WordPress Themes
June 2, 2020
How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your Business?
Author:
Seçil Durgun
Selecting the perfect WordPress theme is crucial for your website’s success. Countless WordPress themes are expertly crafted to captivate your audience. The aim is to offer a stunning visual experience for your visitors, regardless of your niche, ensuring they stay engrossed for extended periods. With a vast selection of over 10,000 themes on WordPress, it’s essential to understand the critical factors in finding your ideal match. Let’s explore the vital aspects to remember when searching for that perfect WordPress theme.
The theme you choose should offer extensive customization options to ensure your business is respected and stands out from others. A theme that looks like thousands of other websites can harm your reputation. Therefore, be sure to check the customization options before purchasing a theme.
Your theme doesn’t have to be specifically built for a niche topic. While niche themes may come with many stock photos related to the topic, what matters when purchasing a theme is the quality of the code, its features, and how well the developers support it after purchase. While industry-specific themes may seem appealing at first glance, avoid them if they don’t have a proven track record.
Getting a fully custom theme built can cost thousands of dollars. Choosing a ready-made theme allows you to save that money. WordPress premium themes are sold for between $20 and $100. You may not want to deal with the potential downsides of using a free theme, as they often lack maintenance and update options.
When choosing a theme, it’s important to note that popularity doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of uniqueness. Popular themes are often highly customizable, allowing you to create a distinctive look for your site. Additionally, popular themes are typically supported by experienced developers, receive high ratings, offer excellent support, and receive regular updates, all of which can contribute to a positive user experience for your site.
Remember that even if a theme is popular, it’s necessary to check its rating on platforms like ThemeForest.net. A theme with a rating below 4.7 could lead to issues. While a five-star rating doesn’t guarantee a bug-free experience, opting for a low-rated theme increases the likelihood of encountering problems. Keeping all themes up to date is super important. Developers usually release updates more often for the most popular themes. When evaluating themes, consider ratings and reviews, but remember that some reviews may only be somewhat reliable.
Many WordPress themes come with various colors, complex layouts, and animations. However, choosing your theme should prioritize usability and simplicity over showing off. Web design aims to ensure users can quickly find the information or product they’re looking for.
Responsive themes adjust the layout of your site for different screen sizes and devices. Today, most websites receive more than half of their traffic from mobile devices. Additionally, Google ranks mobile-friendly sites higher in search results. Therefore, the theme you purchase must be responsive. To check how a theme responds to mobile, you can adjust the screen width in your browser or run the theme’s demo through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Internet users use different browsers. The theme you plan to buy may look great in your browser but may not display the same in others. WordPress theme developers test their themes for browser compatibility using advanced tools, and they usually provide information about which browsers and versions their theme supports. Be sure to review this information before purchasing. If there isn’t enough information, test the theme’s demo link on different browsers and devices.
The primary strength of WordPress lies in its plugins, which allow you to add advanced features to your website. Popular plugins like Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, and W3 Total Cache are widely used. It’s vital that your theme works seamlessly with popular plugins, so check if this information is provided before purchasing. Ask the developer if you’re unsure whether the theme supports a particular plugin.
Many themes come with built-in English language support. However, themes that include translation files and work entirely with translation plugins allow you to simultaneously create a site in any language—or even multiple languages. Review these options before purchasing your theme if translation and multilingual features are essential.
Page builders allow you to create page layouts using a drag-and-drop interface easily. Many premium WordPress themes come with pre-installed page builders that would otherwise cost extra. Some of these page builders are exclusive to the theme developer. Themes that rely on these proprietary builders can cause issues if you want to switch themes. Therefore, choosing themes that support widely-used and regularly updated page builders is best.
Your WordPress theme plays a critical role in making your site SEO-friendly. Even if your theme looks great, if it’s poorly coded, it can hurt your site’s search engine rankings due to reduced performance. Inspecting a theme’s source code may be difficult for those unfamiliar with code, but premium WordPress theme developers typically share information about SEO optimization on the theme’s webpage. If you have any questions, contact the developers before purchasing the theme. You can also use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check if the theme is coded correctly in HTML5, though be aware that you may receive warnings that are not necessarily important.
While aesthetics often take center stage, most themes are not specifically designed to grow your business. Once you’ve chosen your theme, you must add great content and various tools to boost potential sales. Special effects and widgets with your theme may not be helpful as they can slow down your site’s performance. When your site slows down, you’ll lose both visitors and conversions. There are often much better alternatives to the built-in features that come with a theme, with photo galleries being a prime example.