce theme that hasn’t been touched in over a year is a risk, because WooCommerce itself ships breaking changes on a schedule.
• The recent reviews, not the average rating. A 4.9 average built over a decade tells you how good the theme was in 2017. Sort by newest and read what people are saying this year – that’s the theme you’d actually be buying.
• WooCommerce HPOS compatibility. WooCommerce moved to High-Performance Order Storage for orders, and themes and extensions have to declare compatibility with it. If the item page and changelog say nothing about HPOS, treat that as a warning sign about how actively it’s maintained.

And remember what a ThemeForest purchase actually includes: six months of support, extendable, plus lifetime updates for as long as the author keeps publishing them. Nobody is contractually obliged to keep updating a theme forever. On a store, where a broken checkout costs you real money, buying from an author who’s still clearly active matters more than any feature list.

My verdict: Basel was and is a genuinely nice-looking, well-built WooCommerce theme, and the product page options are still better than plain WooCommerce. If you already own it and it’s working, keep it. If you’re shopping fresh today, put it side by side with the current generation of WooCommerce themes, compare their last-update dates, and only then decide – and if you’d rather not tie yourself to a page builder at all, have a look at my roundup of the fastest WooCommerce themes first.