Minimal Blocks Theme Review

General design

This theme looks very modern and fashionable. The main design is based on the vertical blocks putting on a wall. Every block is arranged neatly and logically.
The uniqueness of Minimal Block is the position of title, tagline and primary menu. Instead of lying on the header, they appear on the side menu on the left side. Moreover, I really like the active and energetic atmosphere that the different animations and symbols bring about.

Other elements

The default color of the block is white, combined with the black and light grey color of the text. The purpose of this combination is to make it bright and help the reader concentrate on reading.

The fonts used here are Source San Pro, Oswald and Play Fair Display. They all look modern and straight forward.

Minimal Theme is made for a media-rich blog. You can see it in the diverse ways it displays the feature photos very outstandingly. They can appear individually or accompanied by the title and excerpt, but the images still take the most places on the archive page. The outstanding layout of this page mostly lies in the Masonry structure. I like this structure since it helps the reader scan quickly all the content of your blog and makes it well-arranged. Besides, there are variety of structures like different-styled sliders and grid structure. Therefore, this theme magically becomes extremely versatile and eye-catching.

As I said before, rather than having a traditional header, there are the slide-out menu and the sidebar menu. The slide-out menu jumps in and out when you click the hamburger menu symbol on the left. When you open it, the main body of the page will be a bit narrowed down, yet it still doesn't affect the design much. Plus, the social linking icons are in the vertical sidebar menu to save space for other elements but still give a good and neat appearance.

Slide-out menu and sidebar menu

The single post page is extremely legible as the font is large and prominent. The sidebar exists on this page so I prefer hiding the slide-out menu to see broaden the body content of the post.

Single post page

Finally, maybe I’m quite strict to see that the footer area has too many elements. For example, the social menu appearing in the side menu is repeated here. I think that it’s not necessary because I can always see the social icons on the left whenever I move.

Footer

This free WordPress theme can be ready to use right after being installed. Moreover, you can take advantage of the 1-click demo import to use the theme demo as a foundation of your website. All you need is installing and activating the One Click Demo Import recommended. After that, go to the Import Demo data in the Appearance and click to the Import button. And now, your site is like the demos along with the demo content. I'm sure that every user, even a beginner like me can handle it quickly.

Otherwise, you can set up your website normally with the help of Customizer. It's also simple and easy to do.

There are many sections to set up your website and I will go into detail with some important sections. All the custom features are in the Customizer.

First of all, besides the default color, you can custom the background color of the wall, the banner overlay color, and so on. The background image can also be selected as the wall’s background. These options allow you to extremely personalize your theme and make it artistic.

Customizing color

Next, it gives you many optimization tools for the layout and styles on different pages. All the sections can be rendered properly after being chosen.

Layout options

On the single post page, you can change the minor things only like turning on/off the related posts and changing the breadcrumb's style.

The footer with 3 default columns and sidebar are 2 widget areas. It allows you to add any common widget from WordPress.com easily.

The social icons on the side menu and the footer can be enabled/disabled at the same time. You are free to add an unlimited number of URLs, and then the icons will immediately show up if you put these custom links to the Social Menu location.

Customizing social linking

Unlike social linking, the number of banner slides is limited to 3. I think it’s a modest number for me. It even lets me choose category only instead of freely choose any posts or pages.

Customizing banner slider

As for the feature post and recommended posts slider, the author is more generous with up to 6 posts. It’s enough for me to boast about my hottest posts. You can see all the actions can be done to them below.

Customizing carousel slider

Customizing footer recommendation

No matter how professional you are, you can still quickly learn how to use this theme daily with all post formats provided.

Firstly, the gallery has a good way to display the images even when they have different sizes.

Gallery

The video is displayed this way.

Video

The blockquote is distinctive in an outstanding red box, so extraordinary like this.

Blockquote

I used some tools to check SEO configuration. It hasn't been totally ready to use so you have to install an extra plugin to get SEO optimized.

I have to say that the time load of this theme is still low. You can check it by many tools and here is the result taken from PageSpeed Insights

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

You can find understandable and detailed documentation from the author. They give you many tutorial videos so that you can quickly know how to set up this theme.

In the support forum, I can't find the topic for Minimal Blocks, both free and pro version, even using the search tools. So I guess they don't support this theme in their forum or will update it later. Otherwise, you can use the support ticket instead. The support ticket system is for every user, and it's available during the weekdays. They say that the response time is about 2 or 4 days.