There is no dearth of themes in the ecosystem of WordPress. However, when it comes to free themes that are feature-rich and flexible too, the options are few and far between.
Yes, it’s not easy to find a free, feature-rich, yet scalable and flexible theme for your WordPress website. Yet, when you start your business, you’d want to keep your costs low, and as a result, you may want to look up a free theme that offers all these things.
The good news is that your search might have come to an end. Because in this review, we’re going to take a look at one of the most popular and highly-rated free WordPress themes. The theme, known as Kadence, is a multipurpose theme that can be used for building any kind of website. In this review, we shall try to find out all its advantages and shortcomings, so you can decide whether this is a good theme for your business website or not. Let’s begin!
Kadence Theme Features At A Glance (2023)
| Sr. No. | Feature | Purpose |
| 1. | Header Builder | Build any kind of header without any complications. Sticky header, transparent header — everything. |
| 2. | Footer Builder | Allows building a footer as per your needs |
| 3. | Global color palette and color options | Setup your color palette once and use it sitewide with a few clicks. Apply the colors of your choice anywhere with flexible color options. |
| 4. | Custom layouts | Choose a page layout as per your needs. |
| 5. | Support for custom post types | Allows creating custom post types and page types as per your needs. |
| 6. | Global typography powered by Google fonts | Lots of fonts, with the ability to apply them sitewide in a few clicks. |
| 7. | Global button styles | Like colors and typography, buttons too can be designed from a single place, and their styles replicated sitewide. |
| 8. | CSS pre-loading | Pre-loads the CSS into the header and uses it only when needed, thus boosting site performance. |
| 9. | Breadcrumb generator | Make navigation and internal linking a breeze through breadcrumbs |
| 10. | Responsive controls | To make your website work smoothly across screen sizes. |
| 11. | SEO friendly | Implement schema markup and other SEO features smoothly. |
Kadence Theme Pros and Cons
Here are the pros & cons of the Kadence Theme.
Pros:
- Huge library of templates — both free as well as paid templates
- Easy-to-use color schemes and color options
- Easy-to-use typography and font combinations
- Flexible and feature-rich Header and Footer builders
- Full control of page layouts
- Pro features take theme functionality to an altogether different level.
Cons:
- Fewer templates for Elementor users
- No templates for page builders other than Gutenberg and Elementor.
Kadence Theme Review: Features Explained
Here we have explained all the features of the Kadence Theme.
#1. Branding
Your brand is literally the first thing you want to put on your website and also the first thing that your visitors want to see. Kadence allows you to put it up not only in the form of your logo but also through a full-visual depiction of your brand identity through colors, fonts, and much more, as you’ll discover soon.
But as far as common branding features are concerned, it allows you to put on your logo and your social media handles in the header itself. It also allows you to combine your logo with a site title and tagline and provides multiple alignment options to display them in a manner that you like.
And as you can see in the image above, it also allows you to have different logo and logo display settings for computers, tablets, and mobile devices. In short, you remain in charge of how your brand is displayed.
#2. Colors and color options
Playing with colors is extremely easy in the Kadence theme because it comes with 12 pre-configured color palettes that can be switched quickly to create an eye-pleasing design. Here’s what it looks like:
But even if you don’t want to use any of their existing color palettes, Kadence gives you total control over the colors of almost every part of your website. You can define your own custom color palette with up to two accent colors, four contrast colors, and three base colors. You can apply different colors of the palette to the background, links, text, buttons, and any other content that you have.
You can even choose multiple colors for the text of different types (i.e. headings, subheadings, body, etc.), or multiple colors for the background or any other part, depending on the device being used. In a nutshell, despite being a free theme, Kadence provides you with so much control over colors that you’ll never have to touch the CSS code to define the color for any part of your website.
#3. Fonts and Typography
Just like the color schemes, Kadence does a great job at providing font and typography options, too, by including 12 pre-configured font combinations in the customization panel. You can choose any of them without having to waste your time in pairing various fonts and typography styles to create a cohesive and professional design.
But if you prefer a more hands-on approach and would like to choose your own fonts, it comes with Google fonts integration to let you do that. Again, the best of both worlds, which is rare among free themes.
#4. Header builder
Unlike other themes that rely solely on page builders to build a header, Kadence includes an in-built header builder that can be used to design your header. It’s so feature-rich that it can be used to design a header of any kind — a sticky header, a transparent header, or a header with solid background — everything is possible. Heck, you can even have different header designs for computers, tablets, or smartphones!
Kadence allows you to choose the background color of your header — choose a solid color, a gradient, an image, or even leave it transparent.
The header builder of Kadence is also incredibly easy to use. You can simply drag and drop the items that you want to include in your header in any place where you want them to be and then tweak their style to make them look just as you want.
The header builder also allows you to include multiple menus, a call-to-action button, social icons, and a shopping cart.
#5. Page layouts
The flexible functionality offered by Kadence isn’t limited to the header and footer alone. The theme also provides you total control over the layout of your page by allowing you to choose a page layout, title layout, content width, content style (i.e. boxed or unboxed), and much more. It also includes many preset layouts that can be applied sitewide for setting up your website pages easily.
