Monstroid2 Review – Is This WordPress Theme Worth Your Money?
In this article, I’m going to review the Monstroid2 WordPress theme by TemplateMonster. Monstroid2 is the second iteration of the original Monstroid theme and it brings with it lots of exciting features, and streamlines the entire process.
Keep reading to discover whether or not Monstroid 2 is the right choice for your next WordPress site.
Monstroid2 Theme Overview
Before we dive deep in, here’s an overall summary of this template.
Monstroid2 is a clean, modern, and highly flexible WordPress theme that can be used on a wide variety of websites – business, commercial, educational, eCommerce, online magazines, creative, agency, construction, and many more.
The multipurpose theme was built with a focus on functionality and user experience. It installs in minutes, and you can easily customize it to match your style. The template provides several home layouts, 7 customizable header styles and 4 blog layouts, allowing you to create a highly unique website.
Besides, the Monstroid2 theme ships with a powerful set of plugins to help you establish the website you desire. The plugins serve different purposes, including a drag-and-drop page builder, WooCommerce, hotel booking, mega menus, appointment booking, forums, and an events calendar.
Your purchase also grants you access to easy-to-follow documentation to guide you, and 24/7 effective and friendly support in case you run into any difficulties. And since the theme is copyrighted under GPL3 license, you can reuse it in multiple projects and freely edit according to your needs.
DOWNLOAD MONSTROID2 | VIEW THEME DEMO
Monstroid2 Theme Feature List
Below is a summary of the main features you can expect from Monstroid2 theme:
- Over 17 pre-built website designs that you can easily import (and more coming)
- 7 customizable header styles
- 4 customizable blog layouts
- Ships with a wide range of powerful plugins
- Includes an intuitive page builder to help you create custom layouts
- Can be used in multiple projects
- Supports WooCommerce, making it ideal for eCommerce
- Uses the WordPress live customizer for real time changes
- Based on the popular Twitter bootstrap framework
- Includes easy-to-use documentation to guide
- 24/7 friendly support from the developers
Monstroid2 Theme Installation and Customization Options
When you get yourself a copy of the Monstroid2 theme, your download package will include several files including documentation, license information, screenshots and plenty of other resources to be able to work with the template.
Here are easy steps to install the theme:
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes
- Click Add New > Upload Theme > Browse
- Go to the folder with the theme files on your computer
- Select Monstroid2 zip file and click Install Now
The installation process takes a few seconds after which you can go ahead and activate the theme. When you visit your site at this point, you’ll see how the theme looks as default. You’ll notice that it looks very basic with just “Hello World!” text showing.
Typically what happens at this stage is you’ll have demo content provided or something to that effect.
The Monstroid2 theme recommends installation of the TM Wizard plugin, which will help you to select the skin, install plugins and import demo data for the template.
Installation Wizard
As mentioned above, the Monstroid 2 theme comes with TemplateMonster’s theme installation wizard – and it couldn’t get easier than this.
Once you install the TM Wizard plugin, you can go on to use the installation wizard to automatically install required plugins and import demo content.
But before you get started importing demo data, you should check whether your server complies with WordPress’s minimal requirements. The installation wizard will check your system information.
As you can see above, in my case everything was okay except for the maximum execution time which was set at 30 seconds – the theme recommends 60 seconds.
I still went ahead and clicked the “NEXT” button but with my fingers crossed. Fortunately for me, everything turned out fine and I went ahead to select and install a theme skin.
Amazing Theme Skins
One of the most awesome things about Monstroid2 is the theme skins feature. It comes with 17+ pre-made website designs that cater for various industries and niches, making the template so universal.
The designs are visually appealing and range from neutral & corporate to creative & colorful.
Each theme skin comes with custom demo content for a particular topic along with a predefined set of plugins. The wizard installs required plugins and demo posts and pages depending on which skin you select.
Some of the topics and industries covered with the skins include hotel, construction, corporate, fitness, fashion, loan offers, furniture, lawyer, restaurant, startup, schools, marketing, gallery, portfolio, magazine and many more.
If you’re creating websites for clients, this is pretty awesome considering the theme is released under GPLv3 license that allows you to use it on any number of projects without limitation.
