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Use the free Kadence theme. For most sites it is the right answer and there is nothing to buy: the header and footer builder, the starter templates and the global colour and font controls are all in the free version, which sits on more than 500,000 sites at 4.9 out of 5. Pay $99 a year for Essentials when you specifically need mega menus, the form builder or dynamic content. Pay $299 a year for Pro only if you run WooCommerce or sell memberships. Nothing here includes caching, and you will still need a caching plugin or a host that does it for you.
Also read: Best Gutenberg WordPress themes compared
Who should buy which tier
- A blog or a small business site: the free theme plus the free Kadence Blocks plugin. Genuinely enough.
- You keep hitting a wall on navigation or forms: Essentials, $99 a year. Mega menus, the advanced form builder, the child theme builder and dynamic content sources live here.
- A WooCommerce shop: Pro, $299 a year, for Shop Kit and the checkout and promotions tools.
- A membership or subscription site: Pro, for content restriction and membership levels.
- An agency with client sites: Elite, $499 a year, for white labelling, the client portal and Kadence Central multi-site management.
- You want a page builder: not this. Kadence works with the block editor and with Elementor or Beaver Builder if you bring one.
What it costs
There are three paid plans, all billed yearly:
- Essentials, $99 a year: the block page builder, premium themes and templates, advanced form builder, child theme builder, custom fonts and icons, header, footer and navigation builder, mega menus, dynamic content sources.
- Pro, $299 a year: everything in Essentials, plus Shop Kit for WooCommerce, cart, checkout and promotions tools, content restriction, membership levels and subscriptions, a security firewall with 2FA and virtual patching, and daily backups with one-click restore.
- Elite, $499 a year: everything in Pro, plus A/B testing and performance analytics, popups and sale banners, behavioural targeting, white label branding and a client portal, Kadence Central multi-site management, and built-in email delivery for 1,000 messages a month.
Prices checked September 2026, from Kadence’s plans page.
The jump from $99 to $299 is large, and it is worth naming what you are actually buying. Pro is not a better theme. It is the theme plus a WooCommerce toolkit plus a membership system plus a security and backup product. If you need none of those three, Essentials is the ceiling for you.
What the free version gives you
The free theme is called Kadence, not Kadence Lite, and it is on the WordPress.org theme directory. It has 500,000 or more active installations, sits at version 1.5.2 after an update in July 2026, and holds 4.9 out of 5 across 453 reviews, which is the highest rating of any theme at that install count.
Free includes the drag-and-drop header and footer builder, the starter template library, global colour and typography controls, WooCommerce compatibility, and accessibility-ready markup with keyboard navigation and sensible heading structure.
Pair it with
Kadence Blocks, also free, which adds 600,000-plus installs’ worth of layout blocks to the block editor at 4.8 out of 5. The theme and that plugin together cover what most people buy a premium theme for.
EXPLORE KADENCE THEME
Performance: how it is actually fast
Kadence is fast, and it is worth being accurate about why, because the usual explanation is wrong. Kadence does not include a caching engine. There is no page cache, no object cache and no cache-warming in the theme or in Kadence Blocks, on any tier.
What it does is load only the CSS and JavaScript a given page needs, rather than shipping one large stylesheet everywhere. Kadence Blocks states this plainly: it will not slow your site down because it only loads CSS or JavaScript when you need it. Add lean markup and conditional asset loading and you get a small page without doing anything clever.
That means caching remains your job. Install a caching plugin, or choose a host that caches at the server, or both. A fast theme on an uncached site is still a slow site.
This is also the real contrast with an all-in-one builder theme. Divi carries its builder on every page render, and our breakdown of
what actually makes a Divi site slow separates how much of that is the theme from how much is the setup around it. Beaver Builder on a lightweight theme like Kadence is the split model we set against a single Divi install in
our Beaver Builder and Divi comparison.
Who owns Kadence
This matters when you are about to start a yearly subscription, so here is the chain.
Kadence WP was built by Ben Ritner and his sister Hannah, who were the entire team into 2021. It was acquired that year by iThemes, which Liquid Web had itself bought in 2018, and it then sat inside Liquid Web’s StellarWP family of WordPress brands. StellarWP did not create Kadence; it acquired an existing product with an existing user base.
Today the product is sold through Liquid Web, and its plans page describes Kadence as part of Nexcess, Liquid Web’s hosting arm. kadencewp.com/pricing now redirects there.
None of that is a reason to avoid it. The theme is still updated, still rated 4.9, and had a release in July 2026. It is a reason to buy yearly rather than commit to a long term, and to know that the roadmap belongs to a hosting company rather than to two people.
Features and customisation
The builders
The header and footer builder is the feature people stay for. You drag elements into rows and columns, set what appears on desktop and mobile separately, and get a header that looks designed rather than assembled. Most free themes give you a logo, a menu and a choice of two layouts.
Global colour and typography settings apply across the site, so a brand colour change is one edit rather than forty. Changes preview live.
Starter templates
The free theme includes a starter template library you can import and then edit. Paid plans add more. Treat them as a starting layout rather than a finished site, because the fastest way to a bad site is importing a template and changing only the words.
Page builders and plugins
Kadence works with Elementor, Beaver Builder and Brizy if you already use one, and with the block editor if you do not. It is tested against the usual suspects, including Contact Form 7, WPForms and the common analytics plugins.
SEO
Clean markup and a sensible heading structure, and it stays out of the way of Rank Math or Yoast. No theme ranks you, and any theme that claims to is selling something.
Support and documentation
Documentation covers both the free theme and the paid plans, and it is thorough enough to answer most setup questions without opening a ticket. Paid plans get priority support.
The support question that actually matters with a free theme is whether anyone is behind it at all. Kadence’s July 2026 release and its 453 reviews say yes. An abandoned free theme cannot be fixed when the next WordPress release breaks it, which is the risk you take with a theme nobody has touched in two years.
The closest alternative
Blocksy runs the same free-plus-paid model and is Kadence’s nearest rival on both features and price.
Our Blocksy review maps where its free tier stops and how many sites it takes for its paid version to pay for itself. If you are choosing between the two, that comparison is the one to read.
Verdict
Start free. The free Kadence theme with free Kadence Blocks is a complete answer for a blog, a portfolio or a small business site, and you can build the whole thing without paying anything.
Buy Essentials at $99 a year when a specific missing feature is costing you time, most often mega menus or the form builder. Buy Pro at $299 a year only for WooCommerce or memberships, where you are buying three products rather than a theme upgrade. Buy Elite at $499 a year if you are an agency and white labelling plus Central earns its keep across several client sites.
And whichever tier you land on, add caching. Kadence will not do it for you.
EXPLORE KADENCE THEME
