Hestia Offers Attractive and Free, One Page Material Design WordPress Theme

If you’re in the market for a modern, attractive one page theme for your site, ThemeIsle might have what you’re looking for in Hestia, their new multipurpose WordPress theme.

Based on Google’s Material Design, Hestia fits the needs for both one page and multipage websites for businesses of all sizes. It’s especially suitable for startups, ecommerce, and agencies.

The free theme comes with many valuable features including custom backgrounds, responsive design, a live customizer, WooCommerce compatibility, and much more.

Besides free themes, ThemeIsle also offers a club membership to premium WordPress themes and plugins. Their premium theme offerings include minimal themes, one page sites, magazine themes, photography and portfolio themes, ecommerce, blogs, and business.

Hestia’s Main Features

Hestia comes in both free and Pro versions.

Here are the features you get with the free version of Hestia:

• One page and multipage layouts

Like most themes, Hestia can support multiple page websites, but it also offers a single page design for intuitive and easy navigation for your visitors.

• Fast setup

• One page design sections

The free version of Hestia comes with front page sections for:

Big Title Section
Features
About
Shop
Team
Testimonials
Subscribe
Blog
Contact

Hestia Pro adds more page sections:

Header Slider
Jetpack Portfolio
Pricing Plans

• Live customizer

Through the WordPress customizer, Hestia allows you to see changes you make to your site’s sections in real time, without having to refresh your browser or do any coding. The live customer lets you control section ordering, add new sections, hide sections, and manage backgrounds, logos, menus, fonts, colors, and more.

• Material Design theme

The visual look of Hestia is based on the Material Design language developed by Google for Android, applications, and desktop web interfaces. According to Google, Material Design was developed in order to merge the principles of good design with today’s varied technology and platforms.

With Material Design, Hestia features a clean, layered, bold and vibrant look that includes bright and saturated colors, large-scale imagery, clean typography, and simple and meaningful animation that gives users focused feedback about important design elements.

• Parallax scrolling

Hestia has a smooth and interesting parallax animation effect between page sections when scrolling.

• Compatible with page builders

Hestia is fully compatible with Page Builder by SiteOrigin, one of the most popular page builders for WordPress. Page Builder allows for drag-and-drop construction of posts and pages with many preconfigured site elements.

• Email subscription

Hestia comes with the SendinBlue subscription form built-in for quick email/newsletter delivery, along with the ability to quickly build your subscriber list.

• Responsive design

Hestia is mobile-friendly and fits your site perfectly on any device, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

• Custom backgrounds

Without the need for extra plugins, Hestia allows you to use images, sliders, and video as custom background elements.

• Mega menu

Hestia includes a responsive, user-friendly mega menu for organizing submenu content. It gives users full control over menu design and structure.

• SEO-friendly and optimized for speed

Hestia is built with clean and optimized code that follows the WordPress guidelines for themes. It also supports a SEO-ready site structure and is optimized for speed and compatibility with caching plugins.

• Compatible with ecommerce plugins such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

Without having to code, Hestia allows you to use WooCommerce to quickly build a front page store for your site, ready for selling physical and digital products.

• Widgetized footer

• Translation and RTL ready

Every element in Hestia can be translated through either free or premium plugins. It also offers support for RTL (right-to-left) languages.

• Video tutorials and written documentation

• Hestia includes one-click updates.

Here are some of the additional features that are included in the Pro version of Hestia:

• Featured header slider

Hestia allows you to present a full-width customizable homepage header slider that you can add any content to.

• Fully customizable colors

Get an unlimited range of customizable colors and match your company brand in the header, navigation bar, and more.

• Jetpack grid portfolio

Hestia includes a beautiful lightbox grid portfolio (with two possible layouts) through its integration with the Jetpack plugin.

• Pricing plans section

With Hestia’s pricing tables, you can easily deliver custom package information, along with call-to-action buttons to purchase pages.

• Section Ordering

Use the live customizer to easily and quickly make changes to the order of your homepage sections.

• Calls-to-action

Add marketing messages with ribbons and customizable text and button areas between page sections.

• Fast, professional 24/7 help desk support

Setting Up Hestia

Here’s how to download and set up Hestia:

Downloading Hestia

1. Go to the ThemeIsle site at themeisle.com/themes/hestia/

2. Click the green Download Now for Free button.

3. Enter your email address and click Download Now.

This will get you a free membership to ThemeIsle, and take you to the membership dashboard.