The various layout options offered by Kadence Theme
We must say that it’s uncommon for a theme to offer this level of flexibility in layout options without charging anything. This gives Kadence even more leverage over other multipurpose themes.
#6. Footer builder and layouts
While the footer stays at the bottom of your website, it’s still one of the most important parts of the whole website as it includes internal links to many of your pages and gives a nice finish to all the content of your webpage. Therefore, it’s important for any theme to provide ample functionality for building a nice footer. Fortunately, Kadence our expectations in this department too.
The footer builder of the Kadence theme
It comes with an awesome footer builder that can be used to design a footer area as per your requirements. You can add as many links as you want to, and you can also customize the design of your footer (i.e. the background). And just like other areas, there’s the flexibility of using a different design for your footer on mobile devices, tablets, and computers.
#7. Page Builder Integration
Despite including a header builder, a footer builder, and customizable layouts, it’s amazing that Kadence works incredibly well with popular page builders too. It works with Elementor, which is the most popular page builder plugin available for WordPress. It also works with Beaver Builder, but for this review, we shall explore the possibilities of using it with Elementor only.
Kadence includes pre-built starter templates that can be customized using Elementor. Since the templates have been designed using Elementor or Gutenberg editor itself, you won’t face any compatibility issues when working with them. The template importer plugin also makes the job of choosing the right template easier for you by providing a dropdown in the top right corner to select the page builder you want to use for customizing your template (check the image below).
However, a shortcoming is that, at the moment, it has only 13 starter templates designed with Elementor. There’s a huge library of templates for Gutenberg builder, but Elementor fans will have to choose their template from a bouquet of two dozen options only.
Also, right now, the theme has templates designed using Elementor and Gutenberg editor only. If you want to use any other page builder, you can do that, but you’ll have to start with a blank site from scratch.
#8. Templates
Kadence has built a quite robust library of 75+ starter templates. These professionally designed templates have been developed for websites of almost all kinds and all industries — hospitality, political, events, business, e-commerce, nonprofit, travel, learning, membership, blogging — there’s a template for almost everything and ever need in Kadence.
Using these templates is also quite simple. You just install their Starter Templates plugin, click on the Starter Templates option under the ‘Appearance’ section in the left sidebar, and you’re presented with dozens of stunning, ready-to-use templates.
By default, it shows you both free as well as paid templates, but using the filter bar available on the page, you can choose to check out free templates or paid templates only. You can also filter on the basis of what type of site you’re building.
Now, what makes this theme even more special is the number of free templates included. Out of the 75+ total templates, it has to offer, 46 are free to use! Which other theme offers this much choice among free templates? Very few, actually, and Kadence is one of those rare breed themes.
#9. Kadence Blocks
The Kadence Blocks plugin further extends the functionality of the theme by adding even more customization capabilities to it. It allows you to customize your web pages within the Gutenberg editor by adding new blocks of content that can’t be added without its existence. It includes a number of advanced features that can be used to spruce up the look and feel of your website, including:
- 1500+ SVG icons
- Parallax backgrounds and borders
- A design library
- WYSIWYG Editor
- And much more.
Just like the theme, Kadence Blocks is also available in both Free as well as Pro versions. Regardless of the version you use, it can help you create a really professional website without having to work with too many other plugins.
#10. Pro Features
The good thing that really separates Kadence from other themes is that it offers a lot in its free version itself. But if you’re willing to spend some money, you can get even more out of it! It offers a truly unique set of advanced features to its Pro subscribers, which include but are not limited to:
- 19 new Header addons
- A WooCommerce addon to help you customize your WooCommerce store
- Hooked elements
- Custom fonts
- Ability to add scripts to header/footer
- Access to Pro templates
- Infinite scrolling
- Custom images for taxonomy backgrounds
- And much more.
In a nutshell, if you pay for it…. you won’t want to think about using any other theme for your website in the future.
#11. Pricing
Finally, let’s talk money. Kadence theme is free to download and use, but if you want to purchase any of its Pro plans, then you’ve three options to choose from:
Which of these plans you choose for your website is really subjective and depends on your requirements. While most websites will be good enough with its free variant alone, if you feel you need more, you can choose from any of its three plans.
Who Is Kadence Theme Best For?
Kadence Theme is an amazing theme for anyone who is planning to create an eCommerce store on WordPress. If you want that people need to log in to their accounts to access your website, then the Kadence theme is the right option for you. If you come from a non-technical background, then this theme can help you increase the speed and improve the SEO of your website.
It integrates with most WordPress plugins which will be great if you’re planning to use a Learning Management System (LMS) on your website. With Kadence Pro, you can create custom code solutions for your client’s websites. This theme also gives you features like script management, WooCommerce features, and hooks.
Related Read:
Wrapping Up: Kadence Theme Review (2023)
Overall we can say that the Kadence theme is one of the best free themes available in the market right now. It offers so much functionality without charging anything that you can build literally any kind of website with it without having to worry about design, layout, or necessary features. And even in the rare circumstances when you don’t find something that you need in its free version, you can definitely find it in its Pro plans.
What do you think about its features and functionality? Share your thoughts in the comments. Also, share this review on your social media handles, so others can also learn about this robust multipurpose theme.
