If you’re planning on switching to Kadence or starting your blog from scratch with a Kadence theme, I’ll be showing how to install a Kadence premium theme.
But before we go into that, let’s set the stage for what a Kadence premium theme actually is, and what I do not mean by it.
Kadence itself is a WordPress theme which loads fast, is very user-friendly and works with the WordPress block builder, however, they don’t have premium themes. Those are called starter templates.
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With a Kadence premium theme, I’m referring to a Kadence child theme, which you buy at companies like Restored 316, 17th Avenue Designs, or others.
With Kadence starter templates, you install and activate the Kadence theme itself.
With Kadence child themes, you install the Kadence theme, but you don’t activate it. Then you install and activate the starter template plugin, and you manually install and activate the theme that you purchased and they work with the free version of Kadence in most cases.
Whether your Kadence child theme works with the free version of Kadence or the pro version, will be explained in the terms of the child theme.
In this article, I show you how to install one of those Kadence child themes.
And if you prefer to let me handle all of this for you, I got you covered. My WordPress installation service will take care of this for you.
What To Do Before You Install a Kadence Child Theme
If you’re starting a brand new website with a Kadence child theme, there’s not much you need to do beforehand.
If you’re starting completely from scratch, you can skip to the part where we’re going to install the Kadence theme.
However, if you already have an existing blog and currently using a different theme, there are a few important steps you need to take to limit your risks and make it easy on yourself.
First of all, when you’re making big changes to an exisiting website, I would recommend to do this on a staging site.
Most decent hosting companies give you this option in their package and a staging site is basically a seperate area where you put a copy of your site and allows you to work on your site without it affecting your live website.
The last thing you want is to do changes while you’re having people on your website!
This is also the part where its smart to do a plugin audit. Meaning if you’re having a lot of plugins on your site that you don’t need, just deactivate and delete them.
But let’s go through the steps one-by-one.
Setting Up a Staging Site
Like I’ve mentioned, when doing major changes to your WordPress blog, you don’t want to do this on a live website.
So when you’re going to install your new Kadence child theme, you want to set up a staging site first.
If you’re going to do this on a hosting plan from Siteground, you want to make sure to sign up for a GrowBig or GoGeek package.
Click here to sign up for Siteground hosting
Both of these 2 have staging sites included in the package. Not the starter package.
Personally, I’m using Cloudways and staging is standard included within any of their hosting packages.
On Siteground, go to your account and underneath the WordPress option on the left menu, click on staging.
This is where you select the website you want to create a staging site for and you can set it up from here. It will also provide you with the login details to access your staging site.
Creating a Backup Of Your WordPress Website
At this stage it’s also important to create a backup of your current site. I always like to be safe when doing things like this and when I do this for clients, I can always go back to how it was because nobody is perfect and I sometimes make mistakes as well.
I would recommend to sign up for a tool called ManageWP. This is a site where, for just $1.80 per month per website, it will make daily backups of your site and it will store them on their own servers.
This way, your hosting server will not fill up quickly with storage space and it works really well for restoring sites as well as cloning websites.
Deactivate Certain Plugins
If you’re having a lot of plugins on your wordpress website that you don’t really need, this is the time to get rid of them.
Super important… If you’re currently using the plugin Called Classic editor, you need to deactive it and delete it. Since Kadence works with the WordPress block builder and not with the classic editor.
Also, recently I migrated a couple of websites over to Kadence, which were using the Genesis theme. When you’re working with Kadence, you have to deactivate the Genesis related plugins, except the Genesis Enews Extended plugin, because this one will also work with other themes and is often used for email signup forms.
I recently published an article on my recommended wordpress plugins to have on your site. So make sure to check that out.
Installing The Kadence Theme
Before you install your Kadence Child theme, you need to install the Kadence theme itself.
You can do this in 2 different ways. The easiest is by going to your WordPress backend and go to appearance and then themes and click on add new theme.
as you can see in the image, I have Kadence installed and use the Kadence theme itself. In your Theme dashboard, you want to search for the Kadence theme and click on the install theme button.
Do not activate it!
When using a Kadence child theme, you do need the official Kadence theme installed, but you don’t want to activate it.
Installing The Kadence Starter Templates Plugin
After installing the Kadence theme, you’ll be prompted to install a plugin called Kadence starter templates.
This plugin will help you in a minute with installing the demo site of your Child theme. So go ahead and install and activate the Kadence Starter Templates plugin now.
Installing Your Kadence Child Theme
Once you’ve purchased your Kadence child theme, you will be able to download your child theme to your computer.
This is a Zip file.
Keep in mind that some companies will give you a zipfile which has the child theme zipfile inside of it seperately, aside from some documentation files.
By the way, for the best Kadence child themes, I would highly recommend Restored316, 17th Avenue Designs, or Hello You Designs.
Especially themes like Fusion or the Create theme are gorgeous and really well equipped for lots of different niches and every detail you’ll need to build a successful blog.
Again, you want to go to appearance in your dashboard and then themes, but this time you want to click on the upload theme button at the top. Here you can select where your theme zipfile is located and when you select your zipfile, click on upload.
In a few second, your WordPress child theme is installed and you can activate it.
Installing The Kadence Child Theme Demo Content
At this time you have your Kadence child theme activated on your site, the Kadence theme is installed as well as the Kadence Starter Templates plugin.
Now it’s time to make your blog look exactly the same as the demo site of your purchased child theme.
On the left menu of your WordPress dashboard, go to Kadence and then Starter Templates.
Depending on where you purchased your child theme, this company will show up in the middle of your screen.
If not, go to the top right corner and click on the arrow and the company will be listed there. Click on it and it will show up. And on the top right corner, click on Finish and Launch.
Keep in mind that this can take a few minutes and you want to keep this page open.
Once it’s done, your new site is ready to use.
Customising Your Kadence Child Theme
Depending on your chosen Child theme, there are various things to change and this varies from your menus, color schemes, all the way up to the design of your different pages.
If you’re going to customise site wide settings like your colors, typography, etc. You can do this by go to appearance -> customise.
Here you will see all of the different sections you can change from your theme.
This varies from your headers, footers, colors, and more.
But since this is different per theme, it will be hard for me to share this in this article.
Also, some themes come with shop features like WooCommerce, which would be a whole different topic of itself.
When you have your new design exactly how you want it to be, you can also remove all of the demo blog posts and pages from your site.
By doing this now, it won’t be moved to your live WordPress blog. And you want all of this done before you move everything over.
Pushing Your New WordPress Design Live
Once you’ve changed your new WordPress design as you want it to look and making sure that everything is working correctly, you want to push all of this over to your live site.
Wherever you have your staging area, at SiteGround for example, you’ll see the option to move your staging site over to your live website.
This is the time to do this. And once that’s finished, you can test out your live website to making sure it all looks how you want it to look.
Before you leave
I have a few important resources to share with you.
Now that you’re using a Kadence theme, it’s important to join the Kadence community on Facebook. This is a very active and super helpful Facebook group where you can ask questions and help other Kadence users.
You can join the Facebook group here.
Also, if you want to use all of the features that Kadence has to offer, and more. You can check out Kadence Pro and all of it’s extra plugins here. Especially Kadence Conversions is super cool.
And if all of this sounds too difficult for you to do yourself, don’t worry. You can check out my WordPress Service, and trust me. I offer very competitive prices and a great customer experience.
