Salient Theme Review: Your Creative Website Builder (2025)

Ease of Use

I would rate the overall ease of use of Salient at 3.8/5.

Here’s why:

• Salient provides a straightforward installation process and theme setup.
• It is quick and easy to set up the demo.
• With the front-end visual editor and default customization options, you have the flexibility to customize your WordPress website effortlessly.

Installation Process

Salient creative multipurpose WooCommerce theme is available only on the Envato Marketplace.

After purchasing the theme, download the .zip file from your Envato account. Next, log into your website’s dashboard with your credentials. Follow the steps below for regular theme installation.

• Go to appearance > themes > add new > upload theme
• Find the .zip file you downloaded previously and proceed to upload it
• Click the install now button then activate the theme

Great! You’ve successfully installed and activated the Salient theme on your website.

Theme Setup

To set up the Salient  WordPress theme, install and activate some recommended plugins. Navigate to Appearance> Install plugins area.

Here, you’ll find the list of the required and recommended plugins. To make the theme functional, you have to install and activate the Salient Core and Salient WPBakery Page Builder plugins.

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll gain access to the core theme options. However, I recommend also installing and activating the other essential plugins.

Features

I would rate the overall features at 3.9/5.

Here’s why:

• The theme responsive design ensures your website looks great and functions smoothly on all devices, including high-resolution screens.
• Salient integrates with the WPBakery Page Builder, offering a drag-and-drop interface for easy customization without needing coding knowledge.
• Salient is designed for fast loading times, enhancing user experience, and boosting search engine rankings.
• It is built with the best SEO practices, helping your website achieve better visibility in search engine results.
• Seamless integration with WooCommerce, providing custom design elements for product pages, shopping carts, and checkout processes.

Here are the core features of Salient:

1. Options Panel

The Options Panel is designed with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate and configure settings. The panel offers a comprehensive array of customization settings, allowing users to tailor every aspect of their site.

This includes options for colors, fonts, layouts, header and footer styles, and more. With these settings, users can create a unique and personalized website that reflects their brand identity.

Salient theme’s Page Transitions panel provides users with flexibility and control over how page transitions are displayed and experienced on their website.

Users can select their preferred transition effect from a variety of options available, allowing customization to match the website’s style and branding.

Users can also choose from different styles for the loading icon that appears during page transitions. This helps maintain visual consistency across the site.

The Salient theme provides extensive form styling settings that allow users to customize the appearance and functionality of form elements across their websites.

Users can set the style for all form elements used throughout their site, ensuring a stunning look. Various styles are available for submit buttons used across the site, allowing users to maintain design consistency.

Additionally, users can fine-tune the padding of form submit buttons to achieve the desired spacing.

Moreover, adjusting the font size of form input fields and textarea elements is possible to improve readability and ensure they blend seamlessly with the overall website design.

2. Live Editing

The Salient theme offers a fantastic Live Editing feature that greatly enhances the user experience. It allows users to make direct adjustments on the front end of their website using the WPBakery page builder.

With its visual approach, the design process becomes much simpler as there is no need to constantly switch between the editor and preview modes. The live editing interface is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly.

Users can effortlessly drag and drop elements, resize sections, and customize styles. Any changes made are instantly reflected, providing immediate feedback and allowing users to see changes in real-time.

On top of that, users have the freedom to customize various elements directly on the page, such as text, images, buttons, and backgrounds. The real-time preview feature speeds up the development process.

Users can make adjustments on the spot, eliminating the need for extensive revisions and constant back-and-forth between design and preview modes.

3. Salient Templates

The Salient theme offers an extensive collection of templates, making it easy for users to create professional and visually appealing websites.

With over 400 professionally designed templates covering various niches such as blogs, portfolios, eCommerce stores, and corporate sites, users can find a template that suits their specific needs.

Using the WPBakery page builder, users can easily drag and drop elements, adjust layouts, and modify styles without any coding knowledge.

The templates offer versatile options, allowing users to personalize various aspects such as colors, fonts, images, and content blocks to reflect their brand identity and preferences.

Templates also provide significant time-saving benefits. It streamlines the setup process, enabling users to launch their websites within minutes.

The demo content import feature further simplifies this process by filling the website with pre-designed content that can be easily replaced with custom content.

All templates are fully responsive, ensuring that websites look great and function seamlessly on any device, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

Templates are regularly updated to incorporate new features, design trends, and improvements, ensuring users always have access to the latest and most effective designs.

4. Salient Elements

The Salient theme comes with a powerful set of elements designed to enhance the functionality and appearance of WordPress websites.

