Blover Theme Review

General design

Clean, simple and bright, which are the main temperaments of Blover. It has a sleek design focusing on displaying images and reading efficiency. Besides, the principal element creating and decorating the design is the thin straight lines. They help the appearance solid, straightforward, and catchy as well.

Other elements

The use of Amiri and Work Sans with a large size makes this theme readable and clear. The color scheme in the demo contains just the basic colors like black, white and light grey. They bring about the simpleness and cleanness but causing no impression to me when I've first skimmed. Don't worry, you can change the color scheme easily when using it and it'll be much more creative.

My eyes are attracted by the full-screen slider. The title on it encourages people to explore this post, which is such a wise idea. Especially, an overlay makes the title more prominent and clear.

Full-screen slider

Furthermore, in the Customizer, you are able to choose the height and size of the slider. That allows you to change your first screen area flexibly.

Besides the list of posts on the archive page, there are more layouts for you to choose from. The masonry layout helps you show off more posts, the list with large featured images is more suitable with an image-based blog, or you can show or hide the sidebar. It depends on your purpose and it's so good to see all the layouts are beautiful.

Masonry layout with the right sidebar

Responsive

The design looks nice in all viewports without any mistake. I used this WordPress blog theme on my smartphone and tablet, and I'm very satisfied with the design.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

There is nothing difficult to install and make Blover run immediately. But it's quite difficult for your website to resemble the demo. This WordPress blog theme isn't compatible with One-click demo import so you have to set up your website by hand.

There are two most remarkable steps: setting up the slider and the popular post widgets at the top of the theme.

The slider is easily customizable in Edit Post. You can choose any post without limitation just by making it "Stick to the top of the blog"

Choose the post for the slider

But it's more complicated to create the popular post widget. First, it needs you to install WordPress Popular Posts in the recommended plugins tag. Second, go to the Customizer>Widget>Top. After you install this plugin, there is a new widget called WordPress Popular Posts. I find it pretty hard to edit this section as you have to find the post ID, author ID, and taxonomy ID. A beginner like me doesn't even know what they are and have to read the documentation so carefully. Lastly, you should know that it will display your post according to the number of views.

Customizing Popular post widget

Besides all the standard features, the author suggests many plugins to help you quickly have more. But the most popular ones for a blog like Social Sharing or Instagram Feed aren't compatible with any plugins here.

Along with using Customizer, you have to use Dashboard to customize this theme as I described in the Installation and Set up. Except for WordPress Popular Posts widgets, which is complicated to edit, the other aspects can be changed in a simple way.

There are many color sections, except for the background color section, to make your website colorful.

Customizing color

You can't crop the header image, but it allows you to choose 2 styles for this area and both styles look good.

Customizing header image

There are a lot of things to do in the Homepage section. In this section, the most interesting thing is the Blog homepage layout. The author gives you up to 4 styles for this area so you can display your posts here flexibly.

Customizing homepage

Unlike most of the other themes, this WordPress blog has more than two widget areas. All the widgets from WordPress are rendered properly here.

Widget areas

Finally, adding a social menu is no more a difficult task. By creating custom links and add the menu to the Social menu location, you can have any social icon as many as you want.

Customizing social menu

All the common post formats are ready to use and they all look good.

The gallery is creative and well-organized.

Gallery

The blockquote looks not much different from the other texts.

Blockquote

The video has an adequate frame to watch.

Video

After checking the SEO configuration by some tools, I find that this theme has been perfectly optimized for SEO.

The speed was checked by PageSpeed Insights. It shows that the speed is medium, not fast but still acceptable.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The table of content will help you jump to the needed topic immediately when you click its title in the list. The author creates very helpful detailed documentation with step-by-step instructions and illustrations.

In the WordPress support forum, besides the help of other users, you can also receive official support from the author.