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Choosing a WordPress Theme
When choosing a theme for your WordPress website, you have many options. Over 5,300 free themes are in the WordPress directory, and countless premium themes from various developers are available. When you start your search, you may be overwhelmed by the endless number of free or premium themes available. So, what should you consider before you select one that will make or break your new site?
Below, you will find steps you can take to ensure that you choose the best theme for your WordPress website:
1. Simple is Better
Many WordPress themes offer various color, layout, and customization options; some even have animated elements. While it may seem like all these options help enhance your site, you certainly don’t need them.
Please search for a theme with a design that helps your business clearly and effectively convey its message. Ideally, you want your site to look fantastic and easily navigate for your visitors.
Choose a theme that is not too complicated. Web design aims to help users find information quickly and easily.
2. Your Site Must be Responsive
In today’s day and age, your website must work well on all devices.
People use their smartphones and tablets to browse the web, and if your site looks crappy and doesn’t function properly when viewed on either of them, you’ve got a problem on your hands. A large percentage of website traffic is from mobile devices, up to 50% or more in some cases.
Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and look great on all devices, including desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Google penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly and boosts its mobile-friendly algorithm a few times. Make sure your website has the best chance to appear in Google search results by making it fully responsive.
3. Compatibility with Essential Plugins
One of the major advantages of using WordPress is the number of unique plugins you can use to add all kinds of functionality to your website. From SEO to speed, security, and more, there is a plug-in for anything you need on your website. There are assured must-have plugins that you should install with any website. These include Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, Wordfence Security, and Back Pup. You want to ensure your theme is compatible with all of the widely-used plugins. In many cases, popular themes should be compatible with all the plugins you’d need, but ask the theme developers if you’re unsure.
4. Checking for Browser Compatibility
Your site visitors will use different browsers, so your website must look and function correctly on all of them, including:
- Google Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- Internet Explorer
The mainstream WordPress theme developers thoroughly test their themes using various browser compatibility tools. They will likely mention that their theme is compatible with all browsers in the theme details, but feel free to check for yourself.
5. eCommerce Ready
Are you looking to sell digital or physical on your website? If so, ensure your chosen theme is compatible with WooCommerce, the leading eCommerce plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites.
While most themes should work with WooCommerce, some will inevitably be more suited for your online shop.
You want to ensure some theme demos to see how the shop, product, and product category pages look using whichever theme you choose.
6. Multilingual / Translation-ready
If you wish to have a WordPress site in multiple languages or a language other than English, choose a translation-ready theme.
In addition to selecting a theme with multilingual functionality built-in, some plugins can assist you in translating certain site elements. Loco Translate lets you quickly and easily translate several strings, plugins, and more.
7. SEO-friendly
The WordPress theme you decide on significantly affects your website’s SEO-friendliness. Your site can appear excellent but contain poorly coded HTML, hurting its performance in search engines.
If you’re a beginner, analyzing your theme’s source code will be tough to determine if it’s well-written. Finest WordPress developers often state that their themes are coded well and optimized for SEO.
The W3C Mark-up Validation tool can check your theme’s HTML5 online. It will likely show you some warnings about your site, even if they’re irrelevant, but it’s a good tool for general checks.
8. User-Friendly Design
Your new theme must be nicely designed and simple to navigate. Whatever you do, make sure that everything on your site is clear and can be easily found by your visitors. Look at the theme‘s demo and try to analyze its design more closely.
You can ask yourself the following questions to help decide if it’s a good choice:
- Is the site easy to navigate?
- Is the content readable and easy to digest?
- Does the design fit your site or blog type?
Again, straightforwardness is your friend, so don’t complicate things by making your site fancier than it needs to be.
9. Is it updated frequently?
WordPress core is efficient regularly because of security upgrades, bug fixes, and new features. Choosing a theme that is also actively maintained and updated regularly is important. If a theme was last customized two or more years ago, you’re better off avoiding it.
10. Check ratings and reviews
When deciding on a theme, look at its ratings and reviews. For free WordPress themes, ratings are underneath the preview and download buttons. Click on the corresponding star amounts to see the theme’s ratings, and read through some reviews.
Some people are never satisfied, no matter how excellent a theme is. Keep this in mind when reading bitter reviews written by miserable people who likely couldn’t figure out how to do something on their site.
Conclusion:
Choosing a WordPress theme is straightforward, but one should be handled carefully. Using a crappy theme can negatively affect your site and its design, performance, and user-friendliness.
Author Bio: Anshul Sharma is the CEO of Fluper, a leading mobile app Development Company. His visionary management style has yielded productive results for the company. He believes in contributing his strong understanding with a learned concentration on entrepreneurship and business.