It offers a comprehensive library of over 65 elements, including buttons, icons, sliders, carousels, pricing tables, and more. 

These elements offer users a versatile set of tools to create visually stunning content. Additionally, each element includes numerous pre-designed styles and variations to choose from. 

The elements can be easily added and customized using the WPBakery Page Builder. Users can drag and drop elements, adjust settings, and see real-time changes.

Many elements offer advanced customization options, such as color, size, animation, alignment, and more. Users can enhance the user experience with interactive elements like flip boxes, accordions, and tabs.

Additionally, Salient elements support CSS3 animations and effects, adding a layer of interactivity and visual appeal to draw attention to key content and enhance the overall user experience.

Performance is also prioritized in the design of Salient elements. They are lightweight and optimized for fast loading times, ensuring that they do not negatively impact the website’s performance.

5. WooCommerce Features

Salient offers beautiful layouts for online stores, including a modern dual-column design that efficiently displays product images alongside key product information and purchasing options.

Another layout option is the scroll stacked layout, where users can freely scroll through product images while still being able to view product information and thumbnails.

The shopping cart in Salient is powered by AJAX, which means that there is no need for page reloading when adding items.

This advanced shopping cart includes quantity selectors for on-the-fly adjustments, an auto-reveal feature that automatically reveals the cart as items are added, and cross-device compatibility.

To enhance the user experience, Salient offers a product quick view feature that allows users to view more product information and add items to their cart without leaving their current location.

The theme also provides an innovative filter layout that allows customers to filter products only when necessary.

Salient makes it easy to create flexible category grids with control over column amounts, auto masonry layout, coloring, text alignment, and spacing. This helps in effectively organizing and presenting products attractively.

Overall, the WooCommerce features in the Salient theme provide a powerful and flexible framework for creating a professional and user-friendly online store. 

Pre-Built Websites

The Salient theme includes an impressive collection of pre-built websites designed to streamline the website creation process.

These pre-built websites offer users a quick and easy way to set up a professional and visually appealing site without starting from scratch.

While the pre-built websites provide a solid foundation, they are also highly customizable. Users can easily tweak the design, layout, and content to match their brand identity and preferences.

The integration with the WPBakery page builder allows for intuitive drag-and-drop customization, making it easy to adjust elements, change colors, and add content.

Each pre-built website is designed to be visually stunning and impactful. The designs incorporate high-quality imagery, modern typography, and stylish layouts that make a strong impression.

Salient regularly updates its pre-built websites to ensure they stay current with the latest design trends and technological advancements. Let’s see how to import a pre-built website with a few clicks.

Navigate to Salient > Demo Import area to see the available demo websites. Select a suitable demo website for your website and click the import demo button to start the process.

After finishing the import, you can visit your website to see its current looks.

Quick and simple!

Reliability

I would rate overall Salient reliability at 3.8/5.

Here’s why:

• The Salient theme is highly praised for its regular updates, ensuring users always have access to the latest features and enhancements.
• Additionally, Salient ensures solid performance, achieving an ‘A‘ grade and a 93% performance rating on GTmetrix.

Performance

To test Salient speed and efficiency, I imported a demo website to my site and ran it through GTmetrix.

Here are the results:

The theme earned an A grade with an impressive performance rating of 93%. Notably, the page loaded quickly in just 1.5 seconds. These outstanding metrics truly stand out.

I tried out popular WordPress themes on GTmetrix. Now, let’s compare how Salient performs compared to the others.

Theme	Fully Loaded Time	Total Page Size	Total Page Requests
Salient Creative WordPress Theme	1.5 seconds	660 KB	54
Outgrid Theme	2.4 seconds	1.12 MB	102
Flatsome WooCommerce Theme	1.0 seconds	348 KB	36
Total Theme	3.5 seconds	531 KB	84
Porto Multipurpose Theme	1.8 seconds	1.21 MB	80

To be honest, I found Salient’s overall performance and page speed to be impressive.

⛔ Warning: The results from GTmetrix aren’t conclusive and won’t always hold true as the themes continue to update. However, they are a good indication of the themes’ performance and speed insights.

Updates and Maintenance

The Salient theme is renowned for its commitment to regular updates and robust maintenance, ensuring that users always have access to the latest features, improvements, and security patches.

These are some of the highlights:

• Salient Core plugin has been updated to version 2.0.9.
• One of the notable additions is a theme option that allows you to toggle the header dropdown menu delay.
• They have also included the latest version of the WPBakery page builder plugin, ensuring that you have access to the most up-to-date features and enhancements.
• To enhance performance, they have addressed an issue where animated anchor links were breaking video lightbox elements when the Delay JS Execution performance option was enabled.
• They have corrected any invalid CSS properties in dynamic styles, ensuring that your website looks visually appealing and professional.
• They have improved the performance of the Flickity Carousel specifically in the Firefox browser.

