You have installed Kinetra and imported a demo. This guide takes you from the demo to your own finished site, shows how to work with it day to day, and lists the mistakes that cause most support questions.
Your first hour
Work through these in order. Each one takes a few minutes.
- Check the system status. Open Kinetra → Dashboard. Every line under System status should show a green tick. Fix any warning first; the Troubleshooting guide explains each one.
- Activate your licence in Kinetra → Licence, if the wizard didn’t ask. Without it you get no updates. Activating binds the key to your domain. Local sites don’t need a key.
- Set your name and logo. In Appearance → Customize → Site Identity, enter your site title and tagline, upload your logo, and add a site icon (the small image in browser tabs, at least 512 × 512 px).
- Choose the look. In Customize → Kinetra Theme Options, start with Style Preset, then Colors and Typography. Leave the other sections until your content is in.
- Replace the demo text. Open Pages → Home and change every section to your own words and images. Do the same for About, Contact and the other demo pages. See Editing pages.
- Add your work. Replace the demo projects in Portfolio, the posts in Posts, or the products in Products. Edit a demo item rather than deleting it if you want to keep its layout as a starting point.
- Fix the menus. In Appearance → Menus, check the Main menu and Footer menu point to your pages.
- Set up email. Install WP Mail SMTP from Kinetra → Plugins and connect it to your email provider. Set the address in Customize → Contact Form. Then send yourself a test message from your own contact page.
- Fill in your social links in Customize → Social Profiles. Empty fields are hidden.
- Turn on backups. Install UpdraftPlus and send backups to Google Drive, Dropbox or similar, so a copy lives off your server.
Before you go live
- Let search engines in. In Settings → Reading, untick Discourage search engines from indexing this site. While it is ticked, every page tells Google not to list it.
- Choose one SEO system. Kinetra adds titles, descriptions, social cards and structured data on its own. If you prefer Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress or The SEO Framework, install one of them and Kinetra steps aside. Don’t install two.
- Fill in SEO basics. With Kinetra’s own SEO, set your name, job title and a default share image (1200 × 630 px) in Customize → SEO & Performance. On each important page, fill in the Kinetra — display & SEO box.
- Remove leftover demo content. When your own pages are ready, use Kinetra → Dashboard → System status → Remove demo content. Read the warning about edited pages below first.
- Add a privacy policy in Settings → Privacy, and a cookie banner (for example Complianz) if you use analytics in the EU or UK. Turn on the privacy checkbox in Customize → Contact Form if you need consent for messages.
- Add analytics with your Google Analytics 4 ID in Customize → Advanced, or with Site Kit. Kinetra counts each page change as a page view. With Kinetra’s own setting, your visits while logged in are not counted.
- Shops: test a real order. Set up payments in WooCommerce → Settings → Payments, place a test order in the gateway’s test mode, then switch to live mode.
- Test logged out. Open the site in a private window and on your phone. Click through every menu item, submit the contact form, and check the 404 page by visiting a made-up address.
- Speed check. Run PageSpeed Insights on your home page. If the score is low, see “Speed” below.
Working on your site day to day
Adding a page
Go to Pages → Add New Page. Add Kinetra sections from the Kinetra Sections group (Block Editor) or panel category (Elementor), and normal blocks or widgets in between. If the page starts with a Hero, tick Hide the automatic page title. Publish, then add the page to a menu.
Adding a project, post or product
Write it like any WordPress post and always set a featured image. It appears automatically in the sections and archive pages that list that type. Projects need the Client, Role and Year fields for their cards.
Changing the design
Always use Appearance → Customize. Changes preview live and only go public when you click Publish. If you aren’t sure, use the arrow next to Publish to Save Draft and come back later. Before big changes, export your settings in Kinetra → Dashboard → Settings backup.
Seeing your changes
Kinetra clears popular cache plugins when you save. If a change still doesn’t show, clear your server or CDN cache and reload. You are seeing the newest version when a private window shows it too.
Updating
Updates appear in Dashboard → Updates. Back up first, update the theme, then update Kinetra Core from Kinetra → Plugins if a new version is offered. Keep WordPress, PHP and your plugins up to date too.
