Kadence Theme: Best Free WordPress Theme

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme , you won’t be short of options. You can choose from hundreds of free themes or purchase a paid theme to get specific features. But choosing the right theme from so many options can be a real challenge.

With this in mind, let’s take a detailed look at Kadence Theme , one of the best free WordPress themes that we use at Impulsa Ecommerce.

What is Kadence Theme?

Kadence Theme is a WordPress theme available as a free download, with a pro version that opens up more possibilities. Kadence Theme is the official theme, Kadence Blocks is their blocks plugin and Kadence WP is the company name.

Apart from Kadence theme , Kadence WP also currently offers four other themes and a collection of plugins for WordPress (about 15).

The most notable plugin is Kadence Blocks , a custom blocks plugin that extends the capabilities of the WordPress Gutenberg editor. Like the Kadence theme, Kadence Blocks comes in a free and a pro version.

Both parts of the Kadence WP platform ( Kadence Theme Pro and Kadence Blocks Pro ) are offered together in the Kadence membership .

For this review, we’ve split the main features into two sections, so you can see what’s included for free and what you’ll get if you purchase the pro version.

Opinions about Kadence Theme

If we look at user reviews on WordPress.org , Kadence has more than 200,000 active installations and an average rating of 5 stars.

Although it is a relatively young theme, the level of daily downloads is high and receives around 1,000 daily downloads and peaks of more than 3,000 daily downloads .

With this data, you can be sure to choose a solid theme to create websites and online stores without any problems for beginners. Kadence WP has recently been acquired by iThemes, a reputable company that has proven to have great WordPress products and to be trustworthy.

Main features of the free version of Kadence

Although there are countless free themes, Kadence stands out as one of the best. It’s a lightweight theme that helps your website load faster and offers many more design and customization features than you’ll find in most free themes.

Since Kadence is available in free and professional versions, you may think that the free version is limited, but that is not the case. The free theme is quite capable and its customization capabilities are what really make Kadence stand out.

Features free version of Kadence:

Header and footer builder.
Adhesive and transparent header.
Global color palette.
Robust WordPress Customizer options.
Related entries embedded.
Scroll up.
Tight integration with Gutenberg and Kadence Blocks .

Let us now look at the best features of the free Kadence Theme in more detail.

Header and Footer Builder

First of all, the header and footer builder is drag & drop style , you can easily drag and drop different sections into your header and build a fully functional and attractive header for your blog or website in a matter of minutes.

Kadence includes 3 header rows – the top header row, the main header row and the bottom header row – all for free.

One of my favorite parts about the header builder is that I can have my main navigation, logo, SVG social icons (no need to install an additional plugin), a CTA button, and a search icon wherever I want in the header. , just using the drag and drop function. It also offers the “ hamburger menu icon ” option for mobile and desktop.

Global color palette

The color settings that Kadence offers surpass the options you’ll find in almost any other free theme. From this section, you can set the site background color, content background color, link color, and even set a global color palette for the entire website.

You can also set two accent colors, multiple text colors, and background colors. You can choose from predefined color sets or customize any of the individual colors, giving you complete control over your web design.

Kadence Theme WordPress Customizer

The Kadence theme has a very intuitive WordPress customizer. You can control virtually every aspect of your website design such as pages, posts, and even custom post types. You can choose between wide, box, or sidebar layouts with the click of a button in the WordPress customizer.

With Kadence, all the options you need for each section of your site are exactly where you expect to find them.

Advanced customization options, such as custom colors or the ability to add CSS , are available in the free version of Kadence Theme.

Typography

Use Kadence Theme’s typography settings to create the perfect design for your website’s typography. Within the WordPress customizer you can easily modify the entire site’s fonts, headers, buttons, links, footer, menu, and much more. Includes the use of Google Fonts, System Default and customizing the font style and size.

SVG social icons (no plugin needed)

SVG social icons. This feature is very simple, but something that many popular WordPress themes don’t have.

With Kadence, you can choose from a large number of SVG icons to add to your header or footer without installing a plugin.

Kadence is one of the first themes to have support for a wide variety of social icons that you can add with ease.

SVG icons ( which stands for Scalable Vector Graphics ) are a very lightweight way to include icons and images on a site, taking up much less space than an actual image and therefore allowing pages to load faster.

Starter Templates: Kadence Starter Templates

After installing and activating Kadence Theme , you will be asked if you want to install a plugin with free starter templates. These templates make it easy to edit your website, and offer designs for one-click import of an entire site or a specific page.

Once you have installed the Startup Templates plugin, the settings will be accessible from Appearance > Kadence > Startup Templates . The first thing you will do is choose a builder. You can use the default Gutenberg editor or the popular Elementor plugin.

