Feast revealed their latest offerings – a style suite for their theme. In this review we will look at the service each provides, comparing features, ease of use, cost & longevity, maintenance, SEO (including speed). First – an introduction to the two offerings:
The new Feast+
Feast+ is your branding toolkit for helping you define your brand, and apply it in a beautiful and consistent way across your homepage, categories and posts.
Brand your site with custom colors, fonts and pre-built customizations without having to learn CSS.
Unlike themes with point-and-click styling changes, Feast+ is designed to comply with mobile, pagespeed, accessibility and user experience best practices. (from their website)
Feast+ provides style options in a streamlined and easy to understand way. As is their brand, they are easy to understand, have strong opinions on the right and wrong way to do things and tend to make sweeping generalizations about SEO.
Kadence Theme
Create Beautifully Effective WordPress Sites with Ease! Quickly launch with a starter template, and change global colors and fonts. Build new pages with drop-in-ready sections from the design library. (from their website)
Kadence provides a theme and block plugin, starting with a free version, and pay for more functionality. They are becoming very popular in the developer world for their clean code, and fast out-of-the-box passing scores on Google Pagespeed. Another reason for their popularity is their great customer service, affordability and best practices.
Features
Let’s look at the features for both Feast+ and KadenceWP.
Feast comes with these full page patterns: 2 alternative homepage layouts, and 2 recipe index layouts. Patterns include two pre-styled author-boxes, 8 info boxes with different icons, grid layout, search box, columns, and a navigation menu.
The options page lets you choose between 3 – 5 pre-styled looks for Info box, grid layout box, lists and buttons. You can also globally set 4 colors in the color palette, and 3 fonts.
Kadence is a full block-based theme, allowing different patterns to be automatically styled with the global settings. The global settings are almost-limitless – you choose spacing, borders, shadows, columns, width / height, placement on page, colors, links, media, typography, meta data, and a lot more. The videos above give you a look into the dashboard with each service.
Ease of Use
Feast+ is incredibly easy to use. Once it is installed you select the options you’d like with a click. You can also click the “auto settings” buttons to get one of 5 pre-chosen settings. It doesn’t get easier!
Kadence using a point and click customizer, with custom drag and drop footer, shop pages and more. But there are 1000’s of options. With lots of options, can come overwhelm and lack of direction. Analysis paralysis is real, my friends! We always recommend that you load a starter template, and stick to it until you are used to the block editor. It is easy to delete blocks but not so easy to get them back! (unless you use the Design Library as shown in video).
Cost (& maintenance)
Feast+ is $999/year – for the style choices mentioned above. There are very limited styles. There are not very many blocks, pages or patterns.
What they will tell you is that it is SEO- friendly and Accessibility friendly. See more on this below.
You can get a Kadence theme, starter template, and the Kadence blocks plugin for free. The options shown in the video above are part of the Essentials plan at $149/year.
Regardless of the theme you’ll need your core, plugins upgraded regularly, you’ll need to apply best practices for security and backup daily. All of which are offered in our maintenance plans.
SEO – including speed
What Feast does very well, and what a lot of food bloggers pay for, is their ongoing SEO research in tandem with Casey Marquee. Feast / Casey finds what is working currently and pushes those changes to your site via the Feast Plugin. We advise against this approach.
Why? When there is a new SEO tactic – it is automatically updated to all the sites on the Feast plugin (separate from Feast+). A proven tactic, when used en masse, is likely to be considered “spammy” or “gaming the system” as Google is not about tactics – but about making the best page for the searcher.
Writing for your users, using best practices (not the latest tactics), and researched keywords is the best way to conquer SEO. For 90% of you, SEO is an expensive and slow way to more traffic.
When it comes to speed, Feast+ (with the Feast Theme and plugin) and KadenceWP (with the Kadence Pro and Pro Blocks plugins) both come in within google recommended guidelines.
The truth is that SEO is complicated and a theme is only part of the equation. On accessibility – WordPress is getting there. Right now we do not pass WGAC standards without a little work. And using Feast+ does not fix any of the accessibility issues inherent in WP.
In Summary
I believe a little research goes a long way – get your own keywords and learn how to optimize your posts. The rest of the tactics taught by SEO gurus are usually trends. If there are specifics and templates for your content – avoid that. That will eventually be seen as spammy.
I believe your get more bang for your buck with Kadence instead of Feast+. With both plugins you’ll have to do some work to attain compliance with accessibility testers.
Beginner Checklist
If you’re starting out, you’ll love our comprehensive 52 point checklist for your website! Read through once, and then work on items one at a time as it comes up!
Cathy Mitchell
Single Mom, Lifelong Learner, Jesus Follower, Founder and CEO at WPBarista.