Grand Magazine | Blog WordPress

A growing blog gets harder to browse

Publishing regularly has an effect nobody warns you about: after six months your best content is buried, and readers land on one article, read it and leave without knowing what else is there. A blog or digital magazine doesn't lose visits for lack of text, but for not showing what it already has. Grand Magazine is designed to solve exactly that: organize the archive and give visitors a path to follow.

What helps retention most: trending posts, infinite scroll and search

These are the features that matter most for continuous reading:

• What's hot & Trending: highlights the posts with the most shares and comments, and also the most viewed ones. It puts what has already worked front and center.
• Infinite scroll: posts are displayed in columns and more load when the visitor reaches the end of the page, useful if you have a large archive.
• Live search: helps visitors find content with partial queries. It is enabled with one click, in the header or in the side menu.

More than 20 layouts for the listing and for each post

The theme offers more than 20 predefined layouts for blog pages and as many for the single post. That's no minor detail: a news magazine, a personal blog and a multi-author site don't need the same homepage. The theme supports both a solo blogger and several authors writing.

Visual effects

It includes parallax scrolling, video parallax and parallax backgrounds where you choose the image and the height. They look striking, but use them in moderation if your readers mostly arrive from mobile.

Customization without touching code

Everything is adjusted from the WordPress Customizer with a live preview:

• Unlimited colors with a color picker and several palettes to get close to your brand.
• More than 500 Google Fonts with changes to size, style and color.
• Boxed or wide layout, optional frame, backgrounds with images, patterns or colors.
• Sticky menu or smart menu that hides on scroll down and reappears on scroll up, a top bar with hours and phone number, and a side menu.
• Custom sidebars with no limit, assignable to each page.
• Footer columns (1 to 4, or none) and your own CSS without modifying the theme.

You can also check the responsive view from the Customizer and turn it off with one click, although the usual choice is to leave it on.

Importing the demo doesn't give you a finished site

With one click you can import the demo with pages, posts, sliders, widgets and theme settings, which is handy to see how each piece is built. That said, here is what it solves and what it doesn't:

• Already solved: mobile-friendly design, Retina screens, sharp icons, semantic HTML so search engines can crawl well, and a gallery with multiple upload and drag and drop.
• Up to you: writing the texts, preparing your own images, building the real search ranking of your content and any feature not on the list, such as a shop, newsletter or memberships, which would need another plugin.

A theme being ready for SEO doesn't replace good content or an SEO plugin if you need to manage titles and meta descriptions per page.

Frequently asked questions

Is it suitable for a personal blog?

Yes, it supports both an individual blogger and several authors.

Can I change fonts and colors without coding?

Yes, from the Customizer, with more than 500 Google Fonts and a color picker with instant preview.

Does it adapt to mobile?

Yes, the design is responsive and looks good on laptop, tablet and mobile.

Can I add my own CSS?

Yes, in the theme options, without touching the core files.

Is it suitable for an online shop?

It is aimed at blogs and magazines; to sell you would need to add an e-commerce plugin and check in the demo how it looks.