Paperio Theme Review: A Modern and Stylish WordPress Blogging Theme

Paperio is a new WordPress theme for bloggers who want to ensure their website not only looks great but is packed with useful features.  If you’re starting a new blog or magazine-style website in 2017 or want to give your existing website a makeover then read out hands-on Paperio theme review to find out how this theme could help.

It’s worth pointing out that at the time of writing this Paperio theme review, this product is currently discounted. This gives you a great opportunity to pick up a modern WordPress theme at a bargain price.

Paperio WordPress Theme Features

Although Paperio is aimed at bloggers, it’s definitely not lacking in terms of quality design. As we’ll soon see, the Paperio demos all look really good. Customizing your site isn’t a problem either. So let’s explore the best features next in our Paperio theme review.

Multiple Blogging Demos

Despite being focused at bloggers, Paperio gives you seven demos – or concepts – to choose from. This is great to see. Being able to use the powerful features of Paperio with a range of different designs certainly gives you plenty of options. To help you decide whether Paperio has the right looks for your project, let’s explore the best of these demos or concepts in this section of our hands-on Paperio theme review.

The Paperio News Demo

The Anchali demo is ideal for creating news and magazine style websites. Even regular blogs that publish a relatively large amount of content can make great use from this Paperio demo. The homepage is configured perfectly to display a large selection of your latest content. Thanks to this, as soon as a visitor lands on your homepage, they’ll have plenty of options covering what to do next.

As well as the stylish yet functional homepage layout of this demo, there are lots of templates to work with. Each article you publish on your news website or blog can have its own layout. This gives you the option of presenting your content in the best possible way, rather than having to settle for a one size fits all template.

Anchali is a great example of the type of blog or magazine website you can build with this WordPress theme.

The Paperio Home Décor Blog Demo

Creating a blog about interior design or home décor? If so, the so-called default Paperio demo has been built just for you. The full-width layout of this demo gives you a perfect opportunity to grab the attention of your visitors, as soon as they arrive at your website.

Thanks to the homepage slider, your visitors will also be greeted by a revolving stream of your latest content. Clicking through to an individual blog post on your Paperio-powered website will expose your visitors to a well-designed article, complete with optional videos, multi-column layouts, pull quotes, drop caps, and much more.

Perfect for design and style related projects, the default Paperio demo is well worth taking for a test drive. You can also test how WordPress Customizer works with it.

Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty Blog Demo

The Aquilina demo has been created to help you launch a successful fashion, lifestyle, or beauty blog with WordPress. The main focus of the default homepage layout is the large content slider. Thanks to this feature, your visitors will have plenty of options for where to click next.

However, if they do skip the slider, as they scroll down the homepage, they can see an assortment of your other articles, complete with a featured image and a button inviting them to read more. Finally, the fashion and beauty blog demo homepage layout ends with an “about me” widget and social media feeds in the footer area.

Like the other Paperio blog demos, you get access to all the great post and page templates to give your content a custom look.

Travel and Adventure Blog Demo

The Adelta demo has a default homepage layout that’s particularly well suited to bloggers who have great photos to company their articles. Apart from the full-width homepage slider, the rest of the homepage features a full width, two column layout. Each column displays a list of featured images from your blog posts, enticing readers into your articles with your visual content.

Paperio Food Blog Demo

If you want to start a successful WordPress food blog then choosing the right theme is a crucial step in the journey. Thankfully, Paperio includes a very impressive food blog demo that can also double up as a recipe and restaurant website demo.

By using the Paperio image gallery and slider post templates, this demo gives you an easy way to show off your best food photos. As social media should be part of any food blog’s promotional efforts, it’s good to see plenty of integrations with the most popular networks on this demo.

Business and Finance Demo

While the other Paperio demos are focused on more creative projects, the business and finance demo is better suited to more serious topics. Technology bloggers will find this Paperio demo a particularly good fit. Whether you’re publishing news, reviews, tutorials, or guides, this business and finance focused demo has plenty to offer.

More demos are reportedly coming soon and you can check out the current selection of Paperio concepts here.

Quick and Easy Blog Setup

One of the great things about choosing a theme that’s been built for a specific focus – such as blogging – is that it makes it very easy to launch your new WordPress website. Instead of countless extra plugins and add-ons to install, setting up a blogging theme like Paperio is usually very straightforward. In fact, this theme only relies on three plugins, each of which can be installed in just a few clicks.

Once the theme has been activated and the plugins installed, you then have the option of importing one of the demos. We’ll walk through the setup process in more depth later on in this Paperio theme review. But, all in all, this process only takes a few minutes, leaving you with a modern WordPress website that’s ready for your content.

Site Speed Optimization and Search Engine Optimized

As you can see from the Paperio demos, creating a stylish website with this theme won’t be a problem. However, it takes more than just a nice design to make a website successful. An effective website needs to not only load quickly, but also be optimized for search engines. Thankfully, the developers of Paperio have focused on both.

Fast loading times are essential if you want to ensure your visitors form a good impression of your website. With this in mind, the development team has implemented SRCSET to ensure images are loaded intelligently. Thanks to this responsive image technology, your webiste, and its content will be optimized for the device it is being viewed on. This and the other steps the team has taken to optimize Paperio for fast loading times have seen them record an impressive score of 100 using the Pingdom site speed monitoring tool.

