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Salient Theme Review: A Look at Its Creative WordPress Multi-purpose Theme Capabilities

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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Today we are looking at a popular theme from the ThemeForest marketplace, Salient is a great looking theme aimed at creative websites with a range of different homepage options which will let you create a business site, a portfolio, an eCommerce shop, a one page landing site and more. It has sold a staggering 138,213 copies and counting so far so is one of the most popular themes on the site, appearing on their popular page.

salient theme review multi-purpose wordpress theme

It includes page building functionality with a customized version of the Visual Composer, their own options panel and a copy of the Nectar slider. If you wish to build an eCommerce site with it, it works along side WooCommerce with some extra features such as an Ajax shopping cart.

salient theme demo

Just looking through the theme demos, this is a really beautiful theme so let’s take a look behind the scenes and see how it functions.

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Theme Features

This theme has a lot of options which should let you create highly customized websites, here is a run down of all the main features:

  • Ultra Responsive Design
  • Retina Ready Design
  • Exclusive Nectar Slider
  • AJAX Page Transitions (optional)
  • AJAX Search (optional)
  • Multi Layer Mouse Based Parallax
  • Infinite Scroll option for Blog & Portfolio
  • Multiple Single Post Layouts
  • Graphically Intuitive Shortcode Generator
  • Extensive Theme Options
  • HD Video Tutorial Series
  • Premium Elements
  • Support Ticket System
  • Extensively Written User Guide
  • Unlimited Color Options
  • Template library with more than 400 pre-built page layouts
  • WooCommerce Support
  • SEO Optimized
  • Header layouts
  • Sortable Portfolio
  • Page Builder
  • Advanced Typography – 600+ fonts
  • Built-in “love” system
  • Custom social sharing buttons
  • 550+ Retina ready icons
  • 2 Header Layouts + unlimited colors
  • Footer Column Options
  • Lottie Integration
  • 4 Stylish Blog Layouts
  • Mega Menu Builder
  • Custom Widgets
  • Demo Files Included ( XML )
  • Translation-Ready .po/.mo files included
  • Child Theme Ready

Moreover, you can use the following plugins with this multipurpose WordPress theme: 

  • Demo Importer
  • Shortcodes  
  • Nectar Slider
  • Widgets 
  • Social 
  • Portfolio 
  • Core

Getting Started With Salient

Inside the main Salient zip file you will find a copy of the theme + a child theme to use to make modifications if needed, 6 folders with dummy data for the different types of demo sites and a PDF documentation file. Once you activate the theme, it makes some plugin recommendations for you to install the Salient Visual Composer, WooCommerce and Contact Form 7.

salient theme settings

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After activating the theme, you should create two new pages, one for the homepage and one for the blog page – you can name these anything relevant and publish them. You should then go to Settings > Reading and set them as static pages.

salient theme settings step 2

If you wish to use one of the demo sites as a starting point you can now import the demo content. There are two things you need to do – visit the theme options import / export system and paste in the contents from the text file like so :

salient theme wordpress importer

Then you should use the WordPress importer plugin to add the other XML file which will create the posts and pages. Depending on which theme demo you choose to import, it will have added some new homepage and blog options which you can choose under Settings > Reading. Unfortunately the demo data does not include the images so you will need to add your own as the images are all blank placeholders.

Customizing to fit Your Needs

At this point you can now begin to customize the theme to fit your needs better so you should head over to the Salient menu item which contains their theme options panel where you can set sitewide options. The “General” settings is where you can choose a theme skin,  favicon upload, back to top button, turn on or off responsiveness and so on.

salient theme general settings

You can choose some accent colors globally for your site and some extra color options for things like buttons and icons:

salient theme accent color

There is a very comprehensive Typography section where you can enable Google fonts and set font options for all the site elements, including size, line heights, spacing and so on.

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salient theme enable google fonts

Under the Header setting you can choose from 3 different header layouts, set a text or image logo, set a retina logo and many other options for size, color and fonts.

salient theme header

You also have layout options for the footer, portfolio and blog so you can tweak the layout and many other options for each.

salient theme portfolio

Using The Page Builder

If you load up one of the pages created by the importer, you will see the Visual Composer in action – you can add, delete or edit the existing sections which are in place or drag them around to rearrange the order. You can click to edit an individual element and change the settings for it.

The theme’s page builder is modeled after WPBakery and features a vast selection of blocks.

salient theme using the page builder

If you click the “+” button at the top of the Visual Composer it will open a box with a lot of elements you can choose to add to your page. Things included are a slider, portfolio section, Google Map, Team Member, Single Image, Milestones, Social Media buttons and so on. You can also use this to add New rows, dividers, text blocks etc so you can tailor the page to create any layout you like.

salient theme visual composer

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Underneath the Visual Composer area, each page has their own custom settings you can use to tailor the page even further to your requirements. You can change things like the page header image, header height, page title and sub title, text alignment, background color and header font color. This should give you an idea of just how much you can customize pages, really powerful feature.

salient theme page header settings

Moreover, installing the Core plugin will give you access to the Salient Studio and an impressive template collection featuring hundreds of templates, icons, or hero sections. 