4. From the membership dashboard, click the red Download Files button.

On the next page, you’ll see several free themes you can download from ThemeIsle.

5. Click the Download button next to Hestia.

This will download the hestia.zip file to your computer’s download folder.

You’ll also receive a welcome email from ThemeIsle with an email and password for the membership site.

Note: If at any time you wish to go back to this download section of the membership site, just click the Purchase History link below your account name, on the far right side of the membership site menu.

Adding the Hestia Theme to Your WordPress Site

1. In WordPress, go to Appearance… Themes.

2. Click the Add New button.

3. Click the Upload Theme button.

4. Click the Choose button and select the hestia.zip file you downloaded earlier.

5. Click Install Now.

6. After WordPress automatically uploads and extracts the theme for you, you can click the Activate link.

Using Hestia

Because Hestia offers a one page design, in this section we’ll focus on using it as a one page theme.

Install Third-Party Plugins

To begin with, to get the most out of Hestia’s homepage one page theme sections, you need to install the following plugins by going to Plugins…Add New:

WooCommerce (for the Shop section)
Pirate Forms (for the Contact section)
SendinBlue (for Subscribe section)

Users of Hestia Pro will also need to install the Jetpack plugin for the Portfolio section that comes with the pro version.

Create Home and Blog Pages for Your Site

After installing the required third-party plugins, you’ll want to create your Home and Blog pages.

1. In WordPress, go to Pages…Add New, and create separate pages for your homepage and blog page.

The pages don’t need content, just titles. Publish both pages.

2. After creating the pages, go to Appearance…Customize…Static Front Page.

For Front page displays, choose A static page. For the Front page, choose the name of the homepage you created above. For the Posts page, choose the name of the blog page you created.

3. Now, when you visit the homepage of your site, you’ll see that it’s been quickly and automatically populated with demo content!

I found the demo content to be very helpful for visualizing the theme’s offerings and getting a jump-start on site creation.

Layout, Header and Background Images

To set Hestia’s general layout, along with header and background images, go to Appearance…Customize…Appearance Settings.

1. Under General Settings, choose either a Boxed Layout or a full-width layout for the homepage sections.

2. Under Header Image, choose a background image for the homepage’s top section, as well as the post and archive pages.

3. For Background Image, pick an image to appear behind the homepage sections for the Box Layout option.

Configuring the Front Page Sections

Hestia comes with different front page sections for the one page design, depending on whether you’re using the free of Pro version.

To set up the sections for the free version of Hestia, go to Appearance…Customize…Frontpage Sections. Here’s how you edit each section:

Big Title Section
Choose the background image, text, and any buttons you need. Every section in Hestia can be disabled except for this section.

You need to have Hestia Pro to have the option to create sliders in this section. You can have unlimited slides, and each can have their own background image and content.

Features
Add a title, subtitle, and as many content blocks as you’d like. This is great for showing services or other features. Each content block can also have text and color icons.

About
Use the presented visual/HTML editor to add whatever content you wish. You can also set a featured image for the About section’s background.

Shop
This section appears after you install and activate the WooCommerce plugin. Just add a title, subtitle, and the number of WooCommerce products you’d like to display.

To add your own products to this section, just create them through WooCommerce by going to Products…Add Product.

Team
This section is for presenting your company staff. Add a title, subtitle, and as many team content blocks as you wish. Each team content block can include an image, title, subtitle, text, link, and social icons.

Testimonials
This section is for presenting the positive feedback that people have to say about you or your company. Include a title, subtitle, and testimonial content blocks. Testimonial content blocks include an image, title, subtitle, text and link.

Subscribe
SendinBlue helps you deliver email and newsletters from your WordPress site.

1. First install the SendinBlue plugin for this section.

2. In WordPress, go to SendinBlue…Home, create a SendinBlue account and activate the account with an API key, and configure the plugin.

3. Copy and paste the given code into SendinBlue…Forms.

4. Finally, go to Appearance…Customize…Widgets…Subscribe Section, and add the SendinBlue widget to it.

Blog
Enter a title, subtitle, and the number of most recent posts you want displayed on the front page. With Hestia Pro, you also have the ability to choose between two blog layouts, remove the sidebar from single post and archive pages, have an Authors section, and add a subscribe section with a call-to-action ribbon.

Contact
This section requires the installation of the Pirate Forms plugin. Once installed, the contact form appears at the bottom of the front page, ready to go. You can add a background, section title and subtitle, form title, icons, and as many content fields as you need.