Support

I would rate overall Salient WordPress theme support at 3.6/5.

Here’s why:

• Offers detailed guides and tutorials covering setup, customization, and troubleshooting for all theme features.
• Users can submit tickets for personalized assistance, with responses typically within 1-2 business days.
• Video Tutorials offer access to informative YouTube tutorials for simple setup, customization, and problem-solving with the Salient theme.
• You can get help and advice from other users via active Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter communities.

Customer Service

The Salient theme comes with multiple support options.

You can get support from:

• Via Email
• Ticketing system
• Video Tutorials
• Community support
• Documentations

Go to this link to visit the support center of the Salient WordPress theme.

Documentation

The Salient theme documentation provides extensive, step-by-step guides to help users set up the theme. It covers everything from installation to advanced customization options, making it easy for users of all skill levels.

Visual aids and screenshots are included to clarify complex instructions. Regular updates ensure the documentation stays current with new features and changes.

For troubleshooting, the documentation offers solutions to common issues and frequently asked questions. It includes sections on performance optimization and theme compatibility with popular plugins.

Users can also find helpful tips on enhancing site speed and efficiency. This makes the documentation a comprehensive resource for maximizing the theme’s potential.

Community Support

Salient is active on popular social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, fostering a supportive user community. Their official Facebook page has a community with over 2.7k likes and 2.7k followers.

The page frequently shares updates about theme features, new releases, and engaging content. Users can comment on posts for assistance or to share feedback, and the support team actively engages with the community.

Salient’s official YouTube channel offers video tutorials to help users get the most out of the theme. The channel, with 5.01k subscribers, features 16 videos covering various aspects of the theme.

However, Salient’s YouTube channel hasn’t posted new content in over two years. Additionally, comments are turned off, limiting user interaction and feedback through this platform.

Pricing

I would rate the overall pricing of the Salient theme at 3.6/5.

Here’s why:

• Salient is available for just $60, providing substantial features that offer great value compared to similar products.
• This price includes lifetime free updates, ensuring you always have access to the latest features.
• Additionally, the theme comes with six months of support to help you get started.
• However, it’s important to note that the current license restricts usage to a single website, which could be a limitation for developers or businesses managing multiple sites.

Cost Breakdown

Salient is a premium WordPress theme available exclusively on the Envato Market.

You can take it directly from the Envato Market:

For $60, you will gain access to the following:

• All the features Salient multipurpose theme offers
• Free updates
• 6 months of support from the author

⚠️ Note: If you intend to use the theme across multiple websites, you will have to purchase an extended license from Envato Market.

Consider these additional costs:

• The handling fee for using credit card transactions during purchase
• Extending support to 12 months will cost $18

Money Back Guarantee/Refund

Since Salient is exclusively available for purchase on the Envato Market, any returns or exchanges must adhere to Envato Market’s refund policy.

Here’s a summary of their refund policy:

Circumstance	Eligibility	Notes
Item is “not as described” or doesn’t work as it should	Yes	If the item is materially different from the description or doesn’t work as expected.
Item has a security vulnerability	Yes	If it can’t be fixed easily, you may be entitled to a refund.
Item support is promised but not provided	Yes	If you don’t receive the promised support, you may be entitled to a refund.
Items that have not been downloaded	Yes	If not downloaded within 30 days from the date of purchase.
Resolving disputes – asking Envato to help	Discretionary	If you and the author can’t agree on a refund, Envato may intervene.
You don’t want it after downloading	No	—
Item didn’t meet expectations or is of low quality	No	—
Change of mind	No	—
Bought by mistake	No	—
Lack of expertise to use the item	No	—
Item removed or author no longer active	No	Advised to download items immediately after purchase.
Purchase made over 180 days ago (supported items)	No	For Themeforest and CodeCanyon supported items.
Purchase made over 30 days ago (unsupported items)	No	For Themeforest and CodeCanyon unsupported items and other specified Envato Market items.

Final Thoughts

The Salient theme is a standout choice for anyone looking to create professional, high-performing, stunning, and fantastic websites.

Its responsive modern design, extensive customization options, and WooCommerce integration make it particularly appealing for online stores and diverse web projects.

The theme’s rich feature set, including advanced typography, parallax scrolling, and CSS3 animations, combined with its user-friendly interface, allows both beginners and experienced developers to create unique and engaging websites. 

While there may be a learning curve and costs associated with this premium theme, the benefits it offers far outweigh these considerations.