The Core plugin includes a broad spectrum of page header and page full-screen row tools that allow you to choose a background type, apply text effects or insert animations between rows.

Setting Up Sliders

You have two slider options with this theme, a homepage slider and the Nectar slider which you can place on any page or post. With each slide you can choose a background image, caption and button text / link. You can also upload videos to use as a background in MP4 or OGV format.There is also space to enter code for an embedded video from YouTube or Vimeo.

salient theme sliders settings

SEO Features

How a WordPress theme performs on search engines depends on a number of factors. 

Performance tests indicate Salient isn’t the fastest theme on the market because it needs up to  10 seconds to load fully. This is hardly surprising since the theme contains a ton of code and supports video content and animations. 

Don’t despair. There are plenty of things you can do to speed up the theme, starting with choosing an excellent hosting service. The theme supports lazy loading for these elements: 

  • Flip box element
  • Single image element
  • Image gallery element 
  • Blog element

Consequently, uploading images to the Salient theme won’t significantly impact its speed. That said, you shouldn’t use high-resolution pictures when you don’t have to. 

The important thing to note is that Salient has an outstanding heading structure and is compatible with all popular web browsers. Moreover, the theme and its templates are responsive and load quickly on all Smart devices.

Still, adding too many plugins to this theme or overloading it with media content might slow it down.

Demo Sites

The theme’s Demo Importer gives you an overview of demo sites you can use to build your websites. You can browse through close to 300 demo previews and click the Import Demo button when you see one you like. 

You will be asked to activate the plugins a demo requires to function properly. Also, you’ll have to choose from the following Import options: 

  • Widgets
  • Theme Option Settings 
  • Demo Content 

Please bear in mind that enabling the Theme Option Settings overrides the settings of your current WordPress theme. 

Importing a demo usually lasts a few seconds, but the process might take a couple of minutes if you opt to import all sample images a demo contains.

These are my favorite six Salient demo sites. Here is what they look like :

Blog Creative:

salient theme blog creative demo

eCommerce:

salient theme ecommerce demo

One Page:

salient theme one page website demo

Ascend:

salient theme ascend demo

Clean All Purpose:

salient theme clean all purpose demo

Modern Creative:

salient theme modern creative demo

Lottie Animations

The most recent version of the Salient theme lets you add Lottie animations to a WordPress website. The element is available in the theme’s page builder, and you can drag and drop it to a page section. 

You can add animations to this element by pasting the file’s URL to the designated box. The page builder will generate its preview and prompt you to adjust the animation settings. 

You can choose from several trigger types, including hover, autoplay, and play when visible. In addition, you can set the animation’s dimensions, select its start and end frames and increase or decrease its playback speed. 

Most Lottie animations are lightweight, but despite this, they can still affect the theme’s page load speed.

Pricing

Salient costs $60 for a regular license and is released under a split-GPL license meaning that :

This theme or plugin is comprised of two parts.
(1) the PHP code and integrated HTML are licensed under the General Public
License (GPL). You will find a copy of the GPL in the same directory as this
text file.
(2) All other parts, but not limited to the CSS code, images, and design are
licensed according to the license purchased from Envato.

All updates are included in the theme’s price, which means you’ll have access to all new features the developer adds to the theme in the future.

Frequently Asked Questions about Salient Theme

What is the Salient Theme?

To fully understand what the Salient theme is, you must be familiar with the concept of a multipurpose theme

A multipurpose WordPress theme can be any theme suitable for different niche websites. Hence, you can use a theme like Salient to build an equally functional eCommerce and corporate website. 

The theme has a vast template library, so you don’t have to build each page from scratch. What’s more, Salient has its own page builder that lets you customize templates in any way you want. 

On top of that, there are almost 300 Salient website demos you can import and use to build a website quickly.

How Do I Use Salient Theme in WordPress?

You must first install this theme before you can use it. In addition, you’ll have to activate several plugins, such as Salient Core or Salient Shortcodes, in order to have access to all its features. 

The fastest way to start building a website with the Salient theme is to import one of its website demos. Its Demo Importer makes this process quick and intuitive, so you just have to pick a demo you like and add it to WordPress. 

You don’t need coding experience to build a WordPress website with this theme because you can use the Salient Studio to arrange all elements you want your website to have.

Final Thoughts

This is a very polished theme – I love the design of it, it’s very modern and should let you create some beautiful looking websites as you can see from the demo sites above. The backend is well put together, the options panel contains a huge amount of settings so you can tweak most aspects of the site that you shouldn’t need to modify much, if anything, by hand using custom CSS code.

The import / export system is well needed as it relies on the Visual Composer to create the page layouts which would be a pain to set them all up by hand as this plugin relies on shortcodes. Unfortunately because of this fact, you are going to experience theme “lock-in” which means if you change to another theme, all your custom pages will be lost.

Documentation is good, with a well put together PDF and also a series of video tutorials also available should you need them.

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A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.