What not to do
Each of these breaks something or loses work. The reason is next to each one, with what to do instead.
| Don’t | Why | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Edit the theme’s files | Every update replaces them, so your changes disappear. | Use the Customizer, Kinetra → Custom Code, or a child theme. |
Add page.php, single.php or other templates to a child theme | Kinetra sends every page through one template. A new template replaces the animated site on those pages with plain WordPress output. | Use functions.php and the filters in the Developers guide. |
| Deactivate or delete Kinetra Core | All Kinetra sections, portfolio projects, the contact form and SEO tags stop showing. Your content is kept, but it is hidden until you turn Core back on. | Keep it active. It is the one required plugin. |
| Upload the whole download package as a theme | WordPress says “The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.” | Unzip it and upload only kinetra.zip. |
| Run two SEO plugins, or Kinetra SEO plus a plugin by hand | You get two titles, two descriptions and duplicate structured data. | Use Kinetra’s SEO, or exactly one SEO plugin. |
| Use “delay JavaScript”, “combine JavaScript” or Rocket Loader on Kinetra’s files | The animated site starts late or not at all, and pages show unstyled text. | Kinetra excludes itself automatically in WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, Autoptimize, SiteGround Optimizer, Perfmatters and Cloudflare. For other tools, exclude kinetra, _next/static and __KINETRA__. |
| Let a cache or CDN ignore query strings | Kinetra loads each new page as data from the same address plus ?_kinetra=1. If the cache treats both as one, visitors get raw data or the wrong page. | Keep query strings in the cache key (the default in most cache plugins and Cloudflare). |
| Cache pages for logged-in users | Logged-in users see other people’s carts and admin bars. | Cache only logged-out visitors (the default in most cache plugins). |
| Leave “Discourage search engines” ticked after launch | Google won’t list the site. | Untick it in Settings → Reading on launch day. |
| Click Remove demo content before your pages are finished | It removes every page, project, post and product the demo created, even ones you have edited since. | Create your own pages first, or keep the edited demo pages and delete the rest by hand. |
| Change the portfolio URL slug on a live site | Every project address changes, and old links from Google and social media break. | Choose the slug before launch. If you must change it, add redirects (for example with the Redirection plugin). |
| Delete the Elementor style kits named “Kinetra — …” | Elementor widgets lose their colours and fonts. | Leave them. Kinetra keeps them in sync with the Customizer. |
| Expect an edited Elementor header or footer to keep following the Customizer | Once you edit Kinetra’s header or footer template in Elementor, it is yours and Kinetra stops updating it. | To start again from your Kinetra settings, click Copy them again from Kinetra settings in Kinetra → Dashboard. That replaces your edits. |
| Use one licence on more domains than your plan allows, or on a copy of the site | Activation is refused on the extra domain. A copied or moved site shows “Bound to another domain” and loses demo import and updates. | Deactivate the old site in Kinetra → Licence (or remove it on Your licence) before moving, or upgrade your plan. |
| Update without a backup | If something goes wrong, there is nothing to go back to. | Back up first, every time. |
| Upload huge photos straight from a camera | Uploads are slow, and the original file can be 10–20 MB. | Resize images to about 2400 px wide before uploading. WordPress makes smaller copies for phones. |
Things that are normal
- Pages with a form plugin load with a full page reload instead of the animated transition. Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms and others need a normal page load to work. Kinetra’s own contact form doesn’t.
- Cart, checkout and account pages load normally, so every payment gateway works. Classic shop templates do the same for shop and product pages.
- Animations are calmer on some devices. Visitors who set “reduce motion” on their phone or computer get fades instead of movement.
- The Customizer preview reloads after each change, rather than updating instantly.
- The first visit after an update can be a little slower while Kinetra copies its new files to
wp-content/uploads/kinetra/.
Speed
- Use a cache plugin (LiteSpeed Cache on LiteSpeed hosting, otherwise WP Super Cache or Cache Enabler).
- Deactivate plugins you don’t use, especially page builders and add-on packs. Each one adds files to every page.
- Set Font loading to system fonts in Customize → Typography for the fastest first paint.
- Make sure
wp-content/uploadsis writable, so Kinetra’s files are served as static, long-cached files. - Use PHP 8.2 or newer. Ask your host to turn on compression (gzip or Brotli) and HTTP/2 if they aren’t already.
Getting help
Check Troubleshooting first. If that doesn’t help, contact support with your WordPress, PHP and Kinetra versions (shown in Kinetra → Dashboard → System status), the address of the page with the problem, and what you expected to happen.