MH Magazine Lite Theme Review

General design

You can find that MH Magazine has a standard design of a professional magazine. Generally, it's like you are putting a white magazine on a table so readers will feel so "real" and comfortable when looking for the news. Especially, you can change the background of the table to boost the beauty of the general design.

General design

Other elements

In the demo, the black and red elements contrast with the white background of the magazine, bring about a robust style. Meanwhile, the light grey color sometimes makes it so classic. These colors are the default ones and you just can change the background of the table, so you can hardly restyle this theme's color.

It's a good choice to use Open-sans font as it's readable and "open". This default font is suitable with a "serious" newspaper, I think.

On the homepage, despite having different widgets, it still looks very well-organized. Each section and tab are well arranged and airy so that readers can feel comfortable and easy to scan and skim the content. You can select different widgets to change the homepage as much as you want in the Customizer. There are many ways to showcase your content, which are all tidy and clean.

The inner page looks nice as well. I don't have any complaints about the other page.

Single post page

Generally, I can say that all the elements of MH Themes look reasonable and "adequate". But I still feel like some special thing is missing. I expect some highlight parts that make my website more outstanding.

Responsive

On any viewport or device, this theme still adapts and looks really good with no mistake. You can use some websites to check the responsive design or try it on different devices.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

Just like other themes on WordPress.org, this theme is easy to install. You don't need any other extra step to exert it. However, it's not compatible with One-click demo import so it really takes time to turn your website into a site like a demo. You have to set up the static homepage on the Customizer and choose the homepage template for it in the Edit Page. Then, creating and arranging the widget areas may be a bit complicated. But I think that it's not difficult if you read the documentation carefully.

The most famous feature of this WordPress magazine theme is many different widget areas so that you can easily add advertisements. But it lacks some popular ones for a magazine website like Social Sharing and Social Linking to connect people.

You just need to stay in the Customizer to edit this theme. All the basic things like background image, color, header image can be edited normally.

For example, I can choose any color for the header text and background.

Customizing color

The header image can be cropped to any size as you want.

Customizing header image

In this part, I want you to pay attention to the widget section as it will decide how your homepage looks like.

The total number of widget areas is up to 12 and the number of custom widgets from MH Themes is 6.

The custom widgets are diversified, giving you many different ways to display your news.

Custom widget from MH Themes

For each custom widget, you are given the right to select one category and the number of posts to show. But you can't select single posts, so it's still quite restricted.

On the homepage, there are up to 6 widget areas. I guest that you may be a bit confused by the order of these widgets at first. It's when reading the documentation is in need.

List of Widget areas

I find no mistake with all the post formats when using every day. With all the standard formats, I can easily create different visuals for my post.

For example, I can gather all images in one gallery and it always looks neat and well-organized.

Gallery

This theme also supports video embed from popular channels.

Youtube video embed

After using some tools to analyze, I find that this WordPress magazine hasn't been totally SEO friendly yet. Thus, you have to install a plugin to have better SEO.

The speed is adequate, not too slow. I checked it by Google PageSpeed Insights. You can try other tools to test.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

I find the documentation extremely in-depth and extensive. The author wrote it really carefully with many illustrations. I'm sure that you will understand it easily.

As a free theme user, you can receive support from the author and other users in the WordPress support forum. But I don't see any official troubleshooter from MH Themes on this page so I'm not sure if they support here or not.

If you still have some trouble with it, you can read the F.A.Q sections. Your requests may be covered here.

Then, if the F.A.Q and Documentation can't help you out, you can choose to send a ticket. It's free but you should clarify your request to receive the right support.