Salal Lite Theme Review

General design

The design is classic-oriented. You can see it through the beautiful typography, neutral, and warm color scheme, the combination of the slim curved and straight elements of the design.

The curve and straight lines in the design

Generally, it gives me a nostalgic feeling like I'm watching a classical, timeless movie.

Other elements

The charcoal blue color and grey represent for classic style, giving Salal a cool appearance, while some light brown elements highlight the special buttons and hyperlinks with warmness. They seem to contrast, but in fact, really harmonious with each other.

The typography is beautiful. Playfair Display looks classic and prominent for the heading while Segoe UI is readable. Moreover, the Kalam family font creates an emphasis so that this free WordPress blog theme becomes more creative.

Now, move to the first screen area. It looks attractive with a well-organized header and carousel. The header doesn't have many elements so it becomes airy, comfortable to users' eyes. The carousel, put on a light blue background, is more prominent and subtle.  I can say that the carousel is my favorite part of this free WordPress blog theme.

Featured slider

But when you use Salal Lite, pay attention to the featured images sizes of the post on the carousel. If they're different, the carousel will look unsymmetrical as I did when reviewing it.

Slider with the dissimilar-size featured image

There are 3 layouts for the whole page. You can choose one of them depending on your taste. When reviewing them, I see that they're all gorgeous. Especially, you can take advantage of the Wide layout and Box layout to show the delicate patterned background (or you can use your own background image and color).

Different global layout

Besides the default grid layouts, you have two others, which also look good. I hardly find any mistake with them.

Different archive page layout

The single post page makes use of simplicity in the design. It has a simple header, but still, has its own emphasis through the minor elements like the shadow of the header. The body content is well-spaced, ready to give you a sense of "flow" and readability.

Single post page

Responsive

What kind of device you use, Salal Lite still shows its beautiful and flexible design in that device. You can check it by online tools or try it on different PCs, laptops, mobiles, tablets.

Responsive design

It's quick to install and easy to utilize Salal Lite. You don't need to spend too much time on setting up your website with this free WordPress theme. However, it doesn't have one-click demo import so you have to set up it by hand using Customizer. Luckily, that work is simple even for a non-professional user like me. You just need to set up featured sliders, widgets, and choose the layout.

This free WordPress blog theme has enough necessary features for a simple blog like Social Linking, Comment, Widgets, ... But if you want to include something interesting like Social Sharing, Instagram Feed, ... to popularize your blog, you need to install plugins.

Besides, the author suggests installing Widget Options to have more widgets. You can go to the setting of this plugin and enable the needed module easily.

There are a lot of custom color sections to turn your website into a colorful one. They can be applied properly. Just choose any color in the unlimited color palette.

Customizing color

You can also change the background color or image, but remember that you just can see it when you choose the box layout or center layout.

Customizing color and image of the background

In this review, I'll reveal that you have a maximum of 8 posts to show in the featured slider. That number is enough for me. How about you? Besides, there are many sections to easily enable/disable this feature or customize it. But I wish that I can choose single posts/pages rather than just a category.

Slider setting

Then, in the Thumbnail Settings, it's said that you can enable this setting for the layout you're choosing to have a consistent size for all of your thumbnail. I'm using the grid layout so I put a tick at the equivalent options.

Thumbnail Settings

However, the result doesn't meet my expectation. These are the thumbnails before I enable it. You can see that I have a verticle size photos and has different size compared to others.

Before auto-cropping thumbnails

After enabling this section, the vertical photo is resized, but it still doesn't have a similar size as others.

After Auto-cropping thumbnails

Last, I'd like to review the Typography Settings. It just has two simple options here. When enabling the Google fonts option, there are some slight changes in terms of styling. It's hard to realize the changes if you don't pay attention to some parts. Basically, the family font is unchanged.

Typography setting - Google fonts section

As for the Dropcap section, I still can't figure out how it affects other things.

It's easy to have a day-to-day blog with all the common post formats. They look nice and get along well with the whole design.

All the media items are full-width. Even when I set up them to full block and wide block alignment,  they still look similar.

Gallery

This is the full-width video embedded.

Video embedded

A blockquote looks distinctive with the quotation marks so that you can easily recognize it among normal texts.

Blockquote

If you want to write better content with SEO, you need to install a plugin for SEO because I checked this feature and found that it's not been really effective in Salal Lite yet.

As for the speed, the result is quite good with an 88/100 score.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The author integrated both free and paid Salal themes in one documentation so you should read it carefully to know which parts can be used for Salal Lite.

The tutorial is written step-by-step and in an understandable way. However, it just includes several important parts. Some minor parts of the Customizer like Typography settings are excluded.

The free theme users can receive support from the author through the support ticket system. But you can't expect fast 27/7 support like pro theme users.