Saraswati Blog Theme Review

General design

The design attracts people by its "noble", delicate and decent appearance. The reasonable use and repetition of the graceful floral classic patterns is the most impressive element in this theme. That gives me a big wow first time I view Saraswati and I bet that all romantic young ladies will love that design.

Other elements

With the use of Merriweather with different styles, this WordPress theme becomes very legible, solid and airy. Personally, I think that this typeface really coincided with the formal and vintage style.

The color scheme is also a great coincidence with the theme spirit. The most important color in the palette, to my mind, is the vintage green. That is the most contributory element giving the impression about amenity and nobility.

Other elements are simply and effectively designed. They look harmonious, clean and airy. For example, the header, despite having two menu bars and many elements, but still well-organized and well-balanced. Especially, each element on the header can be on/off.

There is a feature that is not displayed in the demo: featured post slider. This inspiring full-screen slider absolutely embellishes the first screen slider to a high degree.

The featured images on the archive page are large and prominent. You can change this center large image to the left or right image. The position of the sidebar can be modified as well. For example, I choose the left style with the left sidebar like this.

This style looks good, but the images become smaller. Hence, I decided to hide the sidebar to see if my images can be larger. However, there is a small mistake with my two first post like this.

Therefore, I still prefer the default style. It's the most reasonable and outstanding layout.

Next, what I love about the archive post is the gallery post. You just need to add a gallery on the top of your post, a slider gallery appears on the archive page to help people contemplate all the image conveniently.

As for the other inner page, they keep the clean, well-organized design and legibility.

Responsive

This WordPress blog has its own way to display itself very reasonably and flexibly in all kinds of screen.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

Like the other free WordPress theme, this theme is easy to install. It's also ready to use without any enclosed plugin.

You can choose to import the dummy data from the demo, which is very simple to implement. But this method only lets you have the data and your website still doesn't resemble the demo. Hence, manual setting up is required. This work is even easier with the help of Customizer. You don't need to set up complicated things like a static homepage or anything else. Just add basic elements like menu, social link and write your posts.

Along with the common features for a blog, there are many interesting ones like Sticky Sidebar and Menu, especially, the Advertisement banner in the sidebar allows you to advertise anything.

The author doesn't recommend any plugin so things like Instagram Feed or Social Sharing are just available when you find a plugin by yourself.

There are not many things to change, but I think that these basic things are adequate and less confusing for a beginner like me. Plus, you don't need to go anywhere except for the Customizer. It helps your work so simple with live preview.

For example, I can see the change immediately when selecting a new layout for the blog page. The list structure can't be changed, but it gives you multiple choice to change the image style and sidebar position as I described before. All the styles can be rendered properly.

Customizing blog layout

Customizing a featured slider is even easier. Among the category in the drop-out menu, just select one and all the posts in this category will be shown immediately.

Slider section

Besides the option in the Saraswati Blog Theme Options, other basic features can be changed properly. For instance, the color section will make your website so colorful and unique. The typography is fixed, but it's good enough so you don't need to change it.

Customizing color

The social icons come up with a custom social menu. This method is not strange if you are already familiar with WordPress themes. It supports popular social sites so you just need to insert the right URL to see the icons appear in the header.

Customizing social menu

All the standard post formats are adequated to use. In this WordPress themes review, I will describe some most noticeable features with these formats.

You can embed many URL and they are displayed very stunningly.

The gallery is neat and well-organized.

Even the blockquote also look "noble" with the quotation mark.

I find a small problem when displaying the block format like the video, gallery, image in full-width style. It overflows to the margin and is covered by the sticky sidebar as I did here.

After I checked the SEO configuration by some special tools, I found that Saraswati Blog hasn't been effectively optimized for SEO yet. You need a plugin to accomplish this feature but the author doesn't suggest any.

The speed is not a strength of this WordPress blog theme. PageSpeed Insights shows that the speed is just medium: 67/100.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

In this theme documentation, everything you need to know about this theme is well-written. The instructions are understandable, detailed and helpful. I love the sticky menu on the left because it helps me to find the needed topic so quickly and effectively.

In the support forum, you have to find the Sarawati Blog, not the Sarawati Blog Pro. In this forum, you are able to reply and create topics and receive the author's support free. But first, you need to register an account, which is also free, very easy to create and ready to use.