Kadence WordPress Theme Review: The Complete Guide for 2025
Are you looking for the perfect WordPress theme that’s fast, flexible, and easy to customize? Then Kadence might be the theme you have been waiting for. Today, in this article, we are doing a Kadence review, and in this article, we are diving deep into Kadence, which is one of the most popular lightweight WordPress themes on the market right now.
We will look at the design features, starter templates, Kadence blocks, the pro version, and most importantly, whether it’s really worth your time and money. So, if you’re building a blog, business site, or WooCommerce store, stick around, this review could save you hours of trial and error. Let’s start with the installation and starter sites.
Installation and Starter Sites
Now, Kadence has a free version, which means that you can install it directly from the WordPress repository. To demonstrate this, we have created a Taste WP WordPress site. So, what we need to do is simply go to appearance and add theme and install Kadence directly from here.
Once the theme has been installed and activated, we also have to install the AI starter templates to take a look at the starter sites. And once we have that, we have the option to either use the AI powered templates or pre-designed templates.
Now, Kadence gives you tons of starter sites to work with. You can see there are premium, free, all types of starter sites. You can just choose a site and import it within a few clicks.
Easy Import Process
If we want to import a certain starter template, we can simply click on it. It will give us a preview of the entire site. We can choose any color combination that we want. We can choose whether to import the full site or only import the selected pages.
Then we can also choose what plugins to install. Kadence will already mark some of the required plugins, so you cannot deselect these. Once we are done, we can finish and launch and wait for the starter site to import, and our website will be ready within a few seconds.
The entire website is fully responsive, it looks really polishing and really good. But what about the design and customization options? What about that?
Design and Customization Options
This brings us to our next point, which is design and customization options, which is a very important aspect of a WordPress theme. Before importing the starter site, it does give us the freedom to choose a color palette and fonts for our website.
On top of that, if we enter the site customization, we will find tons of customization options. We can customize the colors and fonts, header, footer, general post pages, layout, search results, and much more.
Another lightweight Theme: Astra WordPress Theme
Colors and Typography
If we start with the colors and fonts, we can simply click on colors and choose any palette from over here. You can notice the immediate changes on your website as you go through all of these templates. We can customize individual templates if you want. You can choose the templates from here.
We can customize the site background, content background, title above content, and others. If we take a look at the buttons, we can customize the text colors, button background colors, border colors, etc., just from this one place. So, you can control your button design just from this one section.
If you want to change the typography or access the typography, there’s the base font and the global typography options. You can change your H1, H2, H3, H4 font, all of these are over here. We can also use Google font subsets from here.
Advanced Header Builder
Moving on to the header, if you want to customize your website header or navigation bar, Kadence gives you an advanced header builder. This header builder allows you to build your header visually. You can control everything just from this one section.
You can just simply drag and drop the elements on any of these rows and see the changes take effect immediately. You can add widgets, buttons, links, etc., to your header and customize it and see the changes take effect. This makes your website building a lot faster.
You can also customize the design from this section. You can enable transparent header if you want with one click and disable it if you would rather prefer a non-transparent header. If you want a sticky header, you will have a lot of options such as if you want the sticky option to work only on the main row, the top and main row, whole header, only top row, or only bottom row.
Footer Builder
Moving on to the footer builder, this also gives you an advanced footer builder. Using this, you can build your entire footer, add widgets, customize those widgets directly from this section, and you don’t have to worry about the responsiveness.
In the general section, we find the basic editing options such as layouts, sidebars, images, scroll to top button. So, if you click on it, the scroll to top button will be enabled, and there are other options as well.
So, this gives you a lot of customization options, whether you want to customize the header, customize the footer, customize the colors, typography, everything is there just within your hands reach.
Kadence Blocks Integration
The next point is the Kadence Blocks integration. So, if you are a Gutenberg user, this is a really good news for you as Kadence Blocks introduces much more powerful blocks to the already powerful Gutenberg.
If we expand this, we can see that the Kadence Blocks add so many powerful blocks. The entire starter template is actually built with the Kadence Blocks, as we can see, the advanced text, the single button, these sections, plus you can take sections, row layouts, and customize these row layouts.
For example, if we select this row, you can see that you can choose the number of columns, the layout of those columns, you can control the column gutter, row gutter, content max width, etc. This will help you customize your site with precision and perfection.
Kadence Pro Features
Now, these are all fine, but this is just the free version of Kadence. Kadence Pro actually offers you much more features. So, let’s go ahead and check out some of the pro features of Kadence.
