Whether you’re building it yourself or you’ve partnered with us at P-Brain, every WordPress site begins with a theme. Unlike that My Little Pony theme you chose for your sixth birthday party, a WordPress theme is a very handy and essential tool. Every theme includes a set of files that work together, and settings that allow you to customize your site even if you don’t have programming skills. You can pick things like overall design, what buttons look like, and which fonts to use throughout. Choosing a theme with a wide range of features will enhance your ability to curate the look and feel of your website.
We started using Kadence in 2021 and it has been our favorite theme since then, hands down. Here are five reasons why we and so many developers find the Kadence theme so powerful:
1) Free Is the Right Price
Building even a simple website, whether you’re working with P-Brain or DIYing it, requires an investment of time and money. One of the best things about Kadence is that its main features won’t cost you a dime. The free version of Kadence is robust and powerful enough to do a lot. Not having to sink additional funds into a theme lets you remain focused on building the website you want.
2) Starter Templates That Don’t Suck
Once you’ve picked a theme (such as Kadence), the next step is to start developing a design. More than a lot of other themes we’ve seen, Kadence makes this process easy. They provide a variety of starter templates so you don’t have to build your pages from scratch — and their templates are especially well-designed. These starter templates come with stock images and content as placeholders, just to give you an idea of what things can look like, but you can easily modify anything.
3) Next-Level Customization Tools
The look and feel of your website sets the tone for your organization. Kadence, even in its free version, gives you lots of options for customizing how elements appear. Its tools to format text — including line spacing, font weights and more — are sophisticated and easy to use, which is not the case with many themes and builders. Page headers and footers — the stuff you see up top and down below on web pages — can be customized in endless ways and with multiple rows, enabling designs that both look cool and contain a variety of content.
For those of you who follow WordPress developments, you may be familiar with the new block editor it implemented a few years ago, called Gutenberg. A big reason why Kadence feels so smooth to use is that it works seamlessly with this new editing interface. In a sense, it unlocks Gutenberg’s functionality, so much so that you don’t even need to use a site builder like Elementor or Divi. It’s that good.
4) Customer and Community Support
Sometimes in web design, things don’t go the way you want them to. (There’s an understatement, right?) One great thing about Kadence is the support system behind it. At P-Brain, we’ve been impressed with the quick response times of Kadence’s customer support team. Their friendly and efficient help makes us feel good about going to them when needed. Kadence’s team also provides extensive documentation and a knowledge base on their website. There are even forums of other users who can help you locate answers, plus an enthusiastic community on Facebook willing to share knowledge.
5) Updated Regularly
While it might seem preferable for themes to stay exactly the same forever, the reality is that themes and designs need to adapt to ever-changing digital environments. Kadence enjoys the advantage of a growing number of users and a motivated team who maintain the theme with ongoing updates and improvements. With Kadence, you can expect to see regular changes that make building with this theme easier and even more intuitive.
Bonus: Beyond the Theme
The free Kadence theme comes with an extensive set of features, but you might need more. Kadence has you covered. If you need to level up, Kadence offers high-quality premium tools and add-ons that are already designed to play well with your Kadence theme. When you don’t have to purchase a bunch of different products from different companies, there’s less chance of introducing a hitch into the works. Paid products offered by Kadence include add-ons for marketing, photo galleries and WooCommerce, to name just a few. These products work well together and can make for a more streamlined building workflow. And of course, we all love that.