Regular News Theme Review

General Design

Regular News focuses on readability and elegance, yet with prominence. That's proved by the extensive layout and texts as well as the eye-comforting layout. Besides, the straight lines and low border-radius makes this free magazine theme sharp and "strong".

Other Elements

The background of the first screen area is dark, which causes a strong impression at first sight. And then when scrolling down to read, it's comfortable and legible with the lighter background color. Besides, there are many different colors used in the Category tags so that you can easily recognize and differentiate them. However, I think that various colors like that may be a bit distracting and doesn't match with the elegance of Regular News. Perhaps, if you love this colorful style, you will like them.

Lato family font is used for body texts in order to make this free magazine theme readable. On the other hand, Frank Ruhl Libre - the beautiful and classic style family font - emphasizes the headings and gives Regular News a classy look.

The global layout, besides the full-width style, there is the container style. But, in my view, the container style makes the whole theme quite narrow so I prefer the default full-width one.

Container-style layout

I don't need to review much about the featured content area. You already see how outstanding it is, don't you? This is absolutely the most valuable design, which shows the featured post in the most well-organized and unique layout.

Down the featured content area, the Call to Action with extensive layouts will attract your reader more than every other section. Then, other articles are arranged in a balanced layout with comfortable light blue boxes.

On archive pages, this free magazine theme still keeps the stunning appearance thanks to the full-screen and overwhelming header image. Moreover, all posts are listed separately, prominently, thus giving a balanced and clear look.

Full-screen header image

Single post pages are also beautiful with large and attractive featured images of posts on the header image. What's more, no matter how the featured images' sizes of your posts are, they display stunningly with one default size in the header. That keeps this area symmetrical and united from page to page.

Responsive

This free magazine theme looks good in all viewports. However, because of the restricted width of mobile screens, the featured content area can't keep the cool look like it is in computer screens.

Responsive design

Regular News is a ready-to-use theme so it can be used immediately after installing. But you need to do some more steps to has a beautiful homepage, particularly, the featured content area like the demo. Without choosing a static homepage, you just need to enable front page sections in the Customizer and set up it in a very simple way.

If you want to import a demo file instantly, the Instant Demo Importer can help. However, after installing the One-click Demo Import plugin in the recommended actions tab, I found it's said that no predefined import files available in this theme. I asked for this in the support forum and they said that the demo file for the free version isn't available now. Therefore, you need to have your own file to import here, which is quite inconvenient, especially for a layman like me.

You don't need to install any extra plugin to have the crucial features for a magazine like the Latest News, Breaking News Ticker. You even have a header widget to add advertisement in the most prominent way.

The Customizer interface is optimized and intuitive so that users can quickly understand it. For example, these symbols allow you to choose one among the layouts in a blink of an eye.

Customizing layout

Moreover, I bet that nothing is simpler than customizing the front page of this free magazine theme. When starting to write this review, I thought that it was complicated, indeed, it's so easy. All the sections are wrapped in the Front Page section. You just need to enable/disable them and select a post/category for each part of the front page.

Take the Trending News section as an example:

Customizing Trending News

Yet I find a disadvantage: you must choose one category instead of different posts/pages. Besides, the Trending News, Must Read, and Popular section only show the 3 or 5 latest posts in the chosen category so it's impossible to choose any items you want. If you have any interesting posts but it's published a long time ago, you can't display them in these sections.

Then, I will review the Top Bar setting. The header image and ads image are okay, but you should know that the advertisement image only appears when you insert Ads URL.

Customizing header image and advertisement

Moreover, the ideal size of the image is of 900px x 100px. Otherwise, it will look disproportionate with the header area and change the default frame of the header image like this:

Customizing the advertisement banner with inappropriate size

That's all I want you to pay attention to after reviewing this free magazine theme. Other Customization sections are just okay and easy to work with.

This free magazine theme is easy to use every day with all standard blocks from the Gutenberg editor. The only thing I don't like is that the video block is not full-width if you use the full-width style for the global layout. It happens even when I choose a similar alignment with other blocks. So the whole post looks a bit unsymmetrical.

The video display is not full-width

Regular News has adequate speed, not really excellent but acceptable.

Free Regular News theme's speed check by Google PageSpeed Insights

But SEO hasn't been really well-optimized yet. I know that after verifying with some tools. So I recommend that you should install a plugin for SEO to make it more complete.

The documentation is sufficient and understandable. But it should be included with more images to make things clearer.

Free users still can receive equal support from the author in the support forum. You just need to log in and create a new topic, and of course, it's free. The author replied to my topic really quickly, just within less than 24h.

Quick response from Regular News support team