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If you are looking for a lightweight yet versatile WordPress theme, then Neve should be on your list. In this review, we will look at the features, customizability, pricing, as well as how you can use it to create a website with ease.
With over 200k installations as of 2021, Neve is currently one of the most popular themes in the WordPress theme directory. Its creators are Themeisle, who also developed Hestia, another popular free theme.
Neve may have a lot of things in common with other similar freemium themes. But no themes are the same. Each has its own merits, demerits, and unique points. Neve too has.
By the end of this review, you will be able to decide if Neve is right for you or not.
5 Reasons to Consider Neve
Albeit being a freemium theme, the free version gives a ton of options to customize your site.
1. Highly Customizable
High level of customizability is the main thing I like about Neve. You can use the familiar WordPress customizer to tweak the theme according to your needs.
2. Lightweight Base Theme
Although Neve comes with a ton of options to customize each part of the site, it does not sacrifice performance. The front end is pretty lightweight by keeping the size and number of requests to a bare minimum.
See my performance tests below to see how the theme fared in speed tests.
3. Ready to use Sites Library
Currently, Neve offers 120+ demo websites for kick-starting your WordPress website. Out of these, almost one-third are free too.
If you are about to use Neve on an existing blog, you might not need a demo site.
On the other hand, while creating a website from scratch, you usually don’t have any content, to begin with. In that case, demo sites save time by providing a design with some dummy content. You can import and modify it to make your own version of the design.
4. Compatible with popular page builders
The demo websites are compatible with your favourite page builders like Elementor, Beaver, and Brizy.
Apart from it, the Neve Pro includes an Elementor Booster module, which adds extra widgets like Flip Cards and Review Boxes.
5. Support for AMP
If you are not already aware, AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project aimed at providing faster web experiences for mobile users. Although it’s debatable if you should enable AMP or not, it indeed helps users on slow network connections to have a decent browsing experience.
To be compatible with AMP, there are some constraints to adhere to. For example, there cannot be any script tags in the HTML of an AMP page. Also, the size of the CSS should be less than 50KB.
These days, performance-oriented WordPress themes strive to be friendly with AMP suggestions and Neve is no different.
That means, although you still require an AMP plugin to implement it completely on your site, a compatible theme helps to reduce the number of invalidation errors.
For example, Neve’s codebase includes checking for AMP requests. If the requested page is for the AMP version, the theme won’t load the Javascript file. Otherwise, it loads as usual.
If you are looking for a lightweight yet versatile WordPress theme, then Neve should be on your list. In this review, we will look at the features, customizability, pricing, as well as how you can use it to create a website with ease.
With over 200k installations as of 2021, Neve is currently one of the most popular themes in the WordPress theme directory. Its creators are Themeisle, who also developed Hestia, another popular free theme.
Neve may have a lot of things in common with other similar freemium themes. But no themes are the same. Each has its own merits, demerits, and unique points. Neve too has.
By the end of this review, you will be able to decide if Neve is right for you or not.
5 Reasons to Consider Neve
Albeit being a freemium theme, the free version gives a ton of options to customize your site.
1. Highly Customizable
High level of customizability is the main thing I like about Neve. You can use the familiar WordPress customizer to tweak the theme according to your needs.
2. Lightweight Base Theme
Although Neve comes with a ton of options to customize each part of the site, it does not sacrifice performance. The front end is pretty lightweight by keeping the size and number of requests to a bare minimum.
See my performance tests below to see how the theme fared in speed tests.
3. Ready to use Sites Library
Currently, Neve offers 120+ demo websites for kick-starting your WordPress website. Out of these, almost one-third are free too.
If you are about to use Neve on an existing blog, you might not need a demo site.
On the other hand, while creating a website from scratch, you usually don’t have any content, to begin with. In that case, demo sites save time by providing a design with some dummy content. You can import and modify it to make your own version of the design.
4. Compatible with popular page builders
The demo websites are compatible with your favourite page builders like Elementor, Beaver, and Brizy.
Apart from it, the Neve Pro includes an Elementor Booster module, which adds extra widgets like Flip Cards and Review Boxes.
5. Support for AMP
If you are not already aware, AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project aimed at providing faster web experiences for mobile users. Although it’s debatable if you should enable AMP or not, it indeed helps users on slow network connections to have a decent browsing experience.
To be compatible with AMP, there are some constraints to adhere to. For example, there cannot be any script tags in the HTML of an AMP page. Also, the size of the CSS should be less than 50KB.
These days, performance-oriented WordPress themes strive to be friendly with AMP suggestions and Neve is no different.
That means, although you still require an AMP plugin to implement it completely on your site, a compatible theme helps to reduce the number of invalidation errors.
For example, Neve’s codebase includes checking for AMP requests. If the requested page is for the AMP version, the theme won’t load the Javascript file. Otherwise, it loads as usual.