Blocksy is one of our top three preferred WordPress themes. We love its modular design, simplicity in use and clean architecture. The theme is available in two versions: a Free and a Pro version. The Blocksy theme review below covers both versions.
Free vs. Premium Blocksy theme versions
The free version has far less functionalities comparing to the premium theme edition. However, some fundamentals are available in both free and premium. For example, the following functionalities are available in both: custom widgets functionality, related posts or trending posts.
You will be pleased to find that the free version includes key functionalities. For example, posts, global color palette, or Google Fonts.
The header builder is included in both versions. It can be used to edit your WordPress website he header. Yet, only premium users are able to perform advanced header functionalities. For example, the access to multiple conditional headers is available only in the pro version.
Similarly, the footer builder is available in both versions.
Both the free and the premium version include WooCommerce support. Yet, the premium version includes far more features such as floating cart, gallery slider, or, wishlist.
Creating and adapting a layout with Blocksy is easy
Using the theme is easy. You can start by importing one of the starter sites included. Further, everything is quite predictable and intuitive. It has been one of the smoothest WordPress editing experiences. By installing the Blocksy Companion plugin, you will have access to many useful features, demo templates and extensions.
One key-extension is the deep integration with Adobe Fonts. After activating this extension, Adobe customers will be able to easily use Adobe fonts for their project.
Easy to configure & adapts to your needs
One of the key strengths of the theme is how easy it is to configure it. The theme benefits from a modular design and architecture. This facilitates a stress-free way to configure your design vision.
First, there are many blocks that could be configured. Set up your own look and feel easy by starting with the header. You can also manage multiple advanced headers. Second, there are content blocks to be shown at almost any location if you wish. Each of these could be configured or customized as desired. For example, you can create your own footer using this.
You can preview many of the available modular blocks in the example starter sites. The authors made them available. Beautifully crafted, these examples were designed to illustrate the true potential of the theme. The authors made sure to cover a wide range of industries such as travel, business or news. You can create a presentation website for a mobile app as included in the examples. We found all these examples impressive and designed with a lot of attention to detail during the Blocksy theme review.
Simplicity makes it look great
Simplicity is one of the reasons why Blocksy is great. The theme makes use of ample whitespace, ensuring a clear focus for key elements. White-spacing is important for a modern design, since it helps publishers to highlight easily key messages. The focus point it is increased by isolating a message in the design. Thus, this makes it easier to convey key messages and it increases readability. In the end, this will help in your conversion strategy. A clean clear message contributes towards a conversion edge. Furthermore, the focused layout could be used to highlight key call to actions.
The theme has also many designs based on large photography. This helps creating a highly visual website with lots of images. As a result, this facilitates an emotional connection with your visitors.
You might not prefer simplicity in some situations. For example, if you want to create a magazine style of a portal. However, one might argue that there are website areas where simplicity it is still relevant. Like in this case. For example, the individual articles could still rely on a minimalism design. On the other hand, you would expect that homepages will be richer and less simple. It is quite normal for a magazine news homepage to have a lot of columns and widgets. The theme has a dedicated News starter site for this use case.
A fast-loading WordPress theme
One of the key performance criteria for any WordPress theme is how fast it loads. This is where Blocksy exceeds. The theme is very light and it is designed to load fast. This could help a lot in achieving better rankings in search engines. Modern search engines have their own ranking formula when evaluating how websites should be positioned in the results. And the loading speed is one relevant dimension of the search engine ranking formula.
There are authorities that evaluate web page performance such as Google PageSpeed, Pingdom, or GTmetrix. The Blocksy theme achieves high ranking page loading & performance scores. At least according to the claims on the official Blocksy site that we found during the Blocksy review. The theme performance achievements are detailed on the official website.
As with any other theme, you need to be careful about adding too many plugins and extensions. The theme itself is reasonable light weight. Yet, you could still reach a heavy weight if you add too many plugins to it. This will apply to any theme. It is always good to be circumspect and to minimize the use of plugins and extensions.
Comprehensive documentation found during Blocksy WordPress theme review
The theme has an entire area dedicated to documentation on its official website. Here, you can find guidance on how to start using the Blocksy theme. For instance, you can learn how to install and activate it.
Advanced users will find in the documentation website how to configure advanced headers or footers. For example, you could learn how to create a sticky header.
The documentation also provides insights on how to integrate with other technologies such as Divi. Furthermore, you will find in depth guidance on using the theme together WooCommerce if you want to build an online shop.
WooCommerce Integration
WooCommerce is one established eshops platform. It is one of the first choices of many users when considering an online shop. Therefore, we are happy to see that Blocksy provide key WooCommerce integrations and features.
For example, Blocksy makes it easier to deal with SKUs (stock keeping units) by facilitating search functionalities for your visitors. How about enabling a shopping cart for your website? Everyone knows that a shopping cart is the fundamental feature for an online shop. In this case you will find quite useful the add to shopping cart functionality.
Blocksy also provides many ways to list your products. You could find individual product pages layouts or specific products listings such as galleries or sliders.
As a result, Blocksy is probably one of the best WordPress themes out there. The theme is easy to use, and it has a clean design. The websites created with this theme could load reasonably fast. Lastly, all the provided artifact and the example starter sites could help you to create a professional and beautiful website.
You can learn more about the Blocky theme here: