Phlox Theme Review [2023]
Phlox is a powerful modern WordPress theme that is available in a free and paid version. The theme has been around since 2013 and is constantly updated and improved since then. It’s a great theme for building any kind of website be it a small business website, eCommerce website, photographers, travelers, a portfolio website, or any other kind of website that you can think of.
Also read:
– Uncode Theme Review
– Astra Theme Review
The theme’s main features include a featured post slider, page builder, custom widgets, theme options, featured post sliders, new post formats, and great typography. The theme has over 60 free demos and over 48 pro demos. The demos are carefully crafted and are absolutely stunning. There seems to be a demo available for any kind of business. Demos can help you kick start your website project as you will have pre-built pages and layouts and you only need to customize them. You don’t need to start from scratch.
Let’s get started with the Phlox theme review.
EXPLORE PHLOX THEME
Mobile Responsiveness
People all over the world access the internet from all sorts of devices. These devices have all sorts of screen sizes. It can be difficult to get the layout right for each device. However, with a responsive theme, this becomes very easy. The Phlox theme is fully responsive, and the content of the website will automatically adapt to the screen size. This will provide a great user experience for all visitors no matter the device they use.
We tested several free and pro demos of the theme using desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. We found the theme to be responsive on all devices and laid out beautifully. There were no overflowing text or images on the screen and the demos fit in perfectly. Text size was readable on all devices and images also resized and aligned well.
Here is a desktop and mobile preview of one of the demos.
Performance
When choosing a WordPress theme one of the most important considerations you need to make is the speed of the theme. The best way to test the speed of the theme is to perform a speed test on a few demo websites. Here are the results from 2 demos of the Phlox theme.
In this demo, the website loaded rather slowly. The major culprit here was unoptimized images. The website loaded in 7.3 seconds and the page size was also on the higher side. Despite the requests being only 56, the website was still slow. Optimizing the images will help improve the load time as well as the total page size. Any website loading in over 3 seconds is considered slow. This can be a major set back for people wanting to choose the theme. The theme’s author needs to ensure all their demos are optimized. However, we went ahead and tested another demo of the theme.
Here are the results from the second test on the second demo.
This demo performed much better. As seen in the results GTMetrix did not find any unoptimized images, as was the case in the first test. The page load time was only 3.6 seconds and the page size was 1.33MB and only 90 requests. It would be possible to further optimize this demo by reducing the number of external requests. This can easily be done by combining some CSS and JS files. We believe it would be easy to get the load time to under 3 seconds with this demo.
Overall the theme is not optimized for speed out of the box and you will have to make some optimizations yourself. Some demos are performing better than others.
Design and Customization
The theme uses the popular Elementor page builder, which is one of the best and most user-friendly drag and drop page builders. This allows you to easily create stunning pages without the need for coding.
The theme also comes with 30+ exclusive Elementor elements. These can add the spice that your design might require.
You can also change the theme options and see the results instantly. Unlike many other WordPress themes, Phlox adds a variety of customization options to give you the advantage of customizing any part of your website with ease.
The theme also comes with an exclusive media gallery. You have got lovely pictures and need a competent way to present them. With the theme, you can use the WordPress built-in gallery and turn it around into an arresting and starling gallery. You can easily choose the gallery’s layout style from two ultra-modern grid and masonry layouts. Furthermore, pagination can easily be added to the gallery to make images appear instantly upon pagination.
Another outstanding feature of the theme is the best touch slider. You can easily use it to highlight your posts and it’s responsive. You can choose what posts you want in the slider and then easily choose their layout. There are 4 layout styles.
Looking at the overall design of the demos, we can only say they are spectacular. A lot of work has been put into the theme and you can see that unlike most multi-purpose themes, the designs of the demos do stand out from the crowd.
Support and Updates
As mentioned earlier the theme has been around since 2013 and has constantly been updated and improved. Often, when using a free theme one of the drawbacks is the authors tend to stop development and support. This can be risky, as WordPress is constantly updated and so are plugins and themes. If your theme is outdated, you can easily end up with a theme that is not compatible with the latest WordPress version. This is not the case with Phlox though. As clearly the team behind it continues to build on their already excellent work.
Should you get stuck somewhere and need support there is an excellent knowledge base and a video library. This can be your first point of search for a solution. Should you still not be able to solve the problem you can then hop on to the support forum.
Conclusion
Overall the Phlox theme is an excellent free theme. The design, customization options, number of demos, support are all excellently taken care of. However, the speed of the theme can be improved upon. If you are considering a free theme for your website you should definitely give Phlox a try.
EXPLORE PHLOX THEME
