Amplitude Theme Review

General design

Amplitude has an intuitive design and a striking layout. That can be seen immediately in the full-screen design and the unique overlays. The overlays are the main elements used very often in this theme, giving a sense of transparency. However, the color of these overlays is grey and unchangeable, so to my mind, they make the whole appearance pretty dark.

Other elements

In the demo, you can see that the background image plays a very essential role in the creativity and beauty of this WordPress theme. It's so overwhelming that the other colors become not so important. And as I said before, the color of the overlays is quite dark to me. Maybe many users like this style, but I still wish that I could change the color of these parts.

The typography is used reasonably. It combines both San-serif and Serif family fonts: Merriweather and Assistant wisely. They make Amplitude both readable and artistic.

The most different part between the demo and this free version is the slider on the front page. In fact, the sliders in this free version are not as stunning as they are in the demo. It's also full-screen, but narrower and covered partially by the footer. Plus, I find that the grey borders make me feel that the sliders are somewhat small and restricted.

Featured sliders

I found one matter in the menu bar. The second menu level when lying on the edge of the site doesn't appear unless you swipe out the page. You can see an example in the gift below. I believe that's an inconvenient design for users.

On the archive page, the list is the only style to showcase the posts. I really love the way the author uses these creative buttons and icons to make each post more attractive and creative. As for the sidebar, you can show/hide it on the homepage, inner page or singles post page. But there is only the right sidebar, no other position is available.

The Catalog page is displayed beautifully after you install WooCommerce and create your products.

Responsive

This theme is friendly on all devices or screens. It means that the design is reasonably and beautifully shown in a tablet, smartphone, PC or tablet.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

After installing, you can use this theme right away without any enclosed plugin or extra steps.

This theme is compatible with the one-click demo import. You can read how to import all the demo data in the documentation. It's simple and quick so don't worry if you are just a beginner like me. However, this is the free version, not the pro version like the demo. That explains why after the importing process finishes, your website is still different from the demo.

If you don't want to have the demo data, you can manually set up your website by using Customizer. The work of customizing by hand doesn't take much time. You just need to set up a static homepage and then edit basic things like menu, sidebar, social media.

Along with all the necessary and interesting features for a blog, this theme is compatible with WooCommerce to turn your website into an E-commerce website.

The author doesn't suggest any plugin to have more things like Related Post, Social Sharing, Instagram Feed...So you have to find yourself.

With the Customizer, users can edit many aspects simply, mostly the basic ones.

There is an unlimited color for you to choose in the color palette for the three color sections here.

Customizing color

Changing the background image can give your website a whole new look. Moreover, it allows you to make some pre-setting to have the best fit with the page.

Customizing background image

There is a section to change the header, but when I customize it, the chosen image doesn't show up anywhere.

Customizing header image

Remember to click to turn on the slider and it will show up on the static front page. It provides you with just three items, so I'm afraid that this number isn't adequate to make use of this extraordinary feature.

Customizing sliders

The social media section is also easy to customize. However, there are only four default URL, not enough to use, I think.

Customizing social media

Amplitude covers all the common post formats that you can easily use them to make your post diverse and nice.

For example, images can be collected in a gallery. It looks nice and prominent.

Gallery

This is a full-screen single image, very attractive, right?

Full-screen single image

The video has left alignment even when I choose the center or right side.

Video

The speed and SEO haven't been optimal well yet. As for the speed, I tested by PageSpeed Insights and here is the result.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

I checked the SEO configuration by some special implements and recognized that. Unfortunately, there is no recommended plugin for SEO from the author so a beginner like me may find it hard to search for a suitable plugin to have this feature.

The documentation is comprised of all the theme-related questions. It's also written carefully with many useful illustrations that help you understand it quickly.

If you need help to customize, set up or any theme-related question about Amplitude, go to the support forum for free. But there is no topic for Amplitude so you have to go to All Other Theme topic and create your own one. Before that, you must register for an account.