Adagio Lite Theme Review

General design

When I first skimmed the design, I thought that the design is very simple. But when looking closely, it turns out that the design is pretty meticulous to some extent. The author is really good at using all the elements and mixing them together harmoniously. That's why the appearance is simple, clean but very sophisticated and attractive at the same time.

Generally, this theme looks classic, clean but still, artistic and attractive.

Other elements

As a classic-oriented theme, the color palette contains grey and white colors. These choices are like bringing me back to the time, feeling extremely nostalgic. Similarly, the family fonts: Open-sans and Playfair-Display contribute considerably to the classic appearance of Adagio Lite. However, I can't change the body texts, which are quite slim and difficult for me to read if the post is too long.

The full-screen hero image is the most attractive part. Together with the full-screen menu, they make the first screen extremely impressive. This menu contains the sidebar, quite different from most of the other themes, right? This position of the sidebar can save the room for the body area and still appear conveniently in the sticky menu whenever you move. Plus, I really love the vertical page title and social icons on the 2 sides of this image, which look like the decorative patterns. Lastly, remember that this demo is the pro version, so you just have an image, not a post with title and excerpt like in the demo.

Slider and full-screen menu

The featured images of the posts on the archive page are beautified by the shadow effect. When I hover the picture, I feel like touching a 3D image. That makes the theme more lively and interesting.

The archive page of the demo

However, this is the design of the pro version. As for the free theme, the images are super large, nearly full-screen. Despite not having the shadow effect, these images on this page are still impressive.

The archive page of the free version

The footer is quite "humble" compare to the other factor but it's my favorite part. They are well-balanced, airy and still very nice thanks to the elegant social icons and a dividing thin line.

Footer

The most stunning feature on the single post page is the full-screen featured image. The heading and information are much smaller than this image so the first screen area focuses more on the image-heavy case of your blog.

Single post page

Responsive

Users can see the nice design of this theme on any devices. On a computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone the layout and design are still good. However, the hero image doesn't keep its full size in the small viewport like a smartphone or tablet.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

Right after you install, you can use this free WordPress theme without any extra steps or enclosed plugin. But it's not compatible with one-click demo import so after you activate the theme, it will not look like the demo if you have a new website.

And in case your website already has full content, manual set up is simple. You just need to set up the header image, social linking, and footer in the Customizer.

It's not a feature-rich theme so many extra features like Instagram Feed, Social Sharing or Related Posts are not available. But you still possess the necessary ones for your blog. Plus, you can use the Portfolios from the JetPack plugin.

To find more features, you have to find and install plugins yourself without any suggestion from the author.

This theme supports all the common and basic editable sections. The Customization will help you modify them rapidly. I test all the sections on my website to write this WordPress theme review and here are some most noticeable sections for you.

For example, color can be editable properly.

Customizing color

And this is how you can choose a background image and set it up to make the best fit with your page.

Customizing background image

The hero image remains the default aspect ratio. So you can still crop it but have to keep the default dimension.

Customizing hero image

Next, by creating a social menu and add it to the social menu location, you are free to add any URL you want. If your social pages are popular, their icons will show up very beautifully on the header and footer.

Customizing social menu

The last words, there are three widget areas for you to add all the common widgets from the WordPress theme. Notably, the footer has 2 default widget columns so you should add the even number of the widget to make it balanced.

Customizing footer widget

To get familiar with this WordPress blog theme, you just need to spend half of a day. The necessary formats for a blog are available and display very nicely.

The video has a large screen, very attractive.

Video

The single image is very stunning and large as well.

Single image

The gallery is well-organized and neat even when the images have different sizes.

Gallery

This free WordPress theme hasn't been totally ready for SEO. I hope that the author will update it soon or suggest a plugin for SEO so that a beginner like me can have this feature easily.

The speed is medium, not excellent but I think it's quite acceptable. You can see the result when I checked the speed by PageSpeed Insight.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

At the moment I can't find the documentation for this theme. So I guess that only the pro version has the instruction.

There is an F.A.Q that gives you the instruction related to presale matter. If there is any issue about using the theme, you can contact the theme author via a free support ticket to ask for support. Plus, you can also have the answer from the author in the WordPress support forum. He replies to the topic shortly in a few hours.