You have created an impressive business project and taken care of the quality of services that you will deliver to the prospective customers. You have come up with the plan of the further development. What’s next? You need to reach the wider community of people who are likely to be interested in the things you offer. Building a website is one of the most proven ways to attain the wider recognition.
Gone are the days when people referred to web design agencies in order to build sites from scratch. With the growing popularity of WordPress, the number of free and premium ready-made web designs continues to grow at the fast speed. There are thousands of WordPress templates that you can use for personal or business purposes. The functionality of the latter depends on the niches for which those are intended to be used.
Choosing the best WordPress theme for your web project requires a deeper analysis rather than just picking the most optimal solution with a catching visual style. In most cases, you need to take a look “under the hood”. What features does a particular theme offer? How well is it optimized for the flawless web browsing? What additional features does the download package contain? In order to help you select the best WordPress theme in the market, take a look at the following checklist.
Trusted Theme Provider
There are loads of companies selling WordPress themes and thousands to millions of freelancers and web design studios releasing new ready-made solutions on the regular basis. There is a growing trend of buying themes in the digital marketplaces. These have proven to be the reliable resources that choose the highest quality themes precisely and accept the most efficient ones only.
While selecting the most reputable and trusted provider of ready-made web designs, do not forget to read customer reviews concerning the quality of services being provided, as well as the reasons for/against using their products. The number of active installs and the overall rating of the themes providers in the marketplaces will help you make the right buying decision as well. Additionally, that’s a nice idea to look for the customer reviews on the web or active discussions on forums. All this taken together will help you find a reliable provider of the future basis for your site.
Updates
The web grows and changes. WordPress is well-known as one of the most reliable content management systems due to its regular updates. This stops hackers from attacking WordPress sites, thus making you rest assured that all data will be protected from the malware attacks of any kind.
Choosing a WordPress theme, make sure that the developers update it regularly. If the selected WordPress design missed a couple of the latest major WordPress updates, then you should look for better alternatives.
Responsiveness
The use of handheld devices grows at the tremendously fast speed. Mobile devices are used to access the web for information, to make purchases or just for fun. Whatever purpose your site visitors pursue, you need to make sure that the web page will look equally good on all screen sizes.
Moreover, Google is considering mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. So, if you want your site to become more noticeable in the search engines and reach the top of search result, build your site with the help of a responsive WordPress template.
Plugins Compatibility
It’s likely that you will want to add extra functionality to your WordPress site. If the theme is compatible with all the major WordPress extensions and must-have plugins, then you may use it safely. It will be a great bonus if the chosen template includes some premium tools or custom extensions inside the download pack. This will save you extra cash and money during the launch of your web project.
Mind that theme providers include such information in the descriptions of their digital items. So, do not forget to check a list of plugins that are installed in the theme already, as well as the plugins that the WordPress template is compatible with.
Ease of Customization
Building a website with a theme you will likely need to modify certain elements in the way that matches your needs. The ease of customization of the chosen ready-made design is important to both beginners and expert webmasters. Selecting a WordPress theme, see whether or not it contains extra modification features. It will be a great benefit if the chosen theme includes a visual page builder. With its help, modifying a ready-made layout becomes possible without the need to touch a single line of code. Bringing the necessary changes in the real-time, you can bring your site live in a few days.
Additionally, WordPress templates may include extra skins, additional layout options, sets of ready-made pages, UI kits, and other solutions that will provide for the quicker customization of the chosen digital item.
Speed
Speed plays the major role in user decision-making while browsing the web. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, then people will simply close the tab in the browser window and look for faster alternatives.
While choosing a WordPress theme for your site, check out its life demo first of all. If it takes too long to load all components on the page, then it’s likely that the theme is too heavy and sends too many script requests as a person reaches it.
If you want your site to be granted with the highest score in Google PageSpeed Insights, then consider the page weight, total script requests, and page load time of the selected theme. If your WordPress templates are lightweight and quick-to-load, then the future website will not lag in its performance.
SEO
In addition to the speedy performance of your WordPress theme, pay attention to its compatibility with SEO plugins. One of the major extensions that used on the majority of WordPress sites is SEO by Yoast. With its help, even beginner writers can optimize their content in the professional way. The tool suggests you with the fields to which you should pay more attention. Also, it gives you a set of tips that guide through all the major steps of the content optimization.
Social Media
Launching a website and running social media presence are the two indispensable factors that provide for the more effective brand promotion. In the perfect scenario, your WordPress template should be integrated with social sharing options. Also, it needs to be compatible with social media plugins and contain social media widgets on board. How can you benefit from this? If a user finds your data useful, then he can share a link to your post/page/offer with just a single click. If reveal the latest updates from your social media profiles on the page of your site, then you grow the chances that people will become more engaged with your brand. This will grow your community of loyal customers, which will bring you more profit as a result.
Price
There are free and premium WordPress themes available. Using a freebie may be just fine for a personal blog or a small web project. If you want to launch a professionally-look and luring site, then a paid web theme will be your optimal solution. The cost of premium WordPress themes varies from $50 to $100 or higher (the price tag depends on the functional filling of the theme and the themes provider).
Support & Documentation
And finally, before making the final buying decision, pay attention to all types of support that the template includes. As a rule, theme providers provide support via ticket systems or on forums. Some of them support themes via chats and emails. It’s indispensable for a WordPress theme to contain step-by-step documentation.
Over to You
This is our checklist of the top 10 points that you need to consider while choosing the best WordPress theme. Which of them do you find the most useful? What are your major criteria while selecting a ready-made design for your site? Please share your ideas with us via comments.
About the author
Taylor Mcallan is a big fan of all the things related to the latest innovations and web design tendencies. An avid traveler and coffee addict, she never misses a chance to learn something new and share the experience with the online world.
