This Kadence Theme Review is an informative guide for beginners and pros. We will explore the Kadence theme’s unique features, advantages, and potential drawbacks. By the end of reading this, you will have all the information you need to determine whether it is the perfect fit for your WordPress website.
Kadence themes allow users to create virtually any type of website easily. Whether you’re building a blog, an e-commerce store, a portfolio, or a business site, Kadence provides a wide range of design options and layout controls.
Over the past few years, we’ve used Kadence for our websites and on numerous client website design projects. Having also worked with Genesis, Elementor, Thrive Themes, and others for many years, we are now in a great position to share our findings and thoughts on Kadence.
Without further due, let’s get started…
What Is Kadence?
If you know little about them, Kadence offers a framework and starter themes, which are the key components of the Kadence suite and are designed to help WordPress users create highly customizable, fast, and visually appealing websites. The suite is jam-packed and full of great features…too long to list, in our opinion, but we’ll give it a very good try.
Like many WordPress themes on the market and what you find in your WordPress dashboard, Kadence offers both free and pro versions. We think the free version provides a solid foundation with essential features suitable for most bloggers; the pro version, however, expands with advanced functionalities and customization options and is worth its weight in gold if you’re a serious blogger.
Which Kadence Plugins To Use
Kadence also offers some awesome lightweight plugins compatible with their framework, starter templates (child themes), and other Kadence themes such as ours. Each plugin enhances specific aspects of website functionality, design, and performance. Let’s break down each one:
Kadence Free Plugins: These can be found in your WordPress repository.
Kadence Pro Plugins: These will need to be purchased from Kadence.
As you can see, the list of Pro plugins is huge, and granted, not all will be used, but the most essential plugins to consider that everyone should use from the Pro are:
These plugins are designed to enhance your website’s functionality and extend WordPress’s capabilities to create optimized, user-friendly, and visually appealing websites. As said, some plugins are available for free, while others are only accessible when you purchase a Kadence Bundle.
Is Kadence An FSE?
What on earth is an FSE? It is an abbreviation for Full-Site Editing, it allows users to edit all parts of their website with the Gutenberg editor—including headers, footers, sidebars, templates, and other elements. It was introduced to WordPress with the 5.9 version and is still used today. Themes explicitly designed for Full-Site Editing (FSE), also known as block themes, enable users to manage all aspects of the site design directly from the WordPress editor.
Some popular FSE themes that fully support full-site editing capabilities are:
If FSE interests you, you can find more of these themes directly from the WordPress theme repository.
FSE themes are not the easiest to design and could soak up a lot of your time, especially if you’re not a professional designer. It’s like starting from scratch with no base or template, so if you’re not skilled in this area, it’s better to skip it. For FSE to become more widely acceptable, it will need to reach the same level of customization and ease of use as traditional themes such as Kadence.
To answer whether Kadence is an FSE, it gives the illusion that it is, but it isn’t. Kadence and many other similar themes with block editing emulate FSE capabilities. With all the comprehensive settings, versatile custom layout options, and global styling features, one would automatically assume it is; to speak on the funny side, we’ll call it half an FSE; we’re sure you’re thankful for that, considering its workload!
What’s In Kadence For You?
Let’s break down some key components and features:
Kadence Build
The Kadence framework is designed to be lightweight and optimized for performance, ensuring fast loading times. It is also fully responsive, meaning it looks great on any device, whether a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
Integrations
Kadence is designed to work seamlessly with all popular WordPress plugins. In all honesty, it is very rare to encounter conflicts, and we have never experienced any.
Advanced Designs
Kadence provides customization beyond the built-in options. Our Delicious theme is intricately built with many hooks and filters; for this reason, we offer Kadence Pro completely free with it.
e-Commerce
If you’re running an online store, Kadence provides built-in WooCommerce integrations with features like product gallery sliders, quick view, AJAX add-to-cart, and customizable product pages. It also includes options to customize the checkout process to improve conversion rates.
NOTE: Check out our shop recommendations here
SEO-Friendly
Kadence is built with clean, semantic HTML and follows best practices for SEO, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. It also includes schema markup, which helps improve search engine visibility and click-through rates.
Accessibility
Kadence is built with accessibility in mind, ensuring that your website is usable for all visitors, including those with disabilities. This can be important for compliance with accessibility laws and improving the overall user experience.
