WordPress Themes: Is Salient Still Worth It?
Salient has been around long enough to have a reputation, and for a while that reputation was well earned. It sold in enormous numbers on ThemeForest, and plenty of agencies defaulted to it because it looked impressive out of the box. The question now is whether it still holds up when you look past the demo. Because the web has moved on, and a theme that wowed people a few years ago can quietly become a drag on a site that needs to stay fast, clean and genuinely competitive.
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What Salient Actually Is
Salient is a premium multipurpose WordPress theme built around its own page builder, WPBakery. It ships with a large library of pre-built demos, a custom header builder, and a set of bundled plugins including Revolution Slider. On paper, that sounds like everything you’d want in one package.
In practice, that bundling is exactly where the problems start.
The Performance Problem Is Real
Multipurpose themes like Salient are built to do everything, which means they load assets for features you’re not using. A contact page doesn’t need portfolio scripts. A homepage doesn’t need the WooCommerce helpers buried three directories deep. But they load anyway, because the theme has no way of knowing what you’re not using.
Revolution Slider is a particular offender. It’s been a staple of themes like Salient for years, but it adds significant JavaScript weight even on pages with no slider at all. On a site where Core Web Vitals matter, that kind of passive bloat is quietly working against you before a single visitor lands.
For context, Google’s own documentation on Largest Contentful Paint makes clear that render-blocking scripts are one of the fastest ways to tank your LCP score. A theme that bundles several of them isn’t a shortcut. It’s a liability.
WPBakery Is the Sticking Point
Salient is tightly coupled to WPBakery, which predates the block editor by several years. It works, but it stores layout as raw shortcode inside post content, which means your design is baked into the database in a format only WPBakery can read.
Switch themes, or try to move to a different builder, and you’re left with pages full of unrendered shortcode strings. That’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a migration headache that has caught out a lot of site owners who thought they were just choosing a design, not locking into an ecosystem.
If you’re considering a theme that holds up technically over the long run, the builder underneath matters just as much as how the demos look.
Where Salient Still Has Genuine Strengths
It would be unfair to write it off entirely. Salient has a genuinely active development team, and the theme does receive updates. The demo library is extensive, and for someone who needs a complex-looking site without commissioning a custom build, the variety on offer is hard to match at that price point.
For smaller sites where page speed isn’t a primary concern, where the owner is happy to stay within the WPBakery ecosystem, and where the visual output matters more than the technical detail underneath, Salient can still do the job. It’s not a broken theme. It’s just not a lean one.
What the Alternatives Look Like
The honest answer is that the WordPress theme market has matured considerably. Block-based themes built for the native editor are lighter, more future-proof, and play well with tools like Spectra or Kadence Blocks without the shortcode lock-in. Themes like Kadence or Astra start fast and let you build up complexity only where you need it, rather than loading everything by default.
That said, switching from Salient to a block theme on an existing site isn’t a small job. The rebuild cost is real, and if a site is performing well enough in its current state, the disruption may not be worth it right now. We’ve found that the decision almost always comes down to what the site needs to do next, not just what the theme is capable of today.
The Optimisation Trap to Watch Out For
One pattern worth flagging, a Salient site that’s been “optimised” by someone who installed WP Rocket, ran an image compression pass, and called it done. The PageSpeed score might look respectable straight after, but that’s often because the server cache is still serving the pre-optimisation version of the page. Clear that cache, run the tests again, and the picture can look very different.
In our experience, clients have paid to have their WordPress site optimised and only discovered later, once the server cache expired naturally, that the underlying issues were never actually fixed. The score looked good. The site wasn’t. Always test with the cache cleared and every plugin active, or you’re not testing the real thing.
The Verdict
Salient isn’t a bad theme. But if you’re starting a new build today, there are lighter, more flexible options that won’t put you on the back foot before you’ve written a word of content. If you’re already running Salient on an existing site, the question isn’t whether it’s fashionable. It’s whether it’s slowing you down in ways you can measure. That’s worth finding out before assuming everything is fine.