I recently got to test out The Fox theme from Withemes. If you’re considering buying a new WordPress theme, you should probably read the rest of this review.
When I look for a new WordPress theme, I’m looking for a few different qualities. My number one concern is that it looks good. If a theme doesn’t look good to me, then there’s no reason to use it. Second, the theme must be fast. Before I buy a theme, I make sure to run it through page speed tests like Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix, and Google Page Speed Insights. Lastly, the theme has to be customizable.
The Fox theme definitely provides in the looks department. That’s what originally drew me to the theme. The Fox is sort of a modern spin on the newspaper. The textured frame around the theme makes this pretty apparent. Overall, The Fox is a really good looking, clean theme.
Unfortunately, The Fox is not very fast. I tested the theme from it’s demo address (http://withemes.com/fox/) and I got a 37/100 from Google on desktop and a 14/100 on mobile. I ran the tests again on my own server, and got much better results. Because I use Cloudflare CDN and other tools, I was able to get a 70/100 from Google.
The speed test results are pretty disappointing. After all, website load time is a really, really important factor. If you fiddle with speed plugins, I would imagine you could get your scores up to around 80/100 depending on your host.
Finally, customization. The Fox is, thankfully, very easy to customize. It takes advantage of the new WordPress feature that allows all theme options to be inside the customizer. I found it to be a pretty easy and fun experience to set up the theme. I just think there could be a few more customization options.
Overall, the theme is good. It delivers on looks, it could just use some tweaks to speed it up and a few more customization options. You can buy or demo the theme here.