MaxStore Theme Review

General Design of MaxStore Theme

This free eCommerce theme brings me a feeling that you should sell something like sporty clothes, cars, trainers, ... because it has a "strong" look. Actually, MaxStore design consists of so many straight lines or very thin, slim elements, which made the "hard" and "strong" appearance. However, too many elements like that may cause a side effect: things seem to be messy and stuck.

Except for the overuse of lines, this free eCommerce theme has a good design to highlight the products. You can see that the author adds some effects to the product images to make them more attractive and impressive. Especially, the "tilt" effect in the tile featured product gallery proves that this design is really suitable for the sporty, creative stuff, I have to say it again.

Moreover, the strength of MaxStore lies in the way it keeps all products so neat and clean in a symmetrical grid layout. But all the images are cropped to fit in one frame so you should pay attention to choose a proper ratio aspect for your product images.

MaxStore has two layouts for the homepage, but they're not so different from each other. Thus, I don't think this will have any big impact on the total design.

 

Other Elements

Color and Font

There is nothing special when mentioning the color and font of MaxStore eCommerce theme. All the texts are legible and straightforward, while the default grey color makes this theme a bit "cold", giving me a sense of loneliness (or perhaps, I'm just too sensitive). If you have the same thought as me, I have sad news for you: you can't change the typography of your online store and just can change a few colors of your website.

Header and Footer

As I showed above, there are too many straight lines and elements in the header, making it difficult for me to pay attention to the name of the store. Luckily, the search tool - the most important feature - has a nice design. In my opinion, lines and boxes are used reasonably here.

Personally, I think the footer doesn't match with the rest of the design. And the texts' color and style on it don't match with the background, either.

Other Inner Pages

The archive page looks pretty impressive with large post's featured images. I like the way the author shows the posts' information on the featured images, quite creative. But I don't think the center alignment for the post excerpt is a good idea. That doesn't match with the general design at all.

On the single post pages, I wish that the size and spacing of texts are bigger to enhance the readability. Perhaps this is an eCommerce site so the author focuses on the product pages more.

On the other hand, all elements in the single product page are well-organized to give your customers a memorable shopping time.

Responsive Design of MaxStore

MaxStore ensures you that your online store looks good on any device so that your customers will have the best experience.

Right after you install this free eCommerce theme, your website doesn't look like the demo. It's just like that:

But don't disappoint, you just need to do some simple steps to turn it into a beautiful online store. Overall, I reviewed the process of setting up this theme and it's quite easy so that even a beginner can do it right after reading the documentation.

This eCommerce theme support YITH WooCommerce Wishlist and WooCommerce Shortcodes plugin so you can add more features for your online store.

After installing Kirki plugin, there are more options that appear in the Customizer. But I think the author should have arranged and sorted them in a more logical way. For example, the Color, Site Background, Main Styling can be wrapped in one pannel so that when users need to customize the design, they can find them more easily.

Then, I find the interface of the Customizer is quite different from other themes I've reviewed. For instance, this is how you can customize the sidebar:

That interface is prettier and easier to deal with. But it's not native, I mean if you are a fan of the default WordPress Customizer interface, you have to get used to it.

Overall, it's quite easy to customize MaxStore theme with the Customizer and you can modify some basic and general as well as few minor details of your website.

MaxStore helps you create all standard post blocks easily.

But when you select the right or left alignment of some blocks like the gallery and video embed, they look not really good.

Like this gallery, it's not as nice as it's in the back end.

Or this video size was smaller than the original size when I chose the left alignment style for it.

The speed of this free eCommerce theme is okay, not so good but it's acceptable.

But SEO optimization hasn't been totally effective in MaxStore yet (I checked this feature using some special methods). So it needs to install some SEO plugin to have better SEO for your eCommerce site.

There is only one documentation for both pro and free version so you should read it carefully. Besides, I don't like this structure of the documentation which requires readers to load a new page when opening a new section. That wastes my time a bit.

Apart from these matters, the documentation is a good and useful place where you can find all the instructions to use this free eCommerce theme.

You can use the support ticket of Themes4WP. But in the wordpress.org support forum, I saw that the author rarely works here.