How to Install Kadence Starter Templates to design your website

Below are the following “step-by-step” instructions for installing the Kadence Starter Templates to help design your WordPress Website.

I have personally been using the Kadence Theme for the past 10 years and find that its speed, mobile-friendliness, and customisation make it my favourite to use.

To install:

• For a visual experience, please click below for the video on my YouTube channel,
• or scroll down further for the written instructions.

To Get Started!

When purchasing a domain and hosting, you’ll already have a theme installed like the “Twenty Twenty-four” theme designed by WordPress. To access the Starter Templates, you’ll need to deactivate this standard theme and install the Kadence theme to your WordPress Dashboard.

Before you get started below, I would like to state that it’s important that the starter templates are actually better installed on a fresh/clean website. So if you’ve already added pages to your website, it might be better to use a staging site or at least get your backup processes in place before moving forward.

However, if your website is clean and has no pages added, you can start designing your Kadence Website.

Accessing the Starter Templates

There are two ways you can actually install the Kadence Starter templates.

The first way:

• Go to “Appearance” and then click “Kadence”.
• Click the “Starter templates” Tab at the top.
• Press the Button that says “Install Kadence Starter Templates”, which will ultimately install the same plugin as mentioned in the second option. This is also where you’ll access the Templates.

Now the second option:

• Click the “Plugins” option on the left-hand side of your WordPress Dashboard.
• Press “Add plugin” at the top.
• You can type “Kadence” into the search bar on the right-hand side, and you’re looking for the plugin named “Kadence Starter Templates – Predesigned Website Templates”
• Press “Install Now” and then “Activate”
• Access the templates from your dashboard under “Site Assist” or “Appearance/Kadence/Starter Templates”

Viewing & Choosing a Template

Now you can view all the available Starter Templates, including both Free and Premium options. You can use the filters at the top to help narrow down something that suits your project requirements (e.g. Photography, Blogs, Ecommerce, etc).

You will only see the front Home page in the sample, but when choosing, the rest of the pages, posts, menu, media and plugins needed will install as well.

If you do want any of the premium options, you can go to the Kadence website and purchase the “Essentials package” (or the Pro / Elite Package for more than one website). This starts at $99US a year, which includes all the premium themes and templates.

Obviously, you have somewhat of an idea, or have a plan in place, for the design and functionality that you need. This is when you’ll simply go through all the options and find a starting template that suits your project.

Installing the Template

Once you choose the Starter Template you want, you can click to install and go through some minor settings before doing it.

Colour Palette

The first section goes into choosing the colour palette. This can obviously be changed or adjusted in the “Customise” area in your WordPress Dashboard, but you can start off here with the basics. This includes the Button colours, backgrounds, and even going into Dark or Light Modes.

Choose your settings and move to the next page.

Then it asks in the advanced settings to import the customiser settings and import all the widgets. We want everything to come down, and then press “Next”.

Plugins

This takes you to the Plugin Page. There will be about 9 plugins that you can use; some will be required, and others are optional. If you know what your project needs, then you can click on the plugins to install. Otherwise, this can be done later once the website is set up.

Most of the time, at least the “Kadence Blocks” plugin will be required, and if you already have it installed, then it will recognise that. Another example: e-commerce sites might need a payment and checkout plugin like “WooCommerce”, but this is not your only option, and you can do more research later to find the best one for your business.

It gives you some suggestions of other ones that you might want, but you don’t need to download them if it’s not required for this starter template.

Importing

Then it’s just a point of finish and launch, and then press “Start import”.

It actually doesn’t take too long (probably a couple of minutes), but this is where you can go get a cup of coffee while waiting. What it’s doing is installing all the pages, blog posts, media, plugins, menu and settings needed.

Redesigning

Obviously, this gives you a good start to designing your website, especially if you’re not an actual designer, but it’s also where you need to spend some time to edit everything according to what your requirements are.

A few areas you might like to look at are:

• Appearance/Customise/Colour to adjust your Colour Platte chosen before.
• Appearance/Menus to change your header menu order or options.
• Appearance/ Widgets to edit your sidebar.

You will need to change all the Images, headers, writing and maybe adjust the design, but these starter templates do help a lot with an active website, especially when you’re not a website designer.

The Design Library

Another option for editing pages or posts is using a function called the “Design Library”. This is available in the top left-hand side of every page or post you go to edit.

These are still templates, however, instead of bringing down an entire page, it focuses on smaller sections like your Hero Image, accordion sections like FAQ’s, subscriptions and testimonials.

You can use the Design Library Templates to adjust the existing pages, or start creating new ones.

Tablet/ Mobile Views

One last point to remember, please go into the tablet & mobile mode to see whether everything is actually still sitting in the correct place for you. The Desktop/Mobile & tablet “view” button is available at the top right-hand side of each page or post.

Another way to do this is to view your live website page, right-click to “Inspect”, and make the code area big or small to match the screen size.

Wrap Up

Now, each time you want to access the starter templates (After the first install), you can go into the “site assist” option in your WordPress Dashboard, then your starter templates and click to get started.

Apart from that, you are now done, and it’s time to edit the pages or delete what you don’t need.