Choosing The Perfect WordPress Theme – 8 Things You Should Consider

Most newcomers feel confused when it comes to choosing a theme for their WordPress website.

There are tons of free and paid themes options. Each looks better than the other. How do you choose the most suitable theme for a WordPress website?

In this article, we will give the best 8 things you should consider, so you can pick the best theme for your WordPress website.

Why You Should Be Cautious When Choosing a Theme?

WordPress platform is used to develop all types of sites. That’s why each theme gives to a different business.

Your theme should complement the content of your WordPress website. For example, if you are beginning a blog on diplomacies or social issues, then you would want a theme that enhances readability.

Many WordPress themes come with tons of customization settings and options. If not coded correctly, these options can make it tough for you to change themes or use other WordPress plugins. You will be stuck into that theme or will have to pay a developer to assist you to switch.

In contrast, some WordPress themes look great but make your website particularly slow. People don’t like slow websites, so search engines prefer to rank more active websites higher.

Your WordPress theme is the presentation of your website and plays an important role in how users see it.

You have apparently heard the saying, ‘All that glitters is not gold.

Having found that, let’s take a quick look at the steps that you choose the most suitable theme for your WordPress website.

1. Strive for Simplicity

There are many WordPress themes with lots of colors, complex layouts, and flashy animations. Sometimes you need those settings, but in many situations, you don’t really need all of that.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
~ Leonardo da Vinci

Look for a theme that has a simple & elegant design layout that helps you establish your goal. It needs to look genuine but without settling on usability and simplicity.

Make sure that the theme’s display style is not complicated. The purpose of web design is to help theme users find the data. it helps site owners to achieve their goals at the same time.

If a theme looks great but does not help you generate new subscribers, then it is not a really good theme for you.

Take a look at these simple WordPress themes for some inspiration.

2. Responsive is Not Optional Anymore

Responsive themes arrange their layout across different screen sizes and small devices.

An important number of web traffic is generated from mobile and other handheld methods. Depending on your website’s problems, this number could go also higher than 50% of your traffic.

Google gives mobile-friendly websites on top in their mobile search results. Whatever the topic and demographics of your website, all websites should be fully responsive and mobile-friendly.

Most WordPress themes are already fully responsive by default. But there are still marketers who are selling fixed-width layouts that are not mobile-friendly at all. Make sure that the WordPress theme you are taking for your website is completely mobile-friendly.

Testing a Theme for Mobile

The easy way to test a theme is responsive or not is by resizing your browser screen. when you resize your browser screen width, you will notice that the theme you are using will adjust itself to the screen width.

3. Browser Compatibility

The theme may look great on the