Colors

By going to Appearance…Customize…Colors, you can set the default background and main accent colors for Hestia. Hestia Pro adds the ability to set default colors for the header overlay, header text and navigation bar.

Menus

With Hestia’s one page design, you’ll need to set menu links to the different sections that make up the front page, instead of to different pages. To do that, you need to create anchor links for each section.

1. Go to Appearance…Menus.

2. On the left, select Custom Links to create anchors for each section.

For example, for the Shop section, you would set up the URL like this:

https://yourdomain.com/#products

If your website includes www, include that in the domain example above.

3. Add whatever link text you want for the custom URL, such as Shop, and click the Add to Menu button.

Do this for each section of Hestia you want displayed in your menu, sticking with this format for each anchor link:

Slider (#carousel-hestia-generic)
Features (#features)
About (#about)
Shop (#products)
Team (#team)
Testimonials (#testimonials)
Subscribe (#subscribe)
Blog (#blog)
Contact (#contact)

Hestia Pro sections:

Portfolio (#portfolio)
Ribbon (#pricing)

4. Click the blue Save Menu button, taking note of the Menu Name.

5. Click the Manage Locations tab, and next to Primary Menu, select the menu you just created from the drop-down. Click Save Changes.

As with any menu in WordPress, you can remove or add items (including pages), rearrange items, and also add the menu to the footer.

ThemeIsle has also bundled Font Awesome with Hestia to give users the ability to add different icons to menus. Furthermore, different classes of buttons are available for menus.

Video Tutorial: Setting Up and Using Hestia

Hestia Support & Documentation

Support from ThemeIsle includes:

Documentation (including 50+ theme-specific guides, along with general WordPress guides)
Custom code information
Frequently asked questions
20+ video tutorials
Forum (with over 1000 live threads)
Helpdesk (where they promise to handle tickets in less than one business day)

Premium purchases and membership plans include priority support and a promise to reply from contact forms within 24 hours.

For their WordPress themes, ThemeIsle does not offer customer support for customization and coding changes beyond the live customizer and options panel. They recommend using a site like Codeable for finding professional assistance in customizing their products.

ThemeIsle offers good documentation for its products (it even has documentation for its free themes). After installing and activating Hestia, you can find its documentation in the live customer by going to Appearance…Customize…Hestia…Documentation.

Hestia Pricing

Hestia is a free WordPress theme, however ThemeIsle also offers a Pro version of Hestia for $59 through ThemeForest.

ThemeIsle also offers three different club membership levels for access to its 20+ premium WordPress themes (including Hestia Pro), plugins, and more. Premium themes and plugins come with free updates, dedicated support, and a 30 day money back guarantee.

For those interested in checking out the ThemeIsle membership, here’s the pricing for its three levels:

Treasure Chest Light:
$99/year
Access to all 20+ themes (and all future themes)
Includes WordPress video tutorials and basic support (12 months support and updates)
License for 3 domains
1 year of free shared hosting

Treasure Chest:
$149
Access to all 20+ themes (and all future themes)
Includes WordPress video tutorials and priority support (24 months support and updates)
License for 5 domains
1 year of free shared hosting

Private Club:
$299
Access to all 20+ themes and 10+ plugins (and all future versions)
Includes WordPress video tutorials and priority support (lifetime support and updates)
Unlimited domains license for themes (1 site license for plugins)
1 year of free shared hosting

ThemeIsle allows for canceling or upgrading accounts at any time.

Conclusions & Recommendations

ThemeIsle states that their mission is to provide easy-to-use WordPress themes and designs that can be managed by everyone, without the need for high maintenance costs and expensive WordPress training.

With Hestia, they take a big step in that direction with a clean, attractive, multipurpose theme that can serve as both a one page and multipage WordPress site.

Hestia features a fully responsive design with a modern look, based on Google’s Material Design. It also provides support for ecommerce and drag-and-drop content builders such as SiteOrigin’s Page Builder.

I especially like its real-time live customizer that allows you to make custom changes to page sections without the need for touching code.

And as mentioned earlier, Hestia Pro is a more feature-rich version of the theme that includes elements such as fully customizable homepage sliders, mega menus, video tutorials, newsletter subscription, calls-to-action, pricing tables, portfolios, parallax effects, custom colors, and more.

If you’re interested in the free version of Hestia, you can find out more at Themeisle.