Neve Theme Review

General design

All the pre-built demos from Neve has one thing in common: cleanness and minimalism. But if you need creativity, you'll have creativity. See this demo, it will never let you down.

And when you want elegance, there are so many choices for you like this demo:

Generally, every element is well-arranged from top to bottom, very airy and readable. Therefore, that design can fit with the majority and never be outdated.

Other elements

Color and Font

The color orient to elegance so light grey, black and white play the principal role in all the demos. In addition, some other colors are added in small parts to highlight and make the design less boring. The reasonable combination of colors makes all demos so ethereal and harmonious.

There are different font styles used in all the demos of Neve, but they all focus on readability and minimalism. The popular and simple font like Open-sans, Poppins, Monserrat, ... are the favored because they can coincide with the general spirit of the theme, bringing about simplicity and solidness.

Layout

The page layout can be full-width or container. Both look good and have their own advantage. It's up to you to choose one as long as you're satisfied with it.

Animation

Finally, I'm impressed with the use of animation. For example, the Original demo looks more creative thanks to many interesting effects. Despite the frequent use of animations, they don't make your website glitzy at all. They're slow enough and diverse, thus giving you a strong impression at the first load.

Responsive

Neve looks great on all kinds of devices and screens, including handheld devices. You can test in on PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

After installing the Neve theme, setting up is the most crucial part. You can choose to use instant demo import tool or traditional way to set up your website.

I'm afraid that it's complicated to manually set up because you have to set the static homepage, homepage template and use page builder to have a similar page like the demo. So, I recommend that you should use the instant demo import tool. It's quick and simple. You just need to choose one demo there and choose whether to import all the elements or just some below:

After all, the importing process ends after less than a minute. Then, you will have a website look perfectly like the demo you want.

Interestingly, you can choose one demo created by one of the most popular page builders here. My favorite is Beaver Builder so I will choose it and the Original demo. I also wish to use Thrive Architect and Divi builder but all the demos built from these page builders are not free. Even some demos from other page builders are paid so I can't choose any as desired. However, as a free user, I think the number of free demos is adequate (more than 30 demos).

This superb free multipurpose theme can fit anywhere thanks to multiple page builder plugins compatibilities. From common page builder like Brizy, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect and the special page builder from Divi.

Besides, Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library plugin is specially designed for Neve will provide you with more amazing Gutenberg blocks like Author bio, Font Awesome Icons, Plugin Card, ...

Finally, after having Orbit Fox plugin, more extraordinary features are activated like Social Sharing, Menu Icons, Policy Notice, Page Builder Widgets, ... They make your website a full-function and feature-rich one without using other plugins or adding code.

Customize with Page Builder

Just like any theme that supports drag-and-drop page builder, you're able to highly customize this free multipurpose theme with page builders. However, if you just use a free version of the page builder, you just have the basic features. To have more modules, it's compulsory to buy a Pro page builder.

Customize in Dashboard

Orbit Fox plugin plays an important role in giving more theme features as I mentioned earlier. It's also simple to turn on/off the modules include here.

Customize with Customizer Tool

Then, the Customizer with useful theme options, especially the footer and header builder, will make your work of customizing so much easy.

General point

The interface of the Customizer is so intuitive. You don't need to scroll down and down and look for the wanted section in a long list like other themes. With Neve, this free multipurpose theme can make your work faster by giving an optimized interface like this.

It's smartly designed, arranged and sorted reasonably.

Header and Footer

Notably, the drag-and-drop header and tooter builder allows you to design and set up these areas conveniently. But if you're not familiar with this kind of tool, it's a bit difficult first.

However, this is free Neve so the number of modules for each area is limited: Logo & Site Identity module and Primary module for header, and Copyright module for Footer.

Other sections can be managed normally like other themes.

Color and Font

When dealing with color, you can immediately see the changes. It's free to choose any color you want for the color sections here. They can make your website so colorful.

It's also simple to apply new fonts and styles for your Body text and Heading. Besides many standard fonts, these options include text style to help you style them as much as you want. And what I love most about Neve is that all the typography sections can be rendered properly without any mistake.

Besides common blocks from Gutenberg, you have many advanced and useful blocks from Otter as I mentioned earlier. They'll be all easily utilized if you're already familiar with Gutenberg. Especially, a lot of advanced settings will make your block extremely lively, funny and attractive.

For example, this is the Advanced Heading with color and animation. It makes your post so unique, right?

The common Gutenberg blocks display nicely. Particularly, the full-width alignment makes your media items tremendously outstanding.

Then, I explore that Neve has a special list of options in Post Editor. Therefore, modifying page/post layout becomes so simple. You can save your time because you can set up the layout and some elements right here.

After checking SEO statistics, I found that SEO hasn't worked effectively in Neve free theme yet. So you need a plugin for SEO. However, there is no kind of that plugin among many recommended plugins.

If you use Neve free theme on your computer, the speed is excellent. But it's quite low if you use this free multipurpose theme on mobile devices. You can see the speed test result by Google PageSpeed Insights here.

Don't mistake Neve with Neve Pro Documentation. Neve Documentation includes all the necessary instructions from installation to set up, customization, AMP compatibility, blocks template library, to using page builders. They are all written carefully, understandable and even clearly explained by a video tutorial.

By joining the WordPress.org support forum, users can receive support from other users and the Neve support team. However, the number of questions is big so you should wait for one or two days.