The launch of any website involves thorough planning. To make your business appear more noticeable and professional on the web, you need to play wisely when choosing a predesigned theme that would be a perfect match for a website.
While looking for the best solution for blogging purposes on a news magazine, many of us need to decide if it’s the visual appeal or functionality that is the most important for us. Things got so much easier after the release of the Kicker Elementor WordPress theme in May 2021.
The versatile WordPress theme represents a perfect combination of a catching design and outstanding functionality combined in one design. Besides making your blog or news magazine look more remarkable, Kicker – Multipurpose Blog Magazine WordPress Theme will make your project faster and mobile-friendly. Besides, it includes a bunch of useful features needed for the launch of your topic-specific web resource.
Table of Contents
1. Multiple Demo Skins
2. AMP & Site Speed
3. Colors & Fonts
4. Elementor Page Builder
5. Ready-made Post Layouts
6. Ads & Banners
7. WooCommerce
8. Menu Panels & Mega Menu
9. Custom Popups & Newsletters
10. GDPR & Cookies
11. Localization-friendly, Multilingual & RTL
1. Multiple Demo Skins
Kicker is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that allows you to select ready-to-go demo skins suited for blogging and media-related projects. The demos included in the theme’s packers are ready to be applied for a range of personal and business purposes, including websites dedicated to fitness, fashion, technology, game portals, and other topics.
The number of demo skins grows bigger and more diverse with the release of monthly updates. The theme’s developers will release at least one update per month, including at least one new demo. Every skin included in the theme’s pack features a versatile design intended to make your business look more competitive.
For example, take a look at the theme’s Main Skin. It’s a versatile solution suited for the launch of a news portal.
Cyber Skin represents a perfect combination of visually striking elements and awesome typography patterns that make the design look special.
The Kicker theme includes a demo skin suited for a fashion website. The skin looks clean and modern, featuring striking visual effects, readable fonts, and many useful elements suited for fashion sites.
If you are looking for a ready-made design for your sports website, the Sports & Fitness Skin will come in handy for this purpose.
The theme’s package includes plenty of other demo skins that you may use for a range of other topics.
2. AMP & Site Speed
Being mobile-friendly is an indispensable feature for every business that wants to reach more customers and become more noticeable in the online community. In May 2021, Google announced that site speed and the site’s core web vitals are the two major ranking factors that directly affect its positions in search results.
The competition is getting more intense in the present-day world. A growing number of people use their smartphones to look for some information on the go. Building a mobile-friendly design is especially important for blogs, news magazines, and other kinds of media-related websites.
Following the trend, the Kicker WordPress theme includes two features that would make your website stand out from the competition. These are AMP and custom Lazy Loading functionality.
AMP
The AMP plugin optimizes your site for smaller screen sizes. Using the Kiker theme, you can reveal the AMP version of your site to mobile users. A customer may also decide when he/she wants to browse the AMP version of your site or its desktop version. The dedicated option will appear in the footer of your site.
You can also improve the Google Pagespeed Insights score for mobile devices using the Kicker theme on shared hosting without caching and optimization.
Lazy Load
Lazy loading has become a part of the core WordPress functionality after the release of version 5.5. With its help, your website will deliver a better user experience to your audience by revealing images only when a user scrolls down to the place where they should be. Consequently, you’ll be able to get better TTI (Time to interactive) and CLS (Cumulative layout shift) indicators for your web resource.
Selecting the Kicker WordPress theme, you get a custom Lazy Load effect integrated into the package. It proves to be more effective than the default lazy loading effect from WordPress. It covers 95%-100% of all images available on your web page, while the lazy load plugin by WordPress covers only 40%-50%. The custom script also smoothly runs with the masonry blocks.
Website owners get an opportunity to enable or disable Lazy Load on their web projects, as well as adjust how many images will be loaded on your site’s pages at a time.
3. Colors & Fonts
Kicker WordPress theme provides you with a bunch of handy customization options, including the possibility to adjust colors and fonts according to your personal or business needs.
Using the theme’s dashboard, you can manage the typography of your site. The Kicker theme is loaded with a selection of Google Font and lets you add custom font types that will make your web project look more engaging and outstanding.
The theme also lets you upload Adobe Fonts and other custom font types to your site.
4. Elementor Page Builder
It’s become a popular approach to building websites code-free. There is no doubt in the fact that Elementor page builder is one of the most popular solutions for WordPress. Kicker theme includes the Elementor page builder, which lets you customize its layout and premade designs in the drag-and-drop mode. The builder lets you adjust every part of your site, including posts, sidebars, header, footer, content pages, etc.
Header & Footer Builder
The Elementor page builder facilitates the way you customize the header and footer sections of your site. More specifically, it lets you to:
- Assign custom headers and footers to any post or page individually.
- Get unlimited access to all Elementor components.