Although for now it does not offer many demos compared to its competitors, the design is adapted for any type of business and the templates are easily editable through the Kadence Blocks plugin .

Kadence Extra Features

As I said at the beginning of this article, the free Kadence WordPress theme includes many extra features than most paid WordPress themes.

In fact, here is a list of features you get with the free Kadence theme that you would have to pay for in most other popular WordPress themes:

Scroll to top ( scroll to top ).
Multiple navigation menus.
Copyright text.
Adhesive and transparent header .
Sticky sidebar.
Typography options for any section of your site.
Space control for padding and margins.
Related posts slider at the end of your blog posts.
Additional custom WooCommerce options.

Next, Kadence Theme Pro . Check out the section below to see all the best features of the pro version of the Kadence theme.

Main features of the Kadence Pro version

Both the free Kadence theme and the Kadence Blocks plugin include so many things that it makes you wonder, what additional features do you get if you buy the pro version?

In short, Kadence Pro builds on the features available in the free theme. When you view Kadence settings, the pro plugins that were grayed out with the free theme are now available with Kadence Pro.

Best Features of Kadence Theme Pro :

Advanced plugins for designing headers.
Mega Menu.
Header/footer scripts.
Kadence Elements Hooks.
Additional plugins for WooCommerce .
Personalized and sticky menu (stiky menu).

Advanced Header Plugins

Build a premium header with 20 new header elements to choose from. Some of the plugins include:

Account icon.
Contact elements.
Dividers.
Search bar.
Additional buttons.
Sliding panel.
Widget area.
Extra HTML areas.

Mega Menu

Kadence Pro will display an interface that will help you add icons to your menus. You can also insert a highlighted label next to a menu icon.

Use an icon on the label of each menu item.
Create multi-column dropdowns.
Use custom content for Dropdowns.
Custom background for dropdowns.

Header/Footer Scripts

You can add options in the customizer to add header and footer scripts, for example adding the Google Analytics global website tag.

Header scripts.
Page body scripts after opening.
Footer scripts.

Kadence Element Hooks

Kadence Element Hooks is one of the main reasons to buy Kadence Suite . With Elements, you can insert hooks and headers anywhere on the website with the ability to choose which users to show them to and on which device.

This way you can differentiate between different pages of your blog or online store and create authentic full-width landing pages, custom 404 pages or place custom content in the footer or header.

This functionality is very useful to save you time creating pages or to display banners before the content begins in a single post, visible on all devices.

Kadence Theme Pro + WooCommerce

Kadence Theme has functionalities focused on WooCommerce to create your own online store without problem. Within Kadence Suite, you can find the extra Kadence Woo addons included.

This plugin is made especially for WooCommerce users to quickly customize online stores.

Features of Kadence Theme + WooCommerce :

Add product gallery slider with product image.
Add zoom to the images on the product sheets.
Create personalized messages in the shopping cart.
Show your product variations.
Automatically open the side cart when product is added.
Build custom store with blocks or Page Builders.
Store toggle widget area.
Add to cart for AJAX single product page.

Custom and sticky header

The Kadence Custom Sticky Header allows you to create custom headers, displaying the “sticky” header on top when users scroll down your website.

You can also change the navigation elements when the user visits your website, displaying a different logo, search bar, or social icons depending on the device.

Kadence performance

How does the Kadence theme perform in terms of speed? Can it help you create a website fast?

Kadence is a very lightweight theme compared to other WordPress theme. It occupies 42 KB. This makes it SEO friendly. While the Kadence theme comes with tons of different features, it has clean code, and is pretty fast.

In our reviews, we have looked at some demos on Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix PageSpeed. Google PageSpeed insights recorded 79 on mobile and 98 on desktop , which is pretty good compared to WordPress themes. More than the overall score, we have to focus on Core Web Vitals metrics like LCP, TBT, and CLS.

Here is the breakdown of the metrics:

Metrics	Punctuation	LCP	TBT	CLS
Google PageSpeed Computer	98	1.5s	0ms	0
Google PageSpeed Mobile	79	2s	10ms	0
GtMetrix	TO	691ms	38ms	0.01

Google PageSpeed Desktop : LCP – 1.5s, TBT – 0ms, CLS – 0

Google PageSpeed Mobile : LCP – 2s, TBT – 10ms, CLS – 0

The GtMetrix web vitals: LCP – 691ms, TBT – 38ms, CLS – 0.01

The loading speed will depend on many factors, such as the installation of plugins, hosting, images…

Prices Kadence Theme Free vs Premium

Kadence offers a free version and a paid version if you want to upgrade for more flexibility. Within its plan, Kadence has divided its prices into two large categories, one is annual and the other is lifetime. Both categories are further divided into Kadence Pro and Kadence Suite .