Each theme skin comes with the option to either install a lite or a full version of the demo content. If you’re on inexpensive shared hosting, the theme recommends you install the lite version of demo content avoid overloading your server resources. If you’re on dedicated servers, VPS or premium shared hosting, you can install the full version of demo data.
In my case, I choose the Corporate theme skin with lite version of demo content and the installation was pretty quick.
The installation wizard will first install a set of required plugins before importing sample data. After a moment, you’ll be ready to install demo data.
Depending on whether or not you have anything on your site, you can choose to append demo content to your existing content or replace your existing content with demo content.
During the importation process, it’ll show you the various types of sample content being imported – posts, authors, comments, media, etc.
The installation wizard on Monstroid 2 works pretty fast compared to the first Monstroid theme which took quite a while to import demo contet. It’s obvious right from the get go that the TemplateMonster team have made Monstroid2 much more faster to import and install demo data.
After installing and importing the sample content, everything on the front-end looked really good. Everything was as I expected.
You’ll notice that the images are blurred. This is typical with most themes that you buy and have demo data. They blur out the pictures so you can’t use them on your production site – you need to replace them with your own.
So apart from the blurred images, everything looked and worked exactly like the live demo on TemplateMonster’s site.
Intuitive Page Builder
The Monstroid2 WordPress theme uses Templatemonster’s PowerBuilder modular page building tool that makes it easy for you to create advanced page layouts without touching code.
With this, you can really customize each page and create any kind of layout you want. You have different stacks of rows and you also have columns and sections.
You can easily control your column formats and the different layouts that you can create. Overall, the Power Builder has diverse settings and options that allow you to really customize every little aspect of a page.
If you weren’t impressed with how Monstroid version 1 was for creating stuff, you’ll like how Monstroid 2 makes it easy to build any kind of layout you want.
Accompanying Plugins and Widgets
- Appointment Plugin – Another impressive thing with Monstroid2 is that they included an appointment booking plugin. This means you can allow your site visitors to book appointments from your website.
- Power Builder
- MotoPress Menu
- Cherry Projects
- MotoPress Hotel Booking
- Cherry MegaMenu
- The Events Calendar
- MotoPress Schedule
- TM WooCommerce Pack
Monstroid2 Theme Support and Documentation
One thing that makes Templatemonster stand out in the industry is the quality of support they offer for their products. In the case of Monstroid2 theme, 24/7 support is available if you have any questions about the theme.
Besides, the template comes with detailed documentation with step-by-step instructions on how to install and use it.
Monstroid2 Theme Pricing
The theme’s regular price is $75.
Templatemonster run’s promotions from time to time and when writing this review, the company was offering a limited-time 30% discount, allowing you to get the theme at $53.
The template is licenced under GPLv3; so you can use it on any number of projects without restrictions.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I was impressed by the speed and the different layouts and options that you can work with. I also like how the theme has different skins for different industries and topics.
It’s a great starting point for any type of WordPress site that you want to build. You can customize the layouts, colors, background images and the style altogether via the modules in the back-end. So I think this is a step in the right direction for Monstroid and I think it makes Monstroid2 a top contender among other popular WordPress themes.
It loads much quicker and it installs demo data in a fraction of the time it took Monstroid v1 to install. It gives you so many options to customize your entire site and the whole process is streamlined. Compared to many other multipurpose WordPress themes out there, it’s much better, much faster, much more powerful and much more flexible; so it definitely gets my 5-star rating.
DOWNLOAD MONSTROID2 | VIEW THEME DEMO
Angelo Silva
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I’ve worked with tens of templates and from all my experience this one is special. It’s easy to work and meets all my requirements and my clients. I also love the excellent technical team from Monster Template who are available 24/7.
Ly Mac
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When importing the demo data it asked for my wp admin then it said password is invalid when i entered. However everything turned out okay and the support team was very helpful to me. Would definitely recommend.
Justin
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Hi Ly – I have the same issue, how did you fix this?
Alain
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installing is a nightmare. And support is not easy. In addition, this is not the fastest theme, so you have to do a lot to make it perform a bit. This is probably due to the many plugins that are used and CSS files that are loaded.