Nucleare Theme Review

General design

The first feeling Nucleare brings me is a sense of peaceful and relaxed. To avoid all the disturbing factors, the author uses very few decorative tools. He just needs some thin lines or small cute icons and symbols to embellish the appearance. That answer why it's so clean and harmonic like this.

The decorative element

Other elements

The color scheme plays the most essential part of giving the tranquility of this theme. The green elements throughout the theme make me think of nature and energy. It is also associated with freshness and safety. Besides, the light grey background color can ease my eyes so that I'm very willing to read the post all day. This combination makes me feel extremely healing and comfortable.

The Play-fair Display family font is artistic while the Archivo Narrow is readable for the body texts. I believe that it's a perfect combination.

The header is simple. All the elements are arranged in one line. But thanks to the icons and symbol, it can be less boring.

Header and social icons

The list of posts on the archive page is prominent. The large featured image, together with the hovering-effect enhance the impressive look of this page. That is also the only default layout of the free version.

Featured image on the archive page

The footer in the demo is also straightforward without any widget. You can't add footer widget columns here so I suppose that it may be quite emptry.

Overall, the design doesn't have many special things to say other than the slim design and the sense of tranquility and safety.

Responsive

It's a good new that when you use this free WordPress theme by different devices, the design is still okay. I don't see any mistake of it on my laptop, PC, tablet or even smartphone at all.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

It needs little or no effort to install and set up Nucleare. Without any enclosed plugin or requirement after you activate it, it can run flawlessly.

Despite not having the one-click demo import, I think that it is not really necessary for this theme. It's just helpful when you want to have all the demo data. But when you already have the content for your blog, you don't need it. This theme almost resembles the demo after being activated.

If you just want enough features for a simple blog, this theme can provide you the common and necessary ones. But if you desire more things to make your page an interesting and advanced one, you have to install plugins. The author doesn't suggest any so you have to find yourself.

You are able to customize the basic and some more extra elements of this theme. But I think it may be a benefit for a beginner like me as I don't have to think or waste much time for this task. Thanks to the convenient Customizer, your mission becomes very easy and speedy.

Among the basic custom features, the Colors section is the most noteworthy one. A lot of color section with the unlimited number of shades can make your page colorful.

Customizing colors

Or you can choose an image as a background image to make it more creative as well.

There is no choice for changing the typography and layout. The Nucleare Theme Option contains not many sections. But I'm amazed by the long list of social media. They give you enough popular social link track to insert URL. You just need to add the URL, its icon will appear immediately on the header. Besides, there are some minor things that you can modify in this part.

Customizing social icons

Lastly, I want to remind you that you can't add footer widgets like in the other themes. But it allows you to change the copyright texts and add a footer menu. These modification doesn't make dramatic different but at least I can manage this area to some degree. As for the only widget area, the sidebar, the author gives you all the common widgets, which can be applied properly.

This free WordPress theme is quite easy to use and you can get used to it in about 1 day. During the trial period, I didn’t see any problem when editing my post. It supplies you with the basic formats and here are some examples.

With the quotation mark and the two vertical lines, the blockquote is very unique and different compared to the other kinds of text. However, if you choose the first style with larger texts, there will be a mistake with the quotation mark like I did here.

Blockquote

Interestingly, besides the three common styles, this theme gives you two others: full-width and wide-width. They will display the post format a little wider than the other styles do.

Two other styles of the block

For example, a full-width single image.

Single full-width image

And here is the wide-width gallery.

Wide-width gallery

Regarding the SEO configuration, I checked it by some tool. It's so good that this theme has been totally ready for SEO.

The speed was tested by PageSpeed Insights. You can see the picture indicate that the score nearly reaches the excellent level. I think that's a good result for a free theme.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

I can't find the documentation for this theme anywhere. Plus, I've read on the theme homepage that if you buy the Pro version, you will receive support and documentation so I guess that the instruction is only available for the premium one.

You have to log in to access support. However, registration is only for the pro theme buyer. If you use a free theme, you can receive free support from the author in the WordPress support forum. The author response to all the topics on time here.