Fast Loading Times
Speed is a crucial factor in website performance, both for user experience and SEO. Kadence themes are designed to be lightweight and optimized for performance, ensuring fast loading times. This can help improve your site’s search engine rankings and reduce bounce rates. And let’s not forget that Google loves high-performing sites, too.
Pre-Made Starter Templates
Kadence provides a range of pre-designed starter templates for various types of websites (e.g., blogs, e-commerce, portfolios). We think some of their designs are slightly outdated, but hey, that gives us professional web designers some extra wiggle room to go above and beyond.
Free and Pro Versions
Kadence Theme has a free version with essential features available in the WordPress repository. The Pro version unlocks advanced features like conditional headers, hooked elements, custom scripts, additional design options, and more. You can start with the free version, then upgrade to the Pro version if you like it and need more advanced features.
Cost Effective
Compared to other premium WordPress themes and plugins, Kadence is often considered cost-effective. The Kadence Pro version offers a lot of value with its extensive features and options, and it is generally more affordable than some competitors. It is worth buying if you’re serious about blogging.
17 Kadence Best Features
Kadence has so many great features that it’s impossible to discuss them all, so we will cover what we love using. Though we may have covered some of these features briefly before, this section goes into a little more detail.
Let’s see why we think Kadence is set apart, is great and will benefit more from others:
1. Lightweight & Fast Performance
How many times have you clicked off a website and never returned because it’s slow? Kadence is intentionally lightweight, with minimal CSS and JavaScript to guarantee fast-loading pages so customers keep coming back. The theme is meticulously optimized for speed, promising an enhanced user experience and improved SEO performance. Faster websites deliver higher user retention rates, superior conversion rates, and elevated search engine rankings. It’s 100% guaranteed that people always return to faster websites!
2. Drag-and-Drop Header and Footer Builder
Kadence boasts a visual header and footer builder that empowers users to effortlessly create custom headers and footers through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Users can seamlessly integrate logos, menus, social icons, buttons, search bars, and more, ensuring complete control over the design without any coding skills needed. This enables the creation of unique and imaginative layouts, which can be transferred to making each page different… that is highly not recommended, but it can be done!
3. Extensive Customization Options
Kadence confidently delivers a wide array of customization options through the WordPress Customizer, offering global color palettes, typography settings, layout controls, button styles, and more. Changes can be previewed in real time, allowing you to craft a website that perfectly aligns with your brand or personal style. With meticulous control over every design aspect, Kadence enables you to create a website that reflects your vision with confidence.
4. Deep Integration with Gutenberg
Kadence seamlessly integrates with the Gutenberg block editor and provides its powerful plugin, Kadence Blocks. This feature-rich plugin extends the functionality of Gutenberg with advanced blocks, including tabs, accordions, advanced galleries, and form blocks. It significantly enhances the WordPress block editor experience, empowering you to effortlessly create intricate and visually striking content layouts without the need for a separate page builder plugin.
5. Hooked Elements for Dynamic Content
The Kadence Pro add-on offers “Hooked Elements,” empowering you to dynamically insert content like ads, banners, CTAs, and scripts into various sections of your website based on user conditions such as location, device type, and user roles. This feature provides robust control over the placement of dynamic content, ultimately helping you target specific audiences and enhance engagement and conversions.
6. Advanced Typography and Global Color Controls
Kadence offers an extensive range of typography options, including custom font uploads, seamless integration with Google Fonts, support for variable fonts, and global color palettes that can be effortlessly applied across your entire website. This ensures a consistent brand identity and visual appeal, ultimately enhancing readability and the overall user experience.
7. Built-In Accessibility Features
Kadence is meticulously crafted with accessibility in mind, strictly adhering to the latest WCAG 2.0 guidelines to guarantee that your website is fully usable by people with disabilities. This not only enhances your website’s inclusivity but also has the potential to boost its search engine rankings, as search engines consistently prioritize and reward accessible websites.
8. WooCommerce Integration & Optimization
Kadence offers deep integration with WooCommerce, providing additional customization options for product pages, shop layouts, and checkout experiences. It includes custom WooCommerce templates, product galleries, and conversion-optimized features. It allows you to create a fully optimized online store with enhanced user experience and checkout processes, which can lead to higher conversion rates and sales.
9. Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design
Kadence guarantees full responsiveness, ensuring that your website looks fantastic on all devices, whether it’s desktops, tablets, or smartphones. This feature provides a consistent and engaging user experience across all devices, which is crucial for SEO and user retention.
10. Conditional Headers and Footers
Kadence empowers you to effortlessly produce multiple header and footer designs and strategically showcase them based on specific pages, posts, user roles, or devices. This level of customization ensures an enhanced user experience tailored to the context, making it perfect for landing pages, sales pages, or exclusive member content.
11. Built-In SEO Optimization
Kadence is meticulously crafted with SEO best practices to ensure optimal performance. It boasts fast loading times, clean and semantic code, robust schema markup support, and seamless compatibility with popular SEO plugins. This guarantees a significant boost in your website’s visibility in search engine results, driving a surge in organic traffic.
12. Integration with Popular Plugins
Kadence seamlessly integrates with popular WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce, Elementor, LifterLMS, LearnDash, and others, enhancing its functionality and compatibility. This makes extending your website’s functionality easier without compatibility issues, allowing you to build complex websites that meet your specific needs with confidence.
13. Kadence Cloud for Easy Template Management
Absolutely! With Kadence Cloud, you have the ability to effortlessly store and manage reusable templates and design elements in the cloud. This enables seamless sharing across multiple websites or projects. This feature is particularly advantageous for agencies, developers, or individuals handling multiple sites, as it significantly saves time and guarantees consistency across projects.
14. Transparent Header and Sticky Header Options
Kadence confidently provides customizable transparent headers that overlay content and sticky headers that remain fixed as users scroll. This enhances design flexibility and user navigation, ultimately leading to heightened user engagement and a more modern, interactive browsing experience.
15. Global Button Customization
Kadence empowers you to effortlessly customize button styles throughout your entire website, ensuring seamless design coherence for calls to action and interactive elements. This not only saves time but also enhances user experience by maintaining a consistent and professional design across all pages and posts.
16. Developer-Friendly With Custom Hooks and Filters
Kadence is meticulously crafted for developers, featuring custom hooks, filters, and easy-to-understand code, making it exceptionally adaptable for advanced users. Developers can confidently extend and customize the theme’s functionality without sacrificing performance or stability.
17. Comprehensive Documentation and Support
Kadence offers comprehensive documentation, engaging video tutorials, and a dedicated support team to assist users at all levels, guaranteeing immediate access to help whenever needed to resolve issues and fully optimize the theme’s capabilities.
Conclusion to Kadence’s best features: Kadence is renowned for its lightweight performance, extensive customization options, seamless integration with Gutenberg, and numerous features that enhance design flexibility and user experience. Whether you’re a beginner building your first website or a developer seeking a powerful and flexible theme, Kadence offers compelling tools to help you create a stunning, fast, and functional website.
What Is Kadence’s Support Like?
Kadence’s support is widely acclaimed for being highly responsive, exceptionally helpful, and thoroughly comprehensive, making it an outstanding selling point for users evaluating the theme or its associated plugins. Thanks to its unwavering professionalism, rapid responsiveness, and diverse support channels, it has garnered consistently high praise from its user base.
Whether you prefer to independently address issues using their extensive documentation or require direct assistance from their team, rest assured that Kadence provides an unwaveringly robust support system tailored to meet the needs of all users. Premium users enjoy top-notch priority support, while all users can tap into a vibrant, engaged community and regular updates.
Kadence Vs. Others Comparison
As we have discussed, Kadence is a lightweight, performance-focused WordPress theme that is deeply integrated with the Gutenberg editor. It offers advanced header and footer builder, global color and typography controls, extensive flexibility and compatibility with the Gutenberg editor, making it ideal for those who want a highly customizable, speed-optimized website with built-in SEO features. It also makes it suitable for users who wish to have extensive design flexibility without relying on additional plugins.
Let’s get started with some comparisons:
Is Kadence better than Elementor?
Kadence and Elementor serve different purposes, making them difficult to compare directly. Elementor is a full-featured drag-and-drop page builder plugin that allows for highly customized and visually complex layouts but may come with a heavier performance load.
