Refined Magazine Theme Review

General Design

Refined Magazine focuses on displaying content so you can find that posts are highlighted and organized reasonably, more than images or media items. Especially, the general design can be described as you put a magazine on a table, which resembles the way you read a real magazine on your hand. Thus, reading news on this free WordPress magazine theme is so comfortable and familiar.

General design

Other Elements

The main color of Refined Magazine is blue, the popular choices to have a cool, youthful, and "hopeful" look. The use of this color evenly from top to bottom makes me feel so comfortable, like swimming in the sea on a hot day.

Using Muli and Slabo 27px, this magazine theme is highly readable, the necessary thing of a magazine theme.

Refined Magazine boasts of its clean, adequate first screen area with a well-organized header and featured posts, readable breaking news tickers with thumbnails. That design highlights and seizes people's attention to the important content, but still doesn't forget to show off the beautiful images.

However, if you don't like the content-focused style, it appears to be pretty cramped with the high density of texts and posts.

The prominent header and header image still displays nicely on single post pages. This page is also legible, airy that gives me a sense of "flow".

Single post page

Notably, at the end of these pages, you can find an attractive banner and popular posts. In this way, readers are encouraged to scan all the important content of your post after reading easily.

Under single post

The design is good on archive pages as well. As you see, featured images are super large and prominent. Moreover, the category boxes and social sharing buttons are arranged wisely: they are highlighted enough to attract readers but don't take the spotlight of posts or make this page "tangled" at all. That still ensures the importance of content in this free magazine theme.

Archive page

Responsive

In this review, I'm pretty to sure to you that no matter which kind of device and viewport this theme display, it can display beautifully.

Responsive design

Wow, after installing, if your website already has content, some parts are already set up like that so you don't have to spend a lot of time customizing:

After installing when site is not blank

Even when your website is blank, it still has the default frame for some areas like this, so convenient and easy, right?

After installing when site is blank

If you switch to instant demo import, you have to download a dummy file (you can find Refined Magazine's demo file in the documentation) and upload separate files. That's a bit inconvenient compared to an importer with predefined import files available. But I think that's not challenging at all. You can still quickly import all data and set up within a minute.

Demo importer

All the necessary features for an online magazine are nearly available. So, you don't need to install any extra plugins to have things like Social Linking, Social Sharing, Latest Post, Breaking News Tickers ...

Customization offers detailed and easy-to-use theme options.

I reviewed the color options and satisfy with them. You can choose any color to recolor almost all the elements, making your website extremely colorful.

Customizing colors

Besides, there is a background image option to help you embellish the site. But if you want to change the typography, it's impossible. I think there is no reason to change it, though.

Then, I found an unreasonable section: the header image and header advertisement banner.

Although it allows you to crop the header image, the actual image displays differently. So I guess that it follows a default frame.

Customizing header image

But when I choose an advertisement banner, the header image size changes according to the size of the advertisement banner. That's quite confusing for me.

Adding header advertisement banner

Move to the homepage widget area, I bet that is the most complicated section because if you're not careful to choose and arrange widgets here, your homepage may be quite messy.

Among all the widgets, these special ones from Refined Magazine give you beautiful and unique chances to display your posts. They're all simple to use, just like other default widgets from WordPress.

Special widgets from Refined Magazine

Lastly, there are still various theme options that I can't describe all of them in this review. You just need to know that you can quickly modify, edit, and set up them properly.

Theme Options

If you're already familiar with Gutenberg, there is nothing challenging to use this free magazine theme daily. If not, don't worry, you can quickly learn it in one day.

All the blocks are so stunning, full-screen, like this video embed:

Video embed

Or this well-organized gallery

Gallery

Checking SEO on this theme, I realized that Refined Magazine is carefully optimized for this feature.

As for speed, I tested the speed of this free WordPress magazine theme by Google PageSpeed Insights. The result is not good, but still passable, I think.

Refined Magazine theme's speed check by Google PageSpeed Insights

All you need to know about Refined Magazine are explained and instructed carefully in the documentation. It even has some video tutorials for easy understanding.

In the support forum, remember to choose Refined Magazine instead of Refined Magazine Pro to ask about this free magazine theme. You can raise topics after register and login and receive free support from the author. But I see that he replies a bit late, about after three or four days.