Beware if Coming in from Divi or Elementor

Spent the last few weeks learning the Kadence eco-system and its symbiotic relationship with Gutenberg in WordPress. Simply put, if you already used Gutenberg you will probably rave about Kadence because it adds blocks and layouts that are superior. It also gives you a lot of granular control and good ways to address accessibility that platforms like Divi don’t…. yet. And it’s performance is fast. All pros.

But hands down, if you are familiar with a self contained WP building experience like Divi and how easy it is to make page and posts templates in Divi Library and easily assignable custom headers and footers in Theme Builder, you’re in for a MASSIVE learning curve in Kadence. It can feel very duck taped together and surprisingly inefficient and hard to manage.

I can easily say coming in from the builder world everything feels like it takes 4x as long. Mind you, my background is from decades of web building experience, like from a blank screen and code so I’ve been around a lot of web building systems. I learn new systems all the time, but Kadence for me lacks the quick to learn logic that Divi or Elementor has.

I feel the support at Kadence is faster, friendly and usually competent, but we got into ticketing nightmares where it gets impossible to know what is resolved and what isn’t. Some tickets stacked for us for days.

If you are considering Kadence, particularly for accessibility, do the trial but bang the features harder then I did and see if you will have the extra time and patience to master it. I regret it. After this project we will re-evaluate if we have done enough painful custom pattern building in Kadence that we can do another project much faster, but we’re told Blocks 4.0 is coming and it’s unclear the impact that might have, if it might conflict with what we are working so hard to finally get going. Depending on those things we may chalk up Kadence as a learning experience that cost us a ton of time and profit.