Essence

Author: Colorlib

Updated: October 2026 · v3.0.0

Credits: Images from Unsplash

Essence is a women’s fashion store template built on Bootstrap 5. It has eight pages: home, shop, product, checkout, blog, blog post, customer care and contact. The layout is responsive and mobile-ready.

The home page has a new-collection hero, category tiles, a sale banner, a popular-products slider and a brand strip. The shop page filters products by category, colour, brand, price and search, and sorts them by rating, newest or price. Every page has a side bag: add a product from a card or the product page, remove items and see the total, then send the order from the checkout page. You will also find a product page with a photo slider and size and colour choices, a fashion blog, a customer care page for orders, delivery and returns, and a contact page with a map that loads on click.

What’s new in 3.0

• Bootstrap 5.3.8 (the earlier release used Bootstrap 4.1.0 and jQuery), compiled from Sass with the Bootstrap 4 proportions the design was drawn with, and plain JavaScript with no jQuery. Swiper 14 replaces Owl Carousel, native selects and range inputs replace the jQuery select and slider plugins, and the menu, side bag and back-to-top button are rewritten without plugins.
• A working shop demo: the side bag keeps its items between visits, favourites can be saved and listed, the shop filters and sorting work, and the checkout sends an order request with the bag’s contents.
• Lighter pages: all eight pages together went from 14.1 MB and 332 requests to 8.4 MB and 210 requests; the home page from 1.9 MB to 1.3 MB. Every photo has an AVIF version with the JPEG as the fallback, real dimensions and lazy loading below the first screen.
• No third-party requests: Poppins and Ubuntu are self-hosted, Font Awesome 4 is replaced by Lucide SVG icons and a small social-logo subset, and the contact page map is an OpenStreetMap map (no API key needed) that loads only when a visitor clicks it.
• Working newsletter and checkout forms with labels, validation, status messages and a spam trap (PHP handler included).
• Accessibility: a skip link, landmarks, one main heading per page, real buttons for the menu, bag, favourites and filters, keyboard access to the dropdown menus, and AA text contrast.
• New product, hero and blog photos, fictional brand names and logos, a new customer care page, page titles, descriptions and structured data.