As well as improving the user experience, fast loading times can help your website rank highly in search engines like Google. However, that’s not all the team have done to optimize this theme for search engines. Other search engine optimization (SEO) features include the implementation of rich snippets to help your website stand out in the search engine results pages, and full compatibility with the leading Yoast SEO and All in One SEO WordPress plugins.

This all helps make Paperio a theme that can help your website be found more easily in search engines, and deliver a positive user experience to your visitors.

Powerful Customization Options

As Paperio is a modern WordPress theme, it takes full advantage of the WordPress Customizer. Through this intuitive user interface, you can quickly make changes to many aspects of your website. From fonts and colors to menus and sidebars, there’s lot you can do to personalize your website through the customizer.

Library of Blog Post and Page Templates

As well as the seven website demos, Paperio also includes a good selection of page templates. These templates can be used for the inner content on your site, including blog posts, portfolio items, contact, and about me pages to name just a few. Having a good library of templates to draw from each time you publish a new piece of content can help ensure your content has a unique look, while still fitting into the overall design of your website.

Whether you’re publishing images, photos, or a mixture of different types of media, Paperio has a post format or template to help. There are plenty of layouts to choose from for your blog posts, giving your website a look and feel to rival professional online media outlets.

This newly released WordPress blogging theme also features a number of elements that can be inserted into your content. These elements include different typography settings, a range of title styles, and buttons. They also give you a quick way to insert a multi-column section into your articles, giving them a professional look.

You’ll also have five slider variations to work with, should you choose the Paperio blogging theme. These sliders make it easy to showcase your best content and grab the attention of your visitors.

Social Media Integration

To help you grow your social media followers and leverage the popular social networks to grow your website traffic, Paperio includes some good social media integration-related features. Thanks to the custom widgets, you can easily display links to your social media profiles. Furthermore, you can also use the widgets to display the latest content from your profiles, right on your website.

Paperio WordPress Theme User Experience

Paperio has lots of great features that make it an exciting option for anyone looking for a new WordPress theme.  But how easy it is to use? Can you actually build a professional-looking website with Paperio? Let’s find out in this section of our Paperio theme review.

Installing and Activating the Theme and Plugins

Once you’ve purchased the theme, you can download the files before uploading them to your WordPress website. After the theme has been added to your site, you can click to activate it, transforming the look and feel of your WordPress website.

Once the theme is active on your site, you’ll be prompted to install and activate the recommended and required plugins. Thankfully, there are only a few extras to add to your site. This gives you the freedom of picking and choosing which third party plugins you want to install.

Importing the Demo Content

As mentioned earlier in this Paperio theme review, this theme includes a good selection of varied website demos. Importing them into your site is very straightforward too. All that’s left to do is choose which demo you’d like to use.

Paperio gives you the option of previewing the demos before making a decision. Once you’re ready, clicking the Install button starts the process. You also get the option of choosing which elements of the demo to import. These options cover the menus, posts, pages, customizer settings, and other items.

It’s good to have the ability to decide which elements to import. However, most users will probably fwant to import the entire demo website. While the import is taking place, you’ll be given a constant update on the progress. However, the whole process took less than a few minutes and was over without a hitch.  At the end, you’re invited to install and run the Regenerate Thumbnails plugins. This free plugin helps ensure all the featured images are optimized for your website.

Once the demo website has been imported, you can fire up the WordPress Customizer to begin personalizing your site.

Customizing Your Website

Paperio makes it easy to personalize your website through the WordPress Customizer. This includes the overall styling, layout options, featured image and content presentation, fonts, colors, and more. As you experiment and make changes to your site, you get a live preview of what effect they are having. When you’ve finished, you can hit the Save & Publish button apply them to your site.

About the Paperio Theme Author

The Paperio WordPress theme has been created by the ThemeZaa team. In addition to the newly released Paperio, ThemeZaa has also created a number of popular themes. These themes are available from the ThemeForest marketplace, along with a selection of plugins available from CodeCanyon. This level of experience gives a good indication that ThemeZaa will be around for a while. They aren’t just a fly by night team trying their luck by selling a single theme through ThemeForest.

As well as product support, the ThemeZaa team also offers a bespoke customization service. This covers not only work on the design of your site but also how it functions.  Therefore, if you do choose Paperio and need to modify your website beyond what’s possible through the theme option and settings, you’ll have someone to turn to who’s familiar with the template.

Paperio WordPress Theme Pricing Options

As mentioned, Paperio is available from the ThemeForest marketplace. At the time of writing this Paperio theme review, the price has been discounted by 50%. This brings the price down to $29. $59 is about the average price for a modern WordPress theme like Paperio. Therefore, being able to pick it up for this discounted price represents great value for money.

Paperio Theme Review Final Thoughts

Paperio is a stylish new WordPress blogging theme. Thanks to a small but impressive selection of demos, it covers a varied range of blogs. From basic personal blogs and travel journals to tech news sites and food blogs, the Paperio demos will enable you to start your new website very quickly.

The WordPress Customizer gives you a good amount of control over how your site looks and functions. However, it would be nice to see some sort of page builder tool included with the theme. However, there are many excellent third party page builder plugins to choose from.

If you’re starting a new blog or want to give your existing blog a new look then you should definitely try out the Paperio demos to see if any match your vision.

Find out more about Paperio today.