Besides the benefits of using premium designs and templates, Kadence Pro offers you much more advanced features.
Hook Elements
One such feature is the hook elements. If you are using Kadence theme, hook elements are one of the most powerful tools it offers, especially if you’re aiming for flexible design or custom functionality without editing theme files or writing a plugin.
Hook elements let you inject content into specific location across your site like above the header, below the post title, inside the footer, after the content, etc., using WordPress hooks. You can also choose what type of elements you want. You can create a content section, fixed section, template section, and HTML editor.
Content section are especially useful for secondary header or if you want to add a sale banner. A fixed section is potentially used for ad banner, subscription form, etc., and templates are used when displaying custom post types or instances using dynamic content or advanced custom fields, and the HTML editor, you can use it for custom codes, custom CSS class, and SVG.
Using this feature, you can add content to various sections of your website and also add conditions. You can also add expiry settings and choose when your content or element will be visible and when it will expire.
Mega Menu
Another advanced feature is the mega menu or multicolumn menu. If you want, you can go to your menu section and you can access the menu item settings. Using this feature, you will be able to create multicolumn menu such as this one.
So, in the documentation, what we can see is you can create a mega menu for your contact. So, in your contact, you can add your address, business hours, map, and a contact form. You can imagine how useful and handy this feature can be.
Conditional Headers
Another feature is the conditional header. You can enable conditional header from the pro add-on section after you get Kadence Pro. So, with this, you can create conditional header and choose where you want to display your header and when you want to display your header.
You can also get a header preview while you’re designing your header. For conditional settings, you can look at the display settings, which lets you choose where you want to display your menu either the entire site, the front page, the blog page, and many more.
Dark Mode Switch
Another feature is the color palette switch. So, if you want to add a light mood and a dark mode to your website like many websites have this feature now, you can enable the color palette switch feature.
When you enable this, it’s going to give you the choice to add a color palette switcher on your website. You can choose the color palettes from global palette, so the palette one will be the light mode and the palette two will be the dark mode.
Maintenance Mode
Another simple but very important feature is the Kadence maintenance mode. Normally, when you are developing a live website, it’s safe to put your website in a maintenance mode, and to put your site in a maintenance mode, you normally use another plugin. But if you have Kadence Pro, you don’t have to worry about that.
You will have the feature to add a maintenance mode to your website. So, once you enable the maintenance mode, you will have the option to add maintenance mode pages, and don’t worry, you don’t have to create anything from scratch.
Kadence Pricing Plans
Now, let’s take a look at the pricing. Now, this is the pricing page of Kadence. Kadence has a theme and plugin plus another one is the Kadence Plus hosting. So, if you want hosting as well, you can choose the hosting plan. But we’ll start with the theme and plugins.
So, there are three plans: the Express, Plus, and Ultimate. We already saw the free version and how powerful it is, but if you want to level up your website or add more advanced features to it, getting the pro version will actually help you a lot.
Express Plan
The Express plan is available for $69 a year, which is built annually. This gives you access to the premium templates and design library. You will have up to three site licenses and 1,250 AI credits per year.
This gives you access to the theme blocks, creative kit, custom fonts, and capture. If we scroll down, we can see there are a few more features available such as the AI and pre-built design.
Plus Plan
The next plan is the Plus plan, which is the essential tools to level up your website. It is available for $169 per year, and you can use this for up to 10 sites, and this will give you 4,000 AI credits per year.
Now, you get the pro version of the theme and blocks. You, of course, get access to creative kit, custom fonts, and capture, plus you get the theme kit pro and blocks pro. These are more advanced editions.
Ultimate Plan
Finally, the Ultimate version, which is the best value. It’s available for $299 a year. This can be used on up to 25 sites, and you will get 8,000 AI credits per year.
There’s also a switcher over here, if we click on it, we will be able to use it on up to 1,000 sites, but you will be built an extra $100 per year. You get access to all these features. Now you get the Shopkit for WooCommerce, conversions insights, child theme builder, pattern hub access to all current and future products.
The Ultimate plan actually gives you access to all the available features of Kadence. There’s also a section where you can compare the plans. So, from here, you can compare what you’re getting with the free version, the express version, the plus version, and the ultimate version.
Final Thoughts
So, that brings us to the end of this article. We hope it was helpful for you. If you found this article helpful, give it a like and subscribe to our channel for more helpful articles on WordPress. So, thank you for watching, see you next time.
