Mag Lite Theme Review

General Design

At the first look, I can tell you that Mag Lite has a well-structured design. Every part of a magazine is arranged reasonably so this theme looks tidy and so clean. I think that the design of Mag Lite is most suitable for a serious news website.

And the use of straight lines and sharp elements as below dramatically contribute to the robust and strong design of this magazine theme.

Other Elements

Color and Font

The white background of content boxes with black texts help all news readable while the light grey of the ultimate background will ease your eyes. Moreover, the choice of color for the different reading areas like this is very smart. It helps readers distinguish the content easily and also make the design nicer.

And the colorful tags make this theme lively and less boring. You can change the color of these tags to any color as you want to make your site more unique.

The Roboto Condensed font gets along well with the whole design. But I think the typography somehow makes the lengthy article difficult to read because the spaces between words are quite narrow.

Homepage Design

You can scan and skim the content on the homepage easily thanks to the good structure of slider, featured content, and different widgets.

Among them, I find this blur big number so interesting:

I think that the front page is the most beautiful and interesting design, while other inner pages just have no special emphasis like the homepage.

Archive Pages Design

Besides the default layout like this:

You are given one more:

While the default one is quite creative, I love the second style more because it looks more symmetrical and has less empty and redundant space. But it's up to you to choose your favorite one!

Single Post Pages Design

The header image with the parallax effect here looks like a long ribbon, which somehow makes the single post pages more exciting. But when I used and reviewed this theme, I don't have the parallax effect for this area. So I guess it's not for the free version.

Responsive Design

I used this free magazine theme in different design. It's fine and looks reasonable in all viewports.

This is my site right after installing and activating the theme and you can see that it hasn't look like the demo yet. So I have to set up the static front page and widgets for the front page, which I find a bit complicated if you're a layman.

That's why I recommend using one-click demo import, which is much easier and faster. You don't need to do anything but install the recommended plugin and click the Import button. Then, your site is completely similar to the demo after a minute.

This free magazine theme is packed with useful features and custom widgets that are really efficient for your news or magazines site.

However, it lack Social linking and Social sharing to connect with your readers, or the Related posts section - a common feature of a magazine theme.

You will mostly spend time customizing Mag Lite with the Live Customizer. There are not many theme options and all are quite easy to use.

General Use

What I love most about Mag Lite is the visualized options, which help me imagine how my site will change easily. And I also can simply choose one among some options in drop-down menus. Very easy, right?

Besides, I am allowed to hide/show some elements by putting a tick. That saves my time customizing this free WordPress magazine theme a lot.

Especially, all the changes I made from using the Customizer are accurate as I expected.

Color Customization

But the most interesting thing I found while reviewing this free magazine theme is the color sections for the category tags. There are various color sections and the name of each section is changed according to the name of your category. That's so convenient for you to distinguish the different category tags and choose the color for them easily.

Homepage Customization

Different from most of other free WordPress magazine theme I've reviewed, you have to use widgets to set up the homepage. The widgets are named very clearly so you can easily deal with them.

Furthermore, there are many special widgets from Mag Lite. That's the most advanced feature of this magazine theme.

Be careful about choosing the right widget for the right widget area. Otherwise, it looks so weird like this:

The blockquote has some small issue with the quotation marks:

The gallery display really well:

And video looks good with proper alignment.

I tested SEO optimization with some special methods and it showed that this free magazine theme needed improving its SEO to make it totally SEO-friendly.

The speed of MagLite is not really good as you can see the result from PageSpeed Insights here.

The author links users to the Mag Pro documentation only. I try to search for the Mag Lite official documentation but still can't find it.

It's alright! You can still refer to the Mag Pro instruction but you should carefully read it because some features are only available in the pro version.

Rigorous Themes has different and separate support ticket for different themes, so remember to choose the right Mag Lite support. It's free and quick.