Kadence is one of the popular and lightweight themes for WordPress sites. The best part is that the free theme is sufficient to create a beautiful site with their blocks and starter template plugins. Though the theme is easy to configure, it has hundreds of options scattered all around the customizer section. In addition, the pro add-on will add additional options that makes you get lost in the settings screen. To make things simple for Kadence theme users, here we list down 10 useful tips for optimizing the theme for better SEO and user experience. Check out the review of Kadence theme to understand the complete feature it offers.

Kadence WordPress Theme

You can remove the footer credit from the free version of the theme and create white labelled site. However, the pro add-on offers additional optimization for WooCommerce and allows you to use hooks to insert custom code and layouts. Here we primarily focus on the optimization settings available in free version with few options for pro version.

1. Disable Comments Link

The default WordPress comments form contains a field for the commentors to leave their website URL. Most commentors simply leave comments for backlinking and spamming purposes without any added value to your article. Managing these spam comments is one of the biggest maintenance tasks for any WordPress site owners. In addition, this will put lot of load on your server as spam bots will automatically post hundreds of thousands of comments. Though you can use Akismet to filter spam, the best way is to remove the “Website URL” field from the comments form.

In our earlier article, we have explained multiple ways to remove the comment author link URL. Kadence theme make it super easy that you can simply remove the filed with single click.

• Go to “Appearance > Customize” section.
• Navigate to “General > Comments” section.
• Enable “Remove Comments Website field” option.
• Click “Publish” button and check the comments form and you will not find the URL field.

2. Add Related Posts

Themes like GeneratePress does not offer related posts section and you need to rely on resource intensive third-party plugins for this purpose. Though Astra and few other themes later included this option, Kadence offers elegantly looking related posts section which you can enable for improving click through rate. These related posts also will help to retain users on your site for longer time.

• When you are in customizer, go to “Posts/Pages Layout” section.
• Then navigate to “Single Post Layout” section.
• Scroll down to the bottom and enable “Show Related Posts” option.
• Choose 2, 3 or 4 columns for showing related posts depending upon your post layout selection.
• There is also an option for endlessly loop related posts in the carousel.

Since the related posts is a carousel section, it will occupy only the space for single card in mobile layouts. Users can click on the arrows to navigate the posts in the carousel. In addition to related posts, you can also enable “Show Post Navigation” option to show previous/next navigational links below the post content.

3. Show Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are navigational structure showing the hierarchy of categories for your posts. Kadence theme offers in-built breadcrumb that you can use for adding a navigational structure to your posts.

• First you need to select the breadcrumb source for your theme under “General > Breadcrumbs” section in customizer.
• You have options to use theme’s breadcrumb or from the popular plugins like Yoast, Rank Math and SEOPress.
• Choose the option you would like to use on your site.

• After that navigate to “Posts/Pages Layout” and click on the eye icon against “Breadcrumb” option. This will enable breadcrumb just above the post title and there is no need for you to customize the location.
• If you have opted to use the default theme’s breadcrumb, then disabling “Show Post Title in Breadcrumb” will help you to remove the post title from the breadcrumb trail. If you want to remove the post title from Yoast or Rank Math breadcrumb, check this article.

4. Display Last Updated Date

Showing last updated in your WordPress blog helps users to understand the time relevancy of your content. Since most of the stuffs will change based on the time, this is highly recommended for both users as well as search engines.

• When you are in “Single Posts Layout” section, click on “Meta” option under “Title Elements” section.
• This will open a dropdown where you can enable “Show Date” option. However, this will show the original published date of the article.
• Below that option, you can enable “Show Last Updated Date” to show last updated date of your article.
• You can also show the time along with date, add a label and show the last updated date only if it is different from the original published date. You can enable this option along with “Show Date” option. Otherwise, you may not see any date in the meta section if the article is not updated after publishing.

5. Load Google Fonts Locally

Using Google Fonts is the latest topic in WordPress community after a German court fines a WordPress site owner for collecting IP addresses with Google Fonts setup. If you really like to use Google Font from the theme, then we recommend you to load the fonts locally from your server. You can easily enable this in Kadence under “General > Performance” section by turning on “Load Google Fonts Locally” option.

6. Preload CSS

The same performance section also allows you to turn on “Enable CSS Preload” option. This will help you to preload the CSS files and improve page loading speed in Google Page Speed and other speed measurement tools.

7. Use System Font

The best option to overcome all typography related problems is to use system font stack. This option will inherit the system fonts from macOS and Windows as per the default computer setup. Though it have a risk of misalignment of elements when the font changes, it generally works well similar to WordPress admin dashboard which uses system font stack. Since users will see the same font like other applications on their system, they feel more comfortable when viewing your content. In addition, it completely remove all the font related problems like preloading fonts, enqueueing the files, etc.

• Go to “Colors & Fonts” section in customizer.
• Select “System Default” for “Base Font”.
• Choose “Inherit” for all other elements like heading, breadcrumb, etc.

Note that you also need to select “Inherit” option in all other places where the font selection is available. For example, to use system fonts for “Widget Titles” and “Widget Content” section in “Sidebar”, go to “General > Sidebar” and select the option under “Design” tab. You can do the same for header and footer elements as well. Unfortunately, this may be bit confusing as the font selection option is available under different sections. Though you will always see “Inherit” option for most of the elements, there could be custom Google Fonts selected for some items. This is the case, especially if you have imported demo from the starter templates. Therefore, make sure to check the source code of your published site and confirm only system font is used for all elements.

8. Customize 404 Layout

Over period you might delete content and update the URLs. Due to these factors, 404 page is unavoidable when you have larger WordPress site. when uses land on 404 page, it is necessary to guide them what they can do to find the relevant content on your site. The best option is to provide a search box and links to few popular pages on your site. With the free version of Kadence theme, you can change the 404 page layout and add custom sidebar to show some useful navigational links. This will be useful especially when you are running a niche site focusing on single topic.

If you have the pro version, you can add custom layouts using hook elements.

9. WooCommerce Addon (Pro)

This is only for those having WooCommerce online store. In this case, we recommend purchasing Kadence pro add-on for having optimized page layouts for your product pages. You can build custom shop page and enable Ajax add to cart option. These things will help customers to quickly add products to the shopping cart and finish the checkout.

10. Custom Hooks (Pro)

If you are familiar with Astra Pro or GeneratePress Pro add-ons, then Kadence offers similar option as part of premium version. The hooked elements allow you to create custom layouts (like 404 page) and insert code (like Google Analytics in header section). You can also setup expiry date for blocks to hide them automatically after the expiration date. The pro version also offers a module to insert scripts in header/footer which you can use for webmaster tools verification and ad code insertion.

Final Words

We have used most of the popular lightweight WordPress themes like Astra, GeneratePress, OceanWP, etc. However, Kadence theme stands out from the crowd with power packed features. Though the theme comes with optimized code, you can make use of the above mentioned optimization settings to improve the overall user experience and SEO.