You are looking for the best theme for your WordPress blog or business website, so let me start with one truth about WordPress themes: every theme is built for a particular audience.
In this post I compare the Kadence Theme by KadenceWP with OceanWP, two of the better known names in WordPress themes.
First, a quick introduction to each.
Kadence vs OceanWP Theme
- Kadence Theme: the most powerful blog theme on the market, in my view, despite being the younger of the two. KadenceWP launched it in May 2020. The company is a well-known WordPress plugin developer, best known for Kadence Blocks Pro and now the Kadence Theme.
- OceanWP Theme: you have probably heard of this one. It is one of the bestselling themes on the market, and it is aimed mainly at bloggers.
Before the feature comparison, I want to flag a serious problem with OceanWP.
The most disappointing thing about OceanWP is its pile of upsell extensions, which tells you the core theme is missing a lot of features. You install 1 extra plugin for each feature you need. Your plugins page fills up fast. I explain this fully later in the post.
I hit the same issue with the Astra Theme, so I went with Kadence. It performs about the same and bundles more features in the core theme.
Read my complete Kadence vs Astra Comparison here
Let's start the Kadence vs OceanWP comparison with a quick speed test.
Kadence vs OceanWP Speed Test
Speed is usually the first thing people think about when choosing a theme. Kadence and OceanWP are both built for performance, so do not expect a big gap between them here.
Kadence Speed Test
I have run many speed tests on Kadence with different servers and page builders, and it is a well optimized, speed focused theme. Across all my earlier tests of WordPress themes, only the GeneratePress Theme beat Kadence.
Read my Full Kadence vs GeneratePress Review and Feature Comparison Here
OceanWP Speed Test
OceanWP is known as GeneratePress's closest competitor, and it is just as fast. The difference is that GeneratePress is cleaner with very few features, while OceanWP is a little fancier with a few extras.
There was no clear winner. Sometimes Kadence scored better than OceanWP and sometimes OceanWP came out ahead, so I am calling the speed test a tie.
More comparisons coming soon.