Conclusion: If you prioritize speed, simplicity, and Gutenberg compatibility, Kadence is likely a better choice; if you need more advanced design flexibility and dynamic content capabilities, Elementor might be the better option. Overall, we don’t recommend using Elementor because it’s a pro at slowing down websites.
Is Kadence better than Thrive Themes?
Kadence and Thrive Themes cater to different user needs. Thrive Themes is a suite of tools geared toward marketers, offering conversion-focused features like landing page templates, A/B testing, and lead generation tools.
Conclusion: If you’re looking for a versatile, performance-driven theme, Kadence might be the better choice, while Thrive Themes excels if your priority is maximizing conversions and sales with built-in marketing tools.
Is Kadence better than Genesis?
Kadence and Genesis differ in their approach and flexibility. Genesis is part of the StudioPress framework and is known for its clean, secure, and lightweight code, making it a solid choice for developers and users who prioritize speed, SEO, and simplicity.
Conclusion: Kadence is likely better for non-developers or those wanting more design control, while Genesis is ideal for developers looking for a robust, minimalist foundation.
Is Kadence Better Than Astra?
Kadence and Astra are both popular, lightweight WordPress themes designed for speed, flexibility, and customization, but they have some key differences. Astra has a more extensive library of starter templates, is highly compatible with various page builders (like Elementor and Beaver Builder), and provides more granular performance optimizations.
Conclusion: If you prioritize built-in design features and Gutenberg compatibility, Kadence may be the better choice. Astra might be preferable for those who want extensive pre-made templates and a page-builder-friendly theme.
Is Kadence Better Than Divi?
Kadence and Divi serve different types of users. Divi is a powerful page builder and theme combination with a vast design library and advanced visual editing tools, but it can be resource-intensive and slower to load.
Conclusion: If you prioritize speed, Gutenberg compatibility, and a straightforward design approach, Kadence might be the better choice; however, if you want maximum design flexibility with a feature-rich page builder, Divi may be more suitable.
* Like all block builders, such as Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, etc, they require many other plugins for their themes to function at optimal levels, which in turn makes websites very slow.
Do I need a Starter theme?
In theory, no; realistically, yes.
Kadence framework is a versatile, all-in-one solution that provides extensive customization options and fast performance but comes without any design. You will need a predesigned wireframe (idea on paper) of how you’d like your site to look, and then it needs to be built, which is where Kadence web designers come in handy and predesigned starter templates.
Kadence includes pre-built starter templates that you can import directly to kickstart your website design. Though these are optional they simply offer a quicker path to building a site, which aren’t suitable for most people, considering their blandness. Most are outdated and need mega customization; however, true to Kadence’s support for their nagging followers, they are now building more up-to-date modern starter templates.
Is A Free Template enough?
The free version of Kadence is sufficient for many users as it provides a robust set of features, including a responsive design, a basic header and footer builder, global color and typography controls, and access to a limited selection of starter templates.
It’s an excellent option for those looking to create a fast, lightweight website with essential customization options without the expense. The free version could be a great way to test it, but in doing this, you have to remember that it will have many limitations.
Lifting the limitations opens you up to more advanced features like hooked elements, conditional headers, WooCommerce-specific enhancements, and deeper integration options; upgrading to Kadence Pro would offer more flexibility and functionality. Our Delicious theme is so intricately designed that we decided to provide the theme with Kadence Pro for the theme and blocks.
The free version is often enough for basic sites, but for more complex needs, the pro version is worth its weight in gold, considering what you get for the price.
How much does Kadence cost?
So, could Kadence be the best WordPress theme ever made?
Kadence provides flexible licensing options, including yearly and lifetime plans. If you plan to use the theme long-term or on multiple sites, the full-bundle and lifetime license can be a cost-effective option. We think the full bundle is a better choice because the AI credits renew each year with your subscription, compared to the Lifetime, which doesn’t.
Is Kadence Worth It?
Based on the Kadence theme features, high-performance scores, price for the pro version, ease of use, excellent support team, and our years of experience using it, we believe Kadence is 100% worth every penny! Try Kadence Today with our instant discounted offer for the Essential and Full Bundle!
About Sharna & The Team
Sharna is a WordPress website designer. For over twenty-plus years, she and her team have helped many business owners launch scroll-stopping websites. Her passion is creating high-quality, high-performing websites, whatever their size.
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