As themes in the WordPress repository are accompanied by a rating, choosing one for a website isn’t difficult. Let’s take the example of Blocksy. If we have a look at the stats of this template, its current rating is 5 out of 5. The number of people who have given 5 star rating is 712. Suprisingly, only 1 user has given a rating of 4. The theme’s rating is good but will it suit your website niche or does it have the features you’re looking for? Let’s find it out!
Blocksy review
After installing Blocksy, install and activate its child theme. Why should you do so? When you update a WP template, you may lose the changes you’ve made or features you’ve added to the site with the custom PHP code. To make sure this doesn’t happen, you should install and activate the Blocksy Child theme. You can download the same from the developer’s official website.
There are over 100 settings available in the WP live customizer when Blocksy is active. To open the Live Customizer, click the “Customize” option that you’ll see when the mouse is on the “Appearance” menu. To make sure that users are able to locate the settings quickly, the developer has grouped the options into these three categories – General, Post Types, Pages, and Core. Let’s have a look at the various options you’ll find in these four categories:
In the General section, you’ll find these 8 menus – general, header, footer, sidebar, colors, typography, and performance.
General: This section lets users change the layout, button style, adjust content settings, customize the form’s design, and enable/disable breadcrumbs. It also allows you to activate schema markup for your website and add social media profile links you want to show on your WP site. The layout of Blocksy is fully customizable. You can adjust the content area spacing and change the maximum width of the site as per your requirements.
Header and footer: The header and footer section of this WordPress theme features three rows. There are 12 elements you can put in these rows.
Sidebar: The template supports four types of sidebars. Like the content section, you can change the sidebar’s style by changing its width, text font, setting the gap between the widgets in it, etc.
Pages: Here, the live customizer boasts these menus – page, author, and search. You can customize these three pages from this section. The number of page layouts supported by the theme is five. Out of 5, three are of list type and the remaining are of grid style. In Blocksy, you can activate live search results for the search page.
The template supports 4 page layouts. A page on it can have a featured image and a share box. A comment form is a part of it as well. You can disable it if you don’t want people to share their thoughts.
Colors and typography: To change the color scheme of the template or the font of its content parts, click the Colors/Typography option.
Importing and exporting options: If you’d like to use the same design and theme on other websites you’ve built, the import/export option available in the General settings section will come in handy.
Post types
This section features these menus – single blog post, and categories.
Single posts: If you’re using this template on a blog website, this section is for you. Blocksy supports four single post layouts and two content area styles. You can configure it to show or hide these items – tags, featured image, author/share box, post navigation, etc. There’s an option to enable/disable related posts and comments section as well.
Category: There are five category styles in this WP theme. If you select the grid category style, you can set the number of columns the template should display in the grid. The grid items that appear on the category page are known as cards. You can customize the cards by disabling/enabling these elements – excerpt, title, featured image, post meta, divider, read more button, etc.
Core
You can manage the site identify settings, menus, widgets, and homepage, or add custom CSS to your site from this section.
Our experience
I am using this theme on two blogs (including this one). The only WordPress performance plugin I have installed on the two sites is WP Super Cache. The page speed score of the two blogs is excellent.
Reasons to use
Free: People may have a feeling that free WordPress products may have more ads than features. The thinking of such users will change when they use or switch to this template.
Blocksy is a nice theme. If you want to apply custom branding to it or use the Adobe Typekit fonts, or Google Fonts you’ve saved on your computer or want to create custom sidebars, you should buy its premium edition.
Fast: Core Web Vitals issue is hard to fix but switching to a new WP theme that has high LCP, CLS, and FCP scores is easy. Blocksy scores high in these three departments.
Simple: The template is no doubt feature rich but thanks to the right placement of options, customizing it is easy.
Supports all types of sites: As there are plenty of customization options available in it, Blocksy can be used on WP websites of all types.
If you’re looking for a beautiful multipurpose WP template for your WP site, you can switch to Blocksy.
