Quite often you may face an unsolvable dilemma when making a WordPress website. On one hand, you want your site to have a beautiful look with some nice visual effects and design solutions, and brilliant functionality that can be easily added by means of some powerful plugins. Yet, on the other hand, you want your site to be fast to get better Google Page Speed results and provide your customers with a good browsing experience.
And that’s how we came up with Kicker – a superior WordPress Blog theme released in May 2021 that provides the right balance between the outstanding creative design, powerful functionality, and the site’s performance.
In this article, we will explain why Kicker is the Best Blogging WordPress theme and why you’ll never use any other blogging theme except it again.
1. Demos & Skins
Kicker comes packed with skins and demos for literally any kind of modern news magazine or personal blog.
Here you can find premade skins for news, fashion, sports, travel, food, creatives, games, tech, music, science, viral, kids, review blogs, and much much more.
Above all, the theme author guarantees a new demo each month. So you will get at least 1 new demo every month even after the purchase.
Another important thing about Kicker’s skins is that each demo comes with a unique design crafted specifically for a certain niche.
For example, Main Skin was made as a clean news portal.
While the Cyber Skin is more colorful and has an interesting typography pattern.
Elegant Fashion Skin is the nice combination of fonts, elements and visual effects.
Bright Sports & Fitness Skin offers the design that immerses visitors in a motivating environment.
And there are plenty of other skins, demos, and topics. So, all you have to do is to pick the most suitable one for your project.
2. AMP and Site Speed
You may already know that since May 2021 the site speed and the site’s core web vitals have become officially ranking factors in Google.
Therefore you need to make sure that your site is optimized for desktop and mobile devices. It is especially important for blogging sites, where the competition is really high and even small tweaks impact your rankings.
Kicker is equipped with 2 extremely useful and powerful features that can help you rank higher than your competitors: AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and custom Lazy Loading functionality.
Few words about these 2 crucial features.
AMP for Mobile Devices
The theme comes with the AMP plugin. It automatically generates the second version of your page/article optimized for mobile devices.
It means that now you can show the AMP version of your site to your mobile visitors and the full Elementor based version to your desktop users.
Moreover, your customer can choose the version and switch between the options by clicking on the link in the footer.
*Please Note! AMP plugin works perfectly with the pages and articles created with Gutenberg. Moreover, we’ve also added special style sheets for posts to make them even better on mobile devices.
But! Pages and articles created with Elementor will NOT be 100% compatible with AMP. So, you will need to create their AMP version with the integrated user-friendly AMP Page Builder.
So, now you have full control of your site’s AMP version.
As a result, even if you install Kicker on shared hosting with no caching and zero optimization it will still give you an awesome GPSI (Google Pagespeed insights) score for mobile devices.
Lazy Load
Since the WordPress 5.5 lazy load is a part of the core. But what exactly is it? And why do we need it?
Lazy load is the type of asynchronous loading that initializes the objects (mostly images) in the places where they are needed. In other words, the page will load the image only when your visitor scrolls down to the place where it should be.
This technique helps to significantly improve such indicators, like TTI (Time to interactive) and CLS (Cumulative layout shift).
But we went even further. We’ve created our own Lazy Load script implemented into Kicker that appeared to be twice more effective as the one offered by WordPress.
Moreover, Kicker offers several options like: enable/disable lazy load, choose the number of images that you want to be loaded instantly on pages and posts.
Another advantage of using our lazy load script is that it covers 95%-100% of all images on the page, while the one provided by WordPress can pull only 40%-50%.
And the last but not the least is that Kicker’s lazyload works perfectly with masonry blocks, while WordPress’s one… Well, you don’t even want to see how poorly it works with masonry.
And if you want to simply disable it you can do it at any time.
3. Theme Options: Colors & Fonts
Kicker is supplied with the powerful customization theme panel. It allows you to customize your site with ease. But we put extra attention to colors and fonts.
For example, when it comes to colors you can start with choosing the color scheme present in the theme panel and then set global colors for each element.
You can also use your Customizer to tweak the colors of your site’s elements.
Also, Kicker gives you ultimate freedom with typography. It supports dozens of fonts out of the box, namely Google Fonts.
Above all, you can upload any custom font, including Adobe Fonts.
4. Elementor
As it was already mentioned Kicker is the Elementor based WordPress Theme. It’s a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly visual page builder. And it’s absolutely free.
Moreover, in combination with the Kicker theme, it becomes a real site builder, because you can edit everything including the site’s header, footer, page content, posts, and sidebars.
If you never worked with this page builder you should definitely try it out with Kicker.
Header & Footer Builder
The header and footer building deserves special attention. With Kicker, you can create as freely as regular pages, and place them wherever you need.
- You can create & edit them with Elementor.
- Assign to any post or page individually.
- Use all the Elementor components with no limitations.
- Make Sticky headers.
- Create Video and Parallax backgrounds.
- Choose desktop, mobile, and tablet layouts independently.
5. Gutenberg
Kicker is 100% compatible with Gutenberg. It’s one of the most demanded features for blogging themes.
To make it even more flexible and versatile we’ve integrated a Gutenberg Blocks (Kadence Blocks) plugin. It significantly extends your customization opportunities and provides plenty of premade blocks and sections free of charge.
All the posts you can see on the demo are made with Gutenberg + Kadence Blocks plugin.
It is super easy to create and customize custom posts and they look really awesome.
6. Awesome Posts
Kicker offers numerous design solutions for different types of your posts.
You can use plenty of premade solutions and customize them further towards your needs. It includes customization of your sidebars:
Also, you can choose a unique layout for your posts. Currently, there are 14 premade styles and dozens of their combinations.
Pagination
There are plenty of pagination options for you. There are classic page numbers, Previous/Next buttons, “Load more” on the same page and our favorite one – Infinite scroll.
Next Post Auto-load
If you want to keep your customer on your site, there is a powerful feature called “next post-auto-load”. It’s when the page automatically loads the next article when the visitor finishes reading the first one.