Kadence Switch to Liquid Web
How many of you discovered that you're now Legacy customers with a large billboard on your WordPress menu now?
My old purchases no longer show up on the new portal. Submitting a ticket doesn't provide a number or email confirmation, and it's not there when I check the support area of the new portal.
Man, what a way to botch a new buyout.
I don’t know why companies take these type of decisions. I love Kadence and we use that in many of our sites. Now I am starting hating it. Maybe need a plan to switch with something else.
Shahjahan Jewel Fluent Theme is coming...
Shahjahan Jewel Let me know if you find something you like. All of my sites use Kadence and that means a lot of potential rework for patterns, hooked elements, etc.
They finally replied to me and it started with "Hi Carlos".
If they're going to send a canned reply, perhaps they shouldn't call everyone Carlos.
Shahjahan Jewel same here
Jorge de los Reyes Is it going to be a FSE Block Theme, a Classic Theme, or a Hybrid?
David Fore who knows! I heard it was under development like a year ago.
With all this new AI era, I’ll bet for the lightest, and simplest infrastructure and features.
After doing a bit of research yesterday, from what I can tell so far, Blocksy is being referred to as the closest theme to Kadence free. Would like to hear anyone else's suggestions too. This new full page ad inside my admin dashboard for plugins I don't have, don't need, and won't ever use, like William Beem said, is absolutely repulsive!
It sucks when a company starts to value the bottom line over their customers.
Well apparently, LiquidWeb had many complaints already about their stupid full page advertising forced into the backend admin dashboard, cause it's no longer showing in my admin dashboard this morning. 😁
David Fore This is fascinating. It's not on mine, either. I did not have any other updates. So was this on a timer or did they install a backdoor to make changes on our sites without notice?
I'm betting on the backdoor.
William Beem Wow! I've never heard of a "Backdoor". That sounds kinda creepy and scary, knowing they can do this without our permission and approval. Is there a way to stop or prevent this from happening?
David Fore I don't know that they did it. The only way to know for sure is to monitor your traffic and review the logs. I updated another site today, and the Liquid Web Software Manager did not appear. So I'm still not sure whether it's a time-based display.
I may take a look at Cloudflare today to see my outbound traffic, just out of curiosity.
David Fore Kadence support promises me they don't have a back door. Yet they cannot explain the change. He told me I must have updated it or enabled auto-updates. I corrected him because I had not updated anything, and I do not have any auto-updates on my sites. Auto-updates caused screw-ups. I'd rather screw things up manually.
William Beem Here's what my friend Gemini found about it:
Why It Appeared
The menu item appeared because of the automatic rollout of Kadence Theme version 1.5.0.
Following Liquid Web's acquisition activity, developers bundled a top-level "Liquid Web" admin panel into the core theme files. This dashboard served as a cross-promotional hub designed to advertise sister plugins and host-level ecosystem integrations directly to free-tier users.
Why It Disappeared
The item vanished because the parent company quickly pulled the update or pushed a hotfix due to immediate, severe backlash from the WordPress development community.
- The Backlash: Agency owners and developers flooded WordPress.org support forums and Reddit, furious that an intrusive, unprompted white-label menu was visible to their clients.
- The Rapid Fix: To prevent users from abandoning the theme, Kadence immediately deployed a silent background update or an incremental patch (like
1.5.1) to hide, disable, or remove the intrusive dashboard item from the sidebar.
David Fore I decided to check with Gemini and found some information, but first I'm taking up the support guy's offer to assist. After all, he told me:
"Again, I assure you...we do not have a "back door" into your site. I'm sure there is a logical explanation for the change."
I haven't mentioned anything other than what he requested, so I'm curious to see how this plays out to explain the change. I genuinely want to know.
Plugins do talk to servers. That's how they verify licenses perform auto-updates (which I've disabled), and display news/info on the WordPress Dashboard.
I accept that within reason. Posting an advertisement in my admin area is not what I consider a reasonable use of the service.
This whole Kadence situation is exactly why classic themes with proprietary builders are no longer a safe bet. When your tooling depends on a vendor's portal, licensing system, and roadmap, you inherit every business decision they make — including the ones driven by an acquirer concentrating its catalog into a unified suite.
At my agency we made the move from Elementor to native FSE (TT25) and honestly, we're never going back. It was a steep learning curve for the first few weeks, but the Site Editor has matured massively over the last couple of years. It's now more than capable for genuinely complex projects — including WooCommerce builds with custom configurators, advanced templating, and per-template logic.
What we get with FSE that we never had with Elementor or Kadence:
- No proprietary lock-in. Everything is core WordPress.
- No license portal to log into when something needs renewing.
- No acquisition risk. The block editor isn't going to be "consolidated" into someone else's product line.
- Performance is in a different league. No bloated builder shell, no DOM nesting nightmare.
- The editing experience is genuinely faster and more pleasant once you've internalized the patterns.
If you're a Kadence user looking at this restructuring and feeling uneasy, take it as the signal it is. The migration to FSE is real work, but it's the last migration you'll have to do. Every classic theme + proprietary builder stack is going to face this same question eventually.
Nicolas D I've used a "Block Theme" with FSE a little bit earlier this year, but building one from scratch to replace my current use of Kadence Free theme seems to be a bit much work and learning curve I really don't have time to invest in right now.
Do you know of a completely Block Theme that's free to make this transition with?
I'm seriously considering moving from the Free Kadence Theme to Blocksy's Free version, but again, like you said, what's to stop Blocksy from selling out and we again end up in the same situation in the future that we're currently experiencing with Kadence?
David Fore Twenty Twenty five (TT25), official theme is the best, you don't need any extra external service like kadence, divi or blocksy
If you're interested, I just posted an article about the changes Liquid Web made to Kadence. It's not just from a few days ago, and it's worse than I thought.
I have a commitment from a rep at Kadence to get a full refund. Now I'm waiting to see if it happens. I'll move to GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks.
William Beem why not native blocks ?
Nicolas D 3rd party blocks have more customization features that I like to use.