Salient Theme Review 2022: My Thoughts After 6+ Months of Use

Salient WordPress theme is one of the most popular choices for themes on the market. In this article, I’ll give you a comprehensive Salient theme review, key features, pros, cons, what I love about the theme, and heaps more.

After six months of use, I think I’m confident enough to say that I highly recommend this theme to everyone.

Its endless customization options, multipurpose ability, excellent customer support, and lightweight design make it ideal for most bloggers and web designers.

The theme has also received 121,000+ sales and a 4.81/5 rating from over 6,000 reviews.

Anyways, without further ado, let’s get straight into the Salient theme review for 2022.

Disclaimer: The article contains affiliate links, and I may receive a small commission on purchases at no cost to you. Salient is a theme I use and love and highly recommend for all bloggers. You can read my full disclosure here.

What is Salient?

Salient is a multipurpose WordPress theme built by ThemeNectar and is ideal for bloggers, portfolios, business sites, eCommerce stores, and more.

Launched in late March 2013, it’s one of the most popular themes on Theme Forest to date and has over 120,000 sales with a 4.81-star rating.

It’s also a well-documented theme, has exceptional customer support, and gets updated every few weeks.

Salient Theme: Key Features

Now that we’ve briefly been introduced to the Salient theme, I’ll now move on to the seven key features that I love when using the theme.

These seven key features will hopefully help you decide whether the theme is suitable for you.

Outstanding Performance

A lightweight and responsive theme are crucial to a website’s success nowadays, especially with Google’s Core Web Vitals update coming into play.

The Salient theme is lightweight and fast and achieves a 97% on Google Pagespeed Insights and a 93% on YSlow. These excellent scores will help maintain a solid user experience and help you rank higher on Google.

In my experience, I’ve actually been able to get my page speed to a perfect score.

You can see my results on GT Metrix below. While I have fast web hosting (Cloudways) and a caching plugin (WP Rocket) installed, a bulky heavyweight theme would bottleneck the performance.

The article tested is 389KB in page size and gets fully loaded in 756ms; that’s impressive if I say so myself.

350 Templates

The theme offers 350 templates you can use, which is more than ideal for customizing every page on your website. They’re great for beginners who want to mix and match some aspects without importing a demo site or using code.

There are over a dozen pages that these templates cover, like an about page, blog, call-to-action, map, testimonials, shop, and more.

It’s super easy to use, just click whichever template you want to add, and the theme will do the rest for you. Then you can customize the template however you please.

I prefer this method to import a demo site, as you can mix and match certain elements you like and create a fully customized website within a day.

Demo Importer

With Salient, you can also import an entire demo site from one of their dozens of choices. This option is great if you want to have a website already built for you in one click, and you can edit all the blocks and images to be relevant to your website.

Again, they have over a dozen demo sites to choose from, like blogs, portfolio pages, shops, and more.

If you’re a beginner or professional who wants to skip the entire process of building a website from scratch, this demo importer will fulfill that step.

I have experimented with the demo importer and found it so straightforward to use.

WPBakery Page Builder

Another element that sold me on Salient is its WPBakery Page Builder, making front-end customization easy.

It’s a highly tailored version of the WPBakery Page Builder that Salient has customized, and you can customize your pages however you’d please.

You can add rows, columns, inner columns, and so much more. I’ve used Elementor before ($60/year), but it’s a no-brainer with this page builder already included in the price.

You can also add headings, dividers, images, icons, call to action, buttons, and so much more. It may take a little time to wrap your head around, but I guarantee you’ll become an expert with it in no time.

Full WooCommerce Integration

Because it’s a multipurpose theme, Salient can be used to create your online store with WooCommerce.

It has premium WooCommerce integrations with lots of product styles to choose from, a custom gallery, layout options, and an AJAX cart.

You can also have a quick product view, so customers can quickly view the product and add it to their carts.

If you want to build a beautiful online store that’s clean and professional, Salient can be used for that.

Lifetime Updates

Another critical feature of Salient that’s worth noting is that it includes lifetime updates. Once you’ve purchased the theme, you unlock access to their lifetime updates.

There’s no yearly cost or hidden fees like other popular themes; it’s simply one payment.

A theme with such high sales volume will be updated for years to come, so there are no concerns with them abandoning it down the track.

Mobile-friendly

The last key feature of Salient is its responsive and device-friendly design.

The theme is computer, mobile, and tablet-friendly and looks exceptional on all devices.

Also, when updating your design with the WPBakery page builder, you can preview how the changes will look on all three devices, making it easy to see if any elements are in the wrong spots.

I’m delighted with how my blog looks on mobile devices, and it’s something you must pay attention to, considering that 54.8% of web traffic is from mobile phones.

More Features

Salient is still jampacked with more features, and quite frankly, they would fill up this entire page.

So, here are another ten great features the theme includes:

• Adaptive images: Adjusts the size of images to the device
• Header layout: Includes eight different header layouts
• Advanced typography: 900+ Google fonts to choose from
• Color options: Endless color options
• Page transitions: Fade in and out when navigating your website
• Social media: Integrate social media icons in the header/footer
• Huge icon collection: Choose from thousands of icons
• Shape dividers: A way to separate sections (check my homepage)
• Customize 404 pages: Change background color, add an image, and a return home button
• Sliders: Multiple sliders to choose from

Recommended read: 7 Best Themes for WordPress in 2022

Salient Theme Pricing

Salient is only a paid theme, with no free options available.

It’s a one-time purchase of $60, and that’s it. This license includes one website installation, future updates, and 6-months of support from ThemeNectar.

If you’d like, you can extend the support to 12-months for an extra $18, but I found that most of my problems have already been answered in the comments section.

Salient Theme Support

Salient has some of the best customer support teams I’ve ever experienced, who are professional and respond promptly.

I seriously cannot recommend the team behind Salient enough, as they respond to all of your problems within 6 – 24 hours and give you the exact CSS code needed.

I asked them over ten questions throughout my six months of support, and every single problem was fixed with ease.

Suppose you’ve encountered a problem, head to the Comments tab on Salient’s page. Scroll to the bottom of the page, click the ‘add comment’ textbox, and explain your problem in detail. I also recommend leaving a URL so the team can check the problem firsthand.

What I Love About Salient

I love how beautiful and customizable the Salient theme has been. As a beginner, the theme wasn’t complicated to figure out, and it was pretty straightforward in all aspects.

There are endless customization options, and it’s made super easy with the WP Bakery Page Builder front-end editing.

I love the floating header, performance, shape dividers, and just the general look of the theme.

Also, if I ever came across a problem I couldn’t figure out, the support team was there to fix it within 24 hours.

While I’m not too fond of the limited number of ‘recent blog post’ designs and the category pages that are not possible to customize, it’s easily made up by all of the other cool features.

I rate the theme 4.9/5 stars, with just a few tweaks that could easily make my rating a perfect five stars.

Pros & Cons of Salient

Here are the pros and cons of Salient:

Wrapping Up

Salient is a magnificent WordPress theme that I cannot recommend enough for all bloggers and web designers to use.

Hopefully, my Salient theme review has helped you decide if this theme is suitable for you. Its endless customization options, Salient page builder, and WooCommerce integration are ideal for most websites.

After using it for six months, I have to say that I’ll be using this theme for all my upcoming websites, as it’s the best theme I’ve ever used.

I know I might be biased, but you can navigate my website and see all the cool features of the Salient theme itself. I won’t review a product or service if I don’t use it myself.

My sister has also purchased this theme for her travel blog and has created a beautiful and responsive website.

After reading my Salient theme review, do you plan on purchasing the theme?