There are many hidden gems in the WordPress world. And Kava theme is one of them. I don’t know the reason but very few people talk about it. However, it’s a modern, fast, and lightweight theme. And it’s free.
It is made by a company named Crocoblock which also develops great Elementor plugins. Many designer and developer use their plugins, but very few people talk about Kava.
Also Read: Crocoblock Plugins Review
I really love this theme because it is customizable, fast, lightweight, and has perhaps the most versatile blog archive designs. I’ve used it on multiple websites and it works quite well. Especially with Elementor.
And because it is a very good WordPress theme and very few people talk about it, I want to review it and let you know that there is an amazing Kava theme.
Table of Contents
Kava Theme Design
Kava has one of the best and clean designs I have ever seen. It has a very modern and classy design. Built and designed with care. Also, the code is very clean. Great developers team behind.
Kava has a very clean and modern feel. When you look at the empty pages you can clearly see how professional and clean it is.
Archives and single posts designs are beautiful and well done. Very clean, easy to read, and modern. Blog posts and archive pages look amazing on Kava.
It has many different layouts for blog post archive and single post. You can choose a grid, masonry, creative, etc. And for a single different layout for images, text, sidebar, etc.
And the design is so clean and modern. I think the Kava theme is one of the cleanest and modern WordPress themes out there. And it works great with Elementor.
Kava Customization Options
Another strong side of the Kava theme is its customization abilities. It has every major capability a free theme should have and it goes beyond. It has all the basic options like logo, favicon, social links, etc.
You can choose different page layouts, colors for paragraphs, headings, accent, hover. Also, choose fonts for different kinds of text separately. So, you can have different colors and fonts for text, heading, menu, etc.
Kava is a great blogging theme and it offers 50 different layouts for your blog. You can create any design you can imagine. Blog archive has five layouts:
- Listing
- Grid
- Masonry
- Vertical Justify
- Creative
And each of these categories has ten different layouts. That is a lot. I don’t know any other free WordPress theme with this amount of blog layouts. You can show or hide the sidebar.
These blog designs are high-quality and well-designed. You don’t need to do anything because they already look great.
And all the basic features like the show or hide author, date, tags, comments, button, change excerpt length, and more. Very versatile customization Kava has.
And you can choose from ten different single-post layouts. And all the layouts are so beautiful and modern. Your blog posts will look amazing. But you have to change the single post layout from the WordPress dashboard.
And the only downside I found in the customizer is that it has no options for header layouts and they should improve that. Because many free themes offer different header styles. With the Kava theme, you get the standard header design.
Kava Speed
Beautiful design and customization options are good but what about speed and performance? It is crucial for a theme. And people debate about this. If a theme is not fast, then there is no point to use it.
Kava theme is a fast theme. It is what Crocoblock says on its website. They say that page size is under 200KB, has under 15 requests, and speed score is more than 95%. But is it real?
I tested it myself and I will show you the results. I used the GTmetrix speed tool for the speed test and tested two pages:
- Home Page – No images, texts, or anything. Just a clean page. I want to know how lightweight and fast it is.
- Blog Page – Second test was on the blog archive page with six blog posts, which all had HD images.
And the results were fabulous. The performance had a score of 96%, 0.8s LCP, 0.472s TTFB, and a full-page load time was 1.4s. Pretty impressive results. And page size of Kava was 125KB and it had 15 requests, according to GTmetrix.
For the blog page, I chose the grid layout, style 7. This style shows big images. I wanted to know how Kava will handle this.
The results were very good. Considering, that there is no image optimization, no caching plugin, and the website was hosted on cheap, shared hosting, the result was pretty good.
Performance score of 84%, 1.5s LCP, and the site loaded fully in 2.7s. Page size is just 715KB and requests were 21. If images were optimized, the score would be much higher.
This result showed that the Kava theme is a fast and lightweight theme. I also tested it for mobile devices. It had 70 points on Google Speed Insights. And it is a great score for the mobile version.
This test shows that it is a great, fast, and lightweight theme. Works great with Elementor and plugins. More optimization, caching, and good hosting will improve its speed even more.
I think Kava is a great WordPress theme and you should give it a try. I don’t know why nobody talks about it. Also, you can check Crocoblock plugins and templates.
Conclusion
If you want to try a new theme for your website, the Kava theme is a great option. It is very clean and modern looking. Also, very lightweight, fast, and built for Elementor. Kava can compete with other famous free WordPress themes.
You can use it with Jet Plugins and create various types of websites such as eCommerce, booking, blog, corporate, and much more.
