Pinnacle Theme Review

General design

As I said before, this theme follows the minimalistic style and clean, decent design. The only decorative tool is the thin straight lines to make the emphasis.  Besides, I'm really amazed by the beautiful stunning home page with the lively parallax section and well-organized blocks.

Other elements

The principal colors are grey and white because the designer concentrates on the classic and decent style. Together with these neutral colors, some red elements highlight and make this theme a bit warmer.

Raleway and Arial are the two family fonts in this theme. Their style is so suitable with the decent and minimal style of the whole theme. They are also readable in both body content and heading. Moreover, it enables you to choose new fonts among a lot of standard fonts in the repository of Theme Options.

The full-screen hero image is really attractive, particularly with the large page title and tagline here. Moreover, there are many styles for this header media like slider carousel, flex slider, and video. But I still strongly suggest a static image with large size. If you choose a slider, remember to choose images having the same ratio and pixel sizes. Otherwise, it will look unbalanced like I did.

Featured slider

There is also a small note for this area. You display your page title in the header, and the title is longer than 3 words, the space between the two lines are quite big. That lead to an unsymmetrical arrangement in this area.

Header title has a large line spacing

The most interesting element on the homepage to me is the parallax Call to action area. You can choose any background image, color or alignment for this area to mark your own style.

Changing Call to action background

On the other page, the layout and design are good and reasonable. I feel very relaxed when using it and have no other complaints.

Responsive

The design is perfect in every viewport. Even the header image is still full-screen and looks great on all devices. That helps me use this WordPress multipurpose theme in any device seamlessly.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

To manually set up this theme, you need to install Kadence Toolkit. In this way, you are given Theme Options in the Dashboard where there are more custom features like Homepage Layout, Typography, Menu Setting are available. Notably, after you choose a static homepage, go to this place to enable and organize the modules you by dragging and dropping. It's quite complicated and different from the other themes, right? But I believe that it's not so difficult after you read the tutorial carefully.

Customizing modules on the homepage

Luckily, Pinnacle is compatible with One-click demo import, you can speedily have a website similar to the demo and all the demo data in one minute. All you have to do is simple. Just need to install the Kadence Importer in the recommended plugins tab and then click the import button.

I can affirm that this theme is very feature-rich (compared to other free themes). Kadance theme gives you all the important features for blog, business or e-commerce website and recommended many useful plugins to help you gain more. The premium things like Page Builder and One-click demo import are also available, making this free theme stand out in the crowd.

Customize the Free Theme with Elementor

With the Elementor, you can customize almost everything. But it needs you to know how to use this plugin so a beginner like me might be confused a lot. Instead, using Customizer and Theme Options in the Dashboard is still a common suggestion for a non-professional user.

Customize the Free Theme in the Dashboard

I'm afraid that if aren't familiar with the Theme Options in the Dashboard, it will challenge you. Especially, there are many elements, both major and minor ones, so they require your high concentration.

For example, adding a header image is as easy as the other themes. You should remember only one thing: crop the image before uploading since it doesn't allow you to resize the image here.

Customizing header image

But you must know how to copy the video code to show a video on the header media.

Customizing header video media

The typography can be edited only by using Theme Options. There are up to seven sections to customize the family font and size, style and even color. Moreover, with all the standard fonts, I promise that your website can be personalized and diversified to a high level.

Customizing typography

Customize the Free Theme with Customizer

As for the color options, you should use Customizer because the live preview helps you see the changes immediately.

Customizing color in the Customizer

One more special thing is that there are many extra widgets from Pinnacle besides all the common ones of WordPress. Notably, the Social Links widget is easily editable and has a variety of default social links and one custom link, free for you to add any site you want.

Extra widgets from Pinnacle

These basic elements are not difficult to customize. But the advanced things like Portfolio Option is quite sophisticated to set up. You should check the documentation carefully.

There are all the post formats to help you easily create many kinds of posts. And because of the fact that Pinnacle works perfectly with Gutenberg, all the blocks display very nicely and properly on your site.

The gallery carousel or slider is available in the pro version. In this free theme, the grid gallery is still fine, but I don't like the way it sticks with the paragraph above.

Gallery

The video has a large frame, comfortable to watch without zooming.

Video

There are two styles for blockquote and I suggest the second style, which is more beautiful.

Blockquote

The high speed of this multipurpose WordPress theme totally satisfies me. It's excellent so I don't need to think about the time load. This result is taken from PageSpeed Insights, the most well-known website to check speed.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

On the contrary, SEO hasn't been optimized well yet. But don't worry, the author suggests Yoast SEO. Install it and now your website is ready for SEO.

You are given only four quick links for Demo content, Homepage setting, Portfolio page, and Slider options. Some links are for all the Kadence themes and the Homepage setting is for the premium. But you can still apply to this free version.

The instructions are clarified by video tutorials and images so you can understand them easily.

The support forum is for the premium themes only. Free themes from Kadence WP can receive support in the WordPress support forum. I found some topics with the Theme Author's responses here.