There are several ways to access the Kadence theme and Kadence plugins. You already know that you can get the free version of the theme by downloading it from the official directory, or activating it directly from your WordPress panel.

Kadence’s premium offering is broken down into two parts: Kadence Pro and Kadence Suite .

Annual Kadence Theme Pro Price

Kadence Theme Pro: Costs $79 per year and includes access to Hooked Elements, Mega-menu, Custom Fonts, and plugins for WooCommerce. You can use it on as many websites as you want.
Essential Bundle: The complete Kadence template suite for $149/year, including pre-built templates, Kadence Theme Pro, and Kadence Blocks Pro (recommended).

Full Bundle : The Full Bundle version costs $219 per year and adds advanced features such as Kadence Cloud, Kadence Conversions and a plugin kit to improve the user experience.

In short, this is what the premium version of Kadence includes .

Kadence Cloud.
Kadence Blocks Pro.
Kadence Theme Pro.
All plugins for members (about 15 addons).
Unlimited license use on websites.
One year of support and updates.
Includes all premium starter templates.
30-day return and satisfaction guarantee to its users.

Full membership gives access to all Kadence products for $219 per year. Along with all the features of the pro version, it includes member access to Kadence Blocks Pro, Kadence Woo extras, Kadence AMP, and more.

Kadence Theme Pro + Elementor Page Builder

Kadence Theme is fully compatible with Elementor and you will be able to edit and customize any page on your website your way.

Among the notable features of using Elementor with Kadence Theme, we find its global color palette linked to the Elementor editor, making page customization much easier.

Out of the box, you cannot edit products from the Elementor editor, so Kadence Themes offers full integration with the Kadence WooCommerce Elementor plugin .

How to install Kadence Theme

As we have mentioned before, Kadence Theme is a free theme and can be found within the WordPress theme repository.

Go to Appearance > Themes > Add New > Kadence.

To install Kadence Theme Pro and unlock all the features you will have to install it as a plugin, not a theme , after purchasing it.

Once the Kadence Pro plugin is installed, you have to go to Appearance > Kadence Theme and activate the license and the add-ons that you are going to use for your respective account.

Kadence Theme add-on plugins

Kadence Theme has several products apart from its own theme as a complement. Below you can see the plugins:

Kadence Cloud

Kadence Cloud is a paid premium plugin especially useful for web designers, as it allows you to build a design library in the cloud and sell access to that library to your clients without the need for any plugin. Access is through the Kadence Blocks plugin .

However, Kadence Cloud is designed for the main block editor and the interface for dropping content to your site is part of Kadence Blocks and only runs in the main block editor, so it will not work with Elementor or another page builder. .

You can purchase it for $89/year or purchase the Kadence Suite membership .

Kadence Blocks

Kadence Blocks is a must-have plugin to use with Kadence Theme . It offers multiple blocks to add sections to any page of your website or online store.

It also has a library of 100% responsive block designs to save you time when designing any type of page (about us, contact, pricing tables, hero page, testimonials, informational sections, among others).

With Kadence Blocks you can do:

Sections and blocks.
Advanced photo gallery.
Customer testimonials.
Frequently Asked Questions Accordion.
Custom tabs.
Advanced CTA buttons.
Advanced titles and headings.
Lists with SVG icons.
Information boxes and product sales.
Space / Divider.

Price:

Free version at WordPress.org .
Kadence Blocks Pro – $89/year.

Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer

Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer allows you to make changes to default WooCommerce emails without coding knowledge through the WordPress customizer.

It has pre-built templates that you can import to WooCommerce in one click. Once the template is imported, you can make further changes to the design if necessary.

The customizer is used to select the email you want to edit, and make the changes from the WordPress editor itself.

Notable features of the plugin:

- Live editing of WooCommerce emails.
- Import of pre-built templates.
- Customize the typography, text and color.
- Custom settings can be easily imported and exported.

Email tests in your inbox.

Pros and cons Kadence Theme

Below we show, in our opinion, the pros and cons of Kadence Theme:

Final Opinion on Kadence Theme

Kadence Theme is one of the free templates that exceed expectations. The free version will be more than adequate for many users, with the ability to upgrade to the pro version if you need any premium features. We are very happy with the theme and we encourage you to try it.

It is an option adapted for both beginners and professionals. The customization options and their add-ons allow you to create websites and online stores without barely modifying a line of code in the theme. The same goes for the Kadence Blocks plugin . And the free-to-install starter templates are equally impressive.

The additional features that are available with the pro theme and Kadence Blocks Pro are enough to justify the annual subscription cost if you want to use the advanced features.