WP Perspectives Issue 28: Why I Removed Kadence Blocks

In this issue I reflect on Kadence, Gutenberg blocks, and new page builders.

I Paid the Piper and Removed Kadence Blocks

Those of you who have followed this newsletter will have noticed that I’ve mentioned the need to do maintenance on my sites for several issues. Recently the WebTNG website reached a critical point. It was taking a long time to navigate between sections of the admin and to save changes when editing. Also, while Blog Vault didn’t have an issue, my on-demand backup plugin, WPVivid, was having trouble backing up the site. I use these on-demand backups to make a testing version of the site on localhost. I saw a couple of issues. One, several years ago, when I wrote text versions of my videos I would include lots of screenshots and now the media library alone was 1.9GB. Two, even WP ALL Import and other export / import options were having difficulties. The WP All Import error message mentioned the database and when I checked it I saw that it had a number of unused tables and even a couple of tables with the same name, but in different cases (upper / lower). Time for maintenance.

My Kadence Journey

One of my rules of thumb is that when you see a problem you should address it right away or else it will reappear at an inconvenient time, so why was I waiting? Sigh, Kadence for the Site Editor was first teased two or three years ago. Also, we have a number of new or radically updated builders in the pipeline. I was hoping for a clear solution I could get excited about.

Kadence is one of those stories that is worth reviewing. Kadence Themes was the started by Ben Ritner, a solo dev working out of his Montana home, with his sister helping with support. His themes had names like “Ascend” and “Pinnacle” with hero images of mountain tops. He would often post pictures of his family hiking a mountain trail. The ethos was independent, creative, and free. He was living the dream. He was one of the early developers to release a Gutenberg block collection, Kadence Blocks, well before Gutenberg shipped in core, and it was well received. During the early years of Gutenberg the editor was very anemic, without even a container block. It was widely recognized that third party block collections “saved” Gutenberg by making up for its deficiencies.

Then came the Kadence Theme. In the heyday of WordPress themes developers created niche themes, a theme for lawyers, one for plumbers, one for a travel blog, and so on. Divi was one of the first general purpose themes. While it is generally known for its included builder, it also had extensive Customizer options. GeneratePress and then Astra were a couple of other successful general purpose themes. Blocksy was being developed the same time as Kadence.

What made Kadence a stand-out is that it used the Customizer to the max with its header builder, for instance. It also integrated very well with the Gutenberg editor so that Customizer settings like colors carried over, and they also carried over into the Kadence Blocks. It covered a large spectrum. Then came the version of Kadence Theme Pro and Kadence Blocks Pro that included the Kadence Theme Builder. This was the first builder that let you create your theme templates using blocks, and ACF was supported. It felt very lightweight. After all, we were using a theme and Gutenberg anyway.

I’ve often said that Kadence hit a sweet spot. Kadence Theme Pro, Kadence Blocks Pro, and the Kadence theme builder feature were easy to use, there was a lot of synergy between them, AND the developer added enough advanced features to keep power users happy. For example, Kadence Blocks support several custom fields plugins, they support ACF and Meta Box repeater fields, and, if you were an Elementor user, they also carried the Customizer styles into the Elementor global styles. It is not surprising to me that the Kadence suite was a favorite with agencies.

Kadence was purchased by the Liquid Web hosting company. Talk about synergy, it makes sense for hosting companies to own and promote their own WordPress themes and plugins. They had previously purchased iThemes, which included themes, Backup Buddy, and iThemes Security. However, the iThemes themes had died on the vine due to lack of attention, so it was something of a stroke of genius when Chris Lema snagged Kadence. Chris was growing Liquid Web’s WordPress portfolio as it allowed the hosting company to provide tailored niche premium solutions. There was some worry about how the change might impact Kadence, but Kadence seemed to adapt well to the new circumstances and no one begrudged Ben’s chance for a payday for all of his hard work.

One thing that did happen over time is that Kadence kept adding additional plugins: Shop Kit for working with WooCommerce, Creative Kit as a collection of pre-designed templates, Kadence Cloud (later renamed to Pattern Hub) let people share and even sell their child themes and block designs, Conversions, Insights, and so on. I suppose that in the old days theme clubs justified continued sales and price rises by adding more niche themes. These extras were a way that Kadence could justify increasing the price of their offering.

Throughout all of this time Ben was still front and center. Though he wasn’t as active on Facebook, the team had regular video pod casts with Ben, his sister, and other team members. We would get updates on Kadence products as well as personal news. During these times Ben addressed the elephant in the room. You see, the Site Editor had lost the beta label and project leadership touted it as the future. Kadence was a “classic” theme, block themes were the new thing. Even the nomenclature “classic theme” tagged it as old fashioned and from another age. Ben told us that he had evaluated it carefully and assessment was that the Site Editor wouldn’t make Kadence users happy. Tom Usborne of GeneratePress came to the same conclusion for his users. Nonetheless, every so often we would hear that they were still evaluating it. As time dragged on, Ben even made a comment about third party developers needing to step in, and then he mentioned that they were working on it.

The big fish eat the littler fish … Liquid Web was acquired by One Equity Partners, and they didn’t reveal that a purchase had occurred for several months. At some point Ben went from being in charge of Kadence to overseeing all of the software products that had been acquired and were grouped together under the StellarWP umbrella, such as the Events Calendar, GiveWP, Restrict Content Pro, LearnDash and others. Also, over time we started to see issues with the product. They moved to a new license system which had performance issues, and releases of the block plugins resulted in settings being lost and design issues. Ben responded publicly that he took responsibility and it would improve. Then last year there was a reorganization of StellarWP and many of those on the management team left, including Ben.

The First Round of Maintenance Was Brutal

Back to the present, it was clear that I needed to do at least a first round of maintenance. I wasn’t waiting any longer for an FSE version of Kadence, which meant that when I moved to another solution the Kadence Theme was probably going to go, but what about Kadence Blocks? I had been using Kadence Blocks forever, from the days when there were no core container blocks and for buttons as well as icon lists, icons, table of contents, accordions, and so on. I used the Find My Blocks plugin, which scans your content and shows you what blocks are used where, and there were more than 350 usages. I had always advised people to use the block collection that matched your theme, but today maybe I didn’t need Kadence Blocks anymore? Although I’m not a big fan of core Gutenberg container blocks, they could do most of what I needed, and did I really need icon list bling instead of plain old lists?

Issue 10 of this newsletter was titled “Are Third Party Gutenberg Blocks a Poisoned Pawn?” That was back in December 2021. In chess a “poisoned pawn” is the offer of a pawn sacrifice which looks like a materially advantage, but actually traps the player in a bad position. Back then, five years ago, we realized that 3rd party block collections were a dependency that could one day require manual cleanup, i.e. limited data portability. Over the course of a week and a half I manually replaced all instances of Kadence Blocks. It is safe to say that I am now averse to repeating that mistake. And why should we? Things have changed.

It is clear now that the Site Editor, which was going to make page builder obsolete, isn’t a success. Back five years ago any time people pointed out a lack in the Site Editor they would follow it with the mantra “but I’m sure it will get there eventually.” People no longer say that today. And this state of affairs leads to a resurgence for page builders though out all of 2025 and 2026 is looking to be even more extraordinary.

You can treat WordPress as a total solution, with the Site Editor as your builder, or you can treat WordPress as a platform using a page builder or block collection. Most people today treat is as a platform.

After removing Kadence Blocks, I switched from the SEOPress Pro to the free version of SlimSEO. SEOPress adds a ton of meta fields and for what I wanted, SlimSEO was fine. I may add the Pro version in the future for better link management and for custom schema.

I used the Meow Apps Database Cleaner plugin to clean the database. In the past I used and recommended Advanced Database Cleaner Pro, but they stopped offering a lifetime license for new buyers so I was wary about recommending it any more. It turns out the free version of Meow Apps Database Cleaner has more features than even the Pro version of Advanced Database Cleaner.

There were a lot of unused tables, some from old plugins, but also, I think perhaps Ultimate Import Export Pro or some other plugin left some duplicates with a different table prefix. I also removed some cron jobs that were from old plugins, cleaned the options table entries, and some of the unused old post meta fields.

I also looked at the media library, which was a whopping 1.9GBs. I did an experiment on a testing site and used the newer Regenerate Images plugin to remove the thumbnail and medium sizes, but kept the large size. I set it to be the width of my featured image. After that process completed, I saw that it would save me 1GB of space. However, that wholesale deletion of images would mean that I’d need to check my content for broken images as I had had surely used thumbnail and medium sized images in the past. I may still do that as part of the next round of maintenance, but for now I used the Pro version of the Meow Apps Media Cleaner plugin to scan for unused images. I was able to delete 600MB of images.

With these changes: eliminating Kadence Blocks free and Pro, switching out SEO plugins, cleaning the database, and trimming the media library, the WordPress admin was performing well and I was again able to easily make on-demand backups.

But What’s Next?

Yes, that is the big question, isn’t it? I’m no longer thinking about a possible Kadence solution, so here are my thoughts about the other options.

Bricks

Yes, this is the obvious solution. I’ve made a few sites with it, like it, know how it works, it has great support for dynamic data, good third-party support, a good team, and overall, a good solution. If I had to do it today, I’d use Bricks. I’m feeling at the moment that with the first round of maintenance that I’m OK pausing for a while. Perhaps I can use this opportunity to try out another builder? I like to use themes and plugins, or in this case builders, that am excited about and that I feel comfortable recommending to others. Bricks fits, but there are a host of new options coming available that deserve a look.

Builderius

I have been digging into the current beta versions of Builderius. It is safe to say that it is the most powerful builder currently available, both in terms of dynamic data, but also in relation to other advanced features. There is a lot to like about it and, in general, it seems like the team is finding a good balance by offering power user features, but with sensible defaults. I want to look at Builderius further. I’d like to also see a track record of regular releases once it comes out of beta, not necessarily fast, but regular. Builderius maybe the epitome of the tortoise and hare story. It has been a long time in development, but is coming together nicely.

Divi or Elementor?

I’m impressed with Divi’s drive to totally rewrite and modernize. I have a lot of respect for a developer who recognizes the need and finds a path forward. However, I don’t think that Divi 5 has enough dynamic data features and it is not an option that interests me. I also like that Elementor is modernizing, but I’m not going to subscribe to Elementor Pro and likewise in terms of dynamic data it is not as robust as I need. Also, I’m not a fan of the editor workflow of either of these.

Etch

Etch has a lot going for it. I like the energy of its users who are creating and sharing components. I also like the actual editor / Canvas workflow. However, now that I’ve removed Kadence blocks, I’m not going to replace them with Etch blocks. I could see using Etch to create the theme templates, header, and footer, which is how I use other builders. At this time, however, I will probably give it a pass due to its license. Etch has a split license according to which some files that access WordPress directly and say so are GPL but other parts are not. I’ve only used fully GPL licensed themes and plugins in the past and it would be a big change for me to do otherwise. It is possible that Etch may go GPL in the future, after all, Elementor Pro started out as a proprietary license. I guess we’ll see.

Generate Blocks or Other Gutenberg Solution

Lol, I’m not going through the pain of removing Kadence Blocks just to sub in another 3rd party alternative. Also, though Generate Blocks are powerful and flexible, they haven’t really clicked for me.

I could see using GreenLight blocks for theme templates, to handle dynamic data, but not using them for regular post content. GreenLight seems the best block collection for power users, and the workflow is fine.

Mosaic

The Mosaic say they are targeting a middle ground between Elementor and Etch and from what I’ve seen, they are putting together an easy to use, yet powerful, builder. Also, the class and style system is very well thought out. The dynamic data features are not available for testing yet, but I plan to dive in when they are.

Oxygen 6

I like Oxygen 6. It feels snappy and the front-end output is great. It felt faster to pick up than Bricks, though of course it is a lot leaner and has fewer features. I think the team has done a good job with Oxygen 6 for a version 1. If they keep at it and improve it then it could become a real contender, especially if they keep the price in check. A number of third-party developers, such as the Core Framework team, are intending to support Oxygen 6 and this is another one I want to keep an eye on.

Recently Published

• Meow Apps Database Cleaner – A walk-through of the free version. A recommended plugin.
• Getting Started with Oxygen 6: Walk-Through and Review – A tour of the Oxygen 6 UI and features.
• First Look at the Oxymade Framework for Oxygen 6 – A free CSS framework for the new Oxygen 6.
• Using .htaccess to Lock Down the WordPress Admin and Block Hacking Attempts – A simple security step that people don’t talk about.
• GreenLight Builder Explained – GreenLight has emerged as one of the best Gutenberg block collections. It is fast, simple, and performant.
• Top 10 WordPress Products Bought During Black Friday 2025 – A look at what was popular with buyers over Black Friday.
• Black Friday 2025 Lifetime Deals I Use and Recommend – The best of the best.
• AB Split Test Stop Guessing And Figure It Out – How to use this popular plugin.

From Around the Web

• How Marketing and Engagement Impact The WP Awards – A good interview with Davinder.
• I asked Elementor why they’re changing everything with V4 – A good interview with Roi of the Elementor team and Rino.
• WP-SUDO – An innovative approach to WordPress security.

Best Deals?

Builderius, Oxygen 6, and Divi are all three new modern builders at very attractive prices.

What’s Up Next

I plan to be exploring Builderius, Oxygen 6, and Mosaic.

Thank you for reading. I’d like to hear what you have to say about the newsletter content and what you are excited about. Feel free to comment or send me an email through the contact form.