- Adjust the headers to remain in a sticky position.
- Add Video and Parallax backgrounds to your site’s pages.
- Choose desktop, mobile and tablet layouts independently.
5. Ready-made Post Layouts
Kicker includes a wide choice of ready-to-go post layouts, which you may feel free to adjust just the way you wish. You may also manage whether your site’s sidebar should be placed on the right or left side of a web page, or there should be no sidebar at all.
You may feel free to work with any of the 14 suggested layout styles or dozens of their combinations.
Pagination
Kicker includes a set of pagination options like classic page numbers, Previous/Next buttons, load more, and infinite scroll.
Next Post auto-load
All bloggers follow to make them stay on the blog for as long as possible. Next post auto-load is the functionality that will keep your readers engaged with the content. Kicker is loaded with the Next post auto-load feature, which automatically loads the suggested next article when a person finishes reading the first one.
Using the Kicker theme, you can also create info posts, news, video & audio posts, media galleries posts, events posts, etc. Let’s review some of them in detail.
Regular Posts with Custom Layouts
With the Kicker theme, you may feel free to choose any of the premade page designs or child your own custom layouts that would keep the audience more engaged.
Review Posts
It’s become popular to share review posts to express your expert opinion about the products or services you’ve tried. Kicker lets you create such posts, which may include such elements as:
- Different rating types, like stars, points or percentage;
- As many your own criterias as you wish;
- Item specifications and key points;
- Lists of Pros & Cons;
- Choose the exact review placement on the page;
- Affiliate buttons to drive more affiliate sales through your blog.
Media Posts
Kicker supports various content types that you may wish to share on your site. It also includes multiple media posts.
Regular video post
Video post with the sticky frame
When a customer plays a video post with a sticky frame and scrolls down the page to see other pieces of content you’ve shared, the video will automatically appear in your right bottom corner.
Video Playlist
Using the theme, you can create video playlists using video posts from your blog or any random videos of your own choice.
Audio post
Gallery post
Furthermore, the Kicker WordPress theme lets you add many other media types to your site, including videos, audio podcasts, photo galleries, etc.
Related Posts
It’s another feature that should help you keep your readers on your blog for longer. With its help, you can also improve the SEO ranking of your blog and boost its conversion rates. The related posts section may have the following settings:
- Right side positioning.
- Left side positioning.
- Placement within the content.
- Under the content positioning.
- Infinite scroll automatically shows the next post.
Updated Posts
It’s a common practice to share the ever-green blog posts, which you will update from time to time. While updating posts on your blog, the Kicker theme will reveal two dates – initial publishing and last updated.
Sponsored Posts
If your blo0g accepts sponsored posts or guest posts, using the Kicker theme you may feel free to share the respective articles on your site. Such publications will have “sponsored” attributes and special banner spots.
6. Ads and Banners
Kicker is a flexible and dynamic theme. It lets you take full control over the placement of different elements of your site, including banners. The theme enables you to choose from the following advertising positioning options:
- Above the content
- Below the content
- Sidebar
- Within the content
- Popups, etc.
7. WooCommerce
Whenever you decide to sell something on your site, the full WooCommerce package included in the Kicker theme should come in handy.
It lets you work with premade product pages and adjust them according to your needs.
8. Menu Panels & Mega Menu
We all know the importance of adding a functional and usable menu to your site. The Kicker theme includes usable menu plugins under the hood, which frees you from the need to spend time and money searching for extensions that would be compatible with the theme. More specifically, the theme lets you create a side menu panel that can slide in and out.
It also supports mega menus.
9. Custom Popups and Newsletters
Newsletters and popups are the time-proven elements that let you grow the email list and keep your audience engaged. There are several newsletter forms available in the Kicker theme. It also lets you integrate your site with large newsletter popup forms:
Add a slide in/out small newsletter popup to your site:
Put a static newsletter form within the content:
Add a static footer newsletter like this:
GDPR & Cookies
Kicker is designed and developed according to the latest GDPR demands. It includes the WP GDPR Compliance, GDPR Compliance for MailChimp and GDPR Cookie Consent plugin.
Localization-friendly, Multilingual & RTL
The last but not the least important thing is that the Kicker theme makes it easy to translate and localize your site’s content into any language. It is fully compatible with the Loco Translate and PO Composer. You shouldn’t face any troubles with the WPML and RTL integration.
Final Words
Kicker Elementor WordPress theme is a great choice for everyone looking for a multi-functional solution for getting started with a blog or news magazine. Thanks to the availability of the drag-and-drop page builder, applying the needed changes to the ready-made pages of the theme shouldn’t cause you any trouble. Enhancing your site’s performance with extra tools and functionality should be worry-free, either.
Kicker is ready to be used for different topics and purposes. Thanks to the regular updates and the release of new demo skins, you can easily launch a niche-specific website that will always be up-to-date.
