Are you looking for an honest Kadence theme review? If yes, then you’ve landed on the right page.
Kadence is one of the capable WordPress themes for effortlessly building fast and beautiful websites in minutes. You can easily create any type of website like a blog, agency, shop, education, etc.
So, if you’re considering using the Kadence theme, then you may wonder if it’s the right choice. Luckily, we’ve covered you with an in-depth review that includes all the essential details. For example, key features, costs, pros and cons, and support.
Hence, with this comprehensive Kadence theme review, you can decide whether it’s the ideal theme for you.
Now, let’s dive in to the Kadence theme review and explore everything this theme has to offer!
Overall Rating
Kadence is a popular WordPress theme that you can use for free or upgrade to a paid plan if you need more features. With its multipurpose capabilities, you can easily create any types of website.
Let’s look at its user ratings on different platforms.
Platform | Score |
WordPress.org | 4.9/5 stars |
Trustpilot | 4/5 stars |
G2 Reviews | 4.7/5 stars |
Having tested the Kadence theme, we highly recommend giving it a try. We also give it a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. Hence, it’s a wise choice for anyone looking for a reliable and feature-packed WordPress theme.
So, why not give Kadence a try and see for yourself?
Pros and Cons of the Kadence Theme
Another section of our Kadence theme review is going through its pros and cons.
Like any WordPress theme, Kadence has its advantages and disadvantages. Considering these factors is essential when evaluating whether Kadence is the right choice for your website.
With that in mind, let’s look at the key pros and cons of using the Kadence WordPress theme.
Pros of Kadence Theme
- This theme follows WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards, arial labels, focus control, and keyboard navigation.
- It’s built with a progressive code structure for modern PHP. Hence this theme is lightning-fast.
- Also, the theme header builder monitors your changes live within the native WordPress editing experience.
- It has high customization options, including layouts, colors, fonts, etc.
- You’ll be able to enable breadcrumbs using the built-in breadcrumb generator.
Cons of Kadence Theme
- This theme has a limited number of starter templates.
- You must upgrade to the expensive plan to get features like Kadence Blocks Pro, pro starter templates, custom fonts, etc.
A. Kadence Theme Overview
Kadence WordPress theme is a fantastic option for building your website. It’s a freemium and lightning-fast theme, so you can get started quickly. Also, its extensive customization capabilities allow you to create a website that accurately represents your brand.
Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with popular WordPress plugins, including Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, WooCommerce, and LearnDash. This allows you to incorporate additional functionality into your website easily.
Besides, creating a visually stunning website is easier with a selection of pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop page builder. Plus, you don’t need to be a coding expert to use it.
Additionally, it’s a great option because it offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to design. So, customize the website’s appearance per your needs without being confined to strict templates.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the next portion of Kadence theme review.
B. Key Features of Kadence Theme
Kadence theme comes with many features that enhance your website-building experience. Here, we’ve compiled a list of Kadence’s key features.
Let’s take a look at them!
1. Prebuilt Starter Templates
Kadence WordPress theme comes with a range of prebuilt starter templates, making it effortless to design your website. You can quickly build a site by customizing these prebuilt templates to fit your niche. And with just a few clicks, your website can be up and running quickly.
The starter templates suit multiple niches, including e-commerce, blogs, photography, portfolios, etc. Also, they are pre-designed, and you can easily customize them according to your brand’s identity,
Another great feature of the starter templates is that they are built using Gutenberg, the default WordPress block editor. Hence, providing you with an easy way to modify the content. So, you don’t need coding or design skills to create a stunning website.
2. Advance Header and Footer Builders
Another outstanding feature of the Kadence theme is an advanced header and footer builders. This helps unlock limitless possibilities for your website.
With an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, you can create the perfect header for your site. You can customize your header design, layout, and content placement without any coding knowledge.
In addition to the header builder, the Kadence theme offers a responsive footer builder. You can create a footer perfectly tailored to your website with the same drag-and-drop interface. Also, you can add social share icons to your header and footer, enabling visitors to connect with your site.
Additionally, you can create a stunning hero section with a transparent header that seamlessly blends in with your website’s content. This feature creates a visual flow that enhances user experience and makes your website stand out.
And that’s not all, it offers the ability to enable and define custom styling when your header is stuck to the top. This feature provides a smooth transition as visitors scroll through your site.
3. SEO Optimization
Kadence WordPress theme is also optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The theme follows the best SEO practices for markup and schema where needed. Hence, ensuring your website will rank well in search engine results.
By following the best SEO practices, the theme ensures that search engines can easily crawl and index your site. And with the breadcrumb generator, you can improve the user experience by allowing visitors to navigate your site more easily.
