The most common confusion with Template Kits starts before import: a kit is not a theme. It doesn’t go under Appearance > Themes, and WordPress will refuse the ZIP if you try. A kit is a set of Elementor layouts, and it goes in through Elementor.
What’s inside
A typical Template Kit brings ready-made pages (home, about, services, contact), standalone blocks for building new pages, and sometimes a header and footer. It also comes with a global settings file, with colors and typography, which is what makes the kit feel cohesive.
What it does not bring is the site’s structure: menu, post type, widget area. That still comes from the theme you’re running underneath.
What you need beforehand
- Elementor installed and active.
- A base theme. Kits are built to run on top of a neutral theme: Hello Elementor is the default, and most authors test on it.
- The plugins the kit uses, when there are any. The kit’s manifest file usually lists them, and without them the corresponding blocks come in empty.
How to import
The path depends on how the kit was packaged, and both show up in the catalog:
Kit in Elementor’s format (a single Template Kit ZIP): go to Elementor > Tools > Import/Export and upload the ZIP. Elementor reads the manifest, warns you which plugins are missing, and imports everything at once.
Kit as standalone JSON files (a folder with several .json files): go to Templates > Saved Templates > Import Templates and upload the files. Each JSON becomes a template, and you apply them page by page.
After importing
The pages come in as drafts or published, depending on the kit, but no menu points to them, and that’s normal. Build the menu under Appearance > Menus and set the homepage under Settings > Reading.
If the kit includes a header and footer, they only work with Elementor Pro (Theme Builder) or a plugin that fills that role. Without it, the files import but have no effect. That’s not a flaw in the kit.
If the import fails
A kit is heavy content, and the failure is usually the same one as with theme demos: a server limit. The numbers are in server requirements, and what affects this the most is max_input_vars, because it makes the import end up incomplete without throwing any error.