Therefore, the Kadence theme is an excellent choice if you want a beautifully designed website optimized for SEO. Also, it’s compatible with popular SEO plugins like Yoast. So, you can be sure that your site will rank well in search engines and attract more traffic.
4. CSS Pre-loading
Another incredible feature the Kadence WordPress theme offers is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) pre-loading. This one-click performance boost preloads CSS in the header and calls it when necessary. So that your website will load faster, providing a better user experience.
With this advanced feature, you won’t have to worry about slowing down your website with unnecessary CSS files. Instead, the theme will preload and call what is needed.
5. Custom Fonts
Custom Fonts are essential to creating a unique and memorable website design. With the Kadence Theme, you can easily choose from professional font pairings to suit your brand.
Furthermore, it allows you to customize the typography of your entire website using its theme typography settings. Hence, you can easily adjust the fonts of your headings, buttons, links, and more.
Therefore, with Kadence, you’ll have complete control over the typography of your website. Consequently, allowing you to create a design that perfectly suits your brand and style.
6. Integration With Plugins
Kadence WordPress theme offers seamless integrations with some of the best plugins in the market. The integration with Gutenberg page builder brings globally linked styles to your pages. Making it easier to maintain design consistency throughout your site.
If you’re using Elementor page builder, then Kadence ensures that your colors remain in sync for design consistency. Also, the integration with BeaverBuilder is another excellent feature, allowing you to build your content using the most reliable page builder.
Moreover, running an online store is easy with Kadence’s integration with WooCommerce. It allows you to create high-converting product pages and optimize the checkout flow to increase sales.
Meanwhile, if you’re creating an e-learning platform, Kadence has got you covered with integrations with LearnDash and LifterLMS. Allowing you to create beautifully-designed courses and customize the look and feel of your course grid and lesson pages.
Additionally, for non-profits, Kadence’s integration with GiveWP enables you to create donation pages or forms that match your brand colors. Likewise, the integration with The Event Calendar provides you with a seamless way to create and manage events.
Lastly, if you’re looking to create a user forum, it integrates well with bbPress. And allows you to add a beautiful user form that brings your community together. With all these integrations, Kadence makes it easy to create a functional, beautiful, and unique website.
7. Additional Features
Some additional features of the Kadence theme are:
- No heavy Javascript files for faster page loading times.
- It has inline SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) icons for crisp and clean graphics.
- This theme also offers keyboard navigation for accessibility and ease of use.
- You’ll have 10+ elements to add to your header and build powerful navigation bars.
- Easily control your website layout down to the pixel with the Kadence Theme layout settings.
- You can use the Kadence theme global color palette to apply colors across your entire site easily.
- Ability to control the layouts for custom post types in the WordPress customizer.
This sums up the key feature section of this Kadence theme review article. Now let’s see how to get started with Kadence.
C. Getting Started with the Kadence Theme
Now that you know about the major features of the Kadence theme, let’s start with this theme.
So, please follow these steps serially, and you can quickly get started with the Kadence theme.
Let’s start!
Step 1. Purchase and Install the Kadence Theme
Installing Free Version
First we’ll discuss how to install the free version of Kadence theme.
To install and activate the Kadence theme, first of all, log in to your WordPress dashboard. Go to the Appearance > Themes option.
After that, click on the “Add New” button at the top.
Now type “Kadence” on the search bar and then click on the “Install” option
Once installation is complete, you’ll see the “Activate” button. Just click on it!
And you’re done!
Installing Premium Version
Now to install the premium version, the first thing to do is to purchase the theme. You can directly purchase the theme from its official website.
The purchase process is quite simple. Start by logging in to Kadence’s website.
Then choose the premium plan. Following that, you’ve to add your billing details and payment method. Once you have purchased the theme, now you can download the ZIP version of the Kadence theme.
After that, you’ll need to log in to your WordPress dashboard to install the Kadence theme.
There click on the Appearance > Theme > Add New option.
After that click on the “Upload Theme” option and click on “Choose File” to upload. And then hit the “Install Now” button.
Following that, you’ll get a message saying your Kadence theme is installed. As shown in the image below.
So following these steps, you can easily install both the free and premium version of Kadence theme.
Step 2. Import Kadence Starter Templates
Right after activating the theme, you’ll see the option to import the starter templates.
Click on the “Install Kadence Starter Templates” option. Once done, you’ll see a list of templates you can import.
You can surf through these templates and select the one you want to import. For this Kadence theme review article, we’ve selected the “Interior Design” template.
There you can make changes like colors and fonts. Also, you’ll have the option to import the full site or a single page. Here we’ll choose the “Full Site” option.
After that, you’ll see a popup window with the option to “Subscribe and import the template.” Or simply skip the subscription option and import the template. We’ll skip the subscription option for now.
So, click on the “Start Importing” option.
Now the importing process is complete, you can go to the “View Your Site” button to get a quick look at your website.
And you’re done!
Now, we’ll go to the Customize option.
Step 3. Customize Kadence Theme
After you’re done importing the template, click on the “Customize” option on the left menu bar under the Appearance option.
Following that, you’ll be redirected to the customization interface. Now, you can start tweaking and customizing the imported template to get started with building your website.
So, the customization part comes with different settings: Color & fonts, Header, Footer, General, layout, etc.
Therefore, we’ll go through some of the customization settings.
1. Color & Fonts
The Color & font customization option comes with a further 3 elements you can customize as per your need. They are given as:
i) Colors
Here you can change the background colors of your site, content, title, etc. Then, also choose how your color looks on different devices like desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. Also, you can choose between 3 global palettes.
ii) Buttons
In this section, you can change the text colors, background colors, border colors, etc., and define the border radius per the devices. From this section, you can also choose the font, padding option, button shadow, etc.
iii) Typography
Here, you’ll be able to set typography for different texts with the font, font size, and font family. For example, different headings, titles above content, breadcrumbs, and more. You’ll also have access to Google Font Subsets, including Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, etc.
2. General
The general options of customization further come with various elements that you can customize as per your need. Some of them are as follows:
i) Layout
Here you can change the content width, left/right edge spacing, content top/bottom spacing, etc. Also, easily change the single post-boxed spacing, shadow, border radius, and more.
ii) Sidebar
This option has 2 elements that you can customize: General and Design.
- General: This option allows you to change the width of the sidebar and manage the widget spacing. This option also allows you to enable a sticky sidebar.
- Design: In this option, you can change the widget title, content, and link style. You can also change the link color, sidebar background, divider border, and padding.
iii) Images
This section lets you enable move comments input above the comment list. Also able to enable whether to remove the comment website field or not.
iv) 404 Page Layout
This option lets you choose between 5 different 404 layouts, including narrow, full width, left/right sidebar, etc. Also, you can choose from 2 content style options, boxed and unboxed. Plus, decide to enable/disable or top only/bottom only content vertical padding option.
3. Post/Pages Layout
In this section, you’ll find the layouts for your post/page structure. You can choose from different designs for displaying each of your articles.
- Page Layout: Here, you can change the page title layout including in content and above content. Also, choose the title container width like standard, full width, and contained. Other options include page title alignment, title elements, content style, etc.
- Single Post Layout: This option lets you choose the post tile layout, width, post title alignment, featured image position, etc.
- Archive Layout: similarly, in this section, you can choose archive title layout, container width, archive title color, etc.
4. Homepage Settings
The homepage setting option allows you to choose what’s displayed on the homepage of your website. You can showcase your latest posts in reverse chronological order, a classic blog format. Or you can create a fixed/static page that displays your chosen content.
To set up a static homepage, create two separate pages, one for the homepage and the other for your posts. Doing so allows you to customize your homepage to suit your preferences and display content for your audience.
Thus, you can explore even more options while customizing.
Following above mentioned steps on our Kadence theme review, you can easily install the theme and setup your website.
D. Kadence Theme Support
Next part of this Kadence theme review article is going through its customer support options.
Any theme you use could cause you to become stuck, and that’s when you need excellent customer support.
So, let’s find out how good customer support Kadence Theme provides in this review article.
And the customer support of the Kadence theme is great, to begin with. It provides a comprehensive documentation section that covers everything from getting started to customization settings, header options, troubleshooting, and more.
In addition to the documentation, it offers premium support tickets for more personalized assistance. The ticket system is only available to premium users, and you must log in to use it. With the support ticket system, you can get fast and reliable help to ensure your website runs smoothly.
Further, it also comes with the Facebook community where you can socialize with other Kadence theme users. There, you can connect and resolve your queries or share interesting features of this theme.
E. Kadence Theme Pricing
Kadence Theme is a freemium WordPress theme offering free and premium versions. You can easily download the free version from the official WordPress theme directory or install the theme directly from your WordPress dashboard.
If you want to access additional features, then consider purchasing the premium version. Kadence offers 4 different pricing plans on its official website.
- Kadence Theme Pro Plan: Costs $59 for the first year and $79 annually to renew. It includes unlimited sites, header addons, hooked elements, ultimate addons, etc.
- Essential Bundle Plan: Costs $129 for the first year, then $149 annually to renew. It comes with everything from the Kadence theme pro plan. It also includes Kadence Block Pro, Pro Starter Templates, and more.
- Full Bundle Plan: Costs $199 for the first year and $219 annually to renew. It comes with everything from the essential bundle, plus Kadence Cloud, Kadence Shop Kit, etc.
- Lifetime Full Bundle Plan: Costs $649, one-time payment. It includes lifetime support, updates, and so on.
Besides, if you’re unsatisfied with their plan, then you can get your refund within 30 days from the purchase date.
So, this sums up our Kadence theme review.
Now let’s take a look at some of its alternatives.
F. Kadence Theme Alternatives
While the Kadence WordPress theme is a great option for building websites, it’s always wise to consider alternatives. There are several themes out there that might better suit your needs and preferences.
1. GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a multipurpose lightweight WordPress theme focusing on speed, stability, and accessibility. It prioritizes the essentials your website needs to achieve optimal performance for your visitors and search engines.
Moreover, this theme comes with a theme builder. This feature helps you to design and build theme elements in the block editor. Plus, with its Dynamic Block Elements, you’ll have total design freedom.
Additionally, it has an extensive library of professionally designed websites. So you can choose one and start your new site right away.
Pricing:
GeneratePress is available in both free and premium versions. You can download the free version from WordPress.org.
Whereas there are 2 pricing plans for the premium version:
- Yearly Plan: Costs $59/year, includes all premium features, full access to the site library, 1 year of updates and premium support, use on up to 500 websites, etc.
- Lifetime Plan: Costs $249, one-time payment, includes all premium features, full access to the site library, lifetime updates, premium support, use on up to 500 websites, etc.
For more details, check our article on GeneratePress review!
2. Divi
Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes in the market. With its advanced visual builder technology, you can visually build your website with ease and efficiency. Also, its drag & drop editor helps to move elements around on the front end of your website without coding.
In addition, it offers 200+ website elements, and it’s a module for everything. Some of them include a call to action, sliders, forms, galleries, and more.
Furthermore, this theme is packed with 2000+ pre-made designs for free. It includes 200+ complete website packs and royalty-free photos, icons, and illustrations. You can choose one of them and immediately apply on your website.
Pricing:
Divi is a premium theme available on its official website with 2 pricing plans.
- Yearly Access Plan: Costs $89 per year with access to Divi, Extra, Bloom, and Monarch themes. It also includes hundreds of website packs and more.
- Lifetime Access Plan: Costs $249 one-time payment with everything from the yearly plan. Plus, it includes lifetime updates, support, and unlimited website usage.
3. Blocksy
Another on our list is Blocksy, one of the most innovative and lightning fast WordPress themes. Also, it’s well-optimized for the Gutenberg editor and seamlessly integrates with other popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc.
Additionally, this theme is packed with dozens of cool features. For example, code-splitting features allow you to load JavaScript behavior only when needed. Plus, the live preview features help to display your changes in real time without slowing your workflow.
Moreover, it comes with many customization options, making it easy to start a website that matches your brand. You can set the layout option from default, narrow to full width. Also, change your header layout, customize the header elements, and more.
Pricing:
Blocksy theme is available in both free and premium versions. The free version is easy to download from the WordPress.org official theme directory.
Whereas the premium version is available on its official website with 3 pricing plans.
- Personal Plan: Costs $49/year for 1 site license. It includes features like multiple conditional sidebars, content blocks, extra post types, mega menus, etc.
- Professional Plan: Costs $69/year for 5 sites license. Includes custom code snippets, custom fonts, Adobe Typekit fonts, custom widgets, and more.
- Agency Plan: Costs $99/year for unlimited licenses. Includes white labels, duplicate header items, product share icons, gallery sliders, and many more.
Also, check out the Blocksy theme review for more detailed information.
G. Final Verdict – Is Kadence Theme Worth it for Your WordPress Site?
In conclusion, the Kadence theme is the best option for building a versatile and responsive theme with various advanced options. Its free version has plenty of handy features to get your website up and running quickly. You can easily build your website according to your preferences with numerous customization options and elements.
Additionally, the theme is designed with performance in mind and loads quickly. Hence ensuring an excellent user experience for visitors to your website. Moreover, its SEO-optimized features make your website easily discoverable in search engines.
The only downside is that it offers a limited number of starter sites compared to similar themes. However, if you’re a user of the block editor or a third-party page builder, then the Kadence theme is worth checking out.
Additionally, since it has a free version, why not give it a try?
Conclusion
That’s all, folks! We’ve arrived at the end of our Kadence theme review. We believe that you’ve understood the Kadence theme and can use it on your site.
We hope you liked our Kadence theme review article. If you’re using the Kadence theme for your website, then please share your experience below in the comment section.
However, if you’ve any further queries about the Kadence theme review, then please feel free to ask us. We’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Also, share this article with your friends and colleagues.
You may also check out our article on the best WordPress themes and templates and the best lead generation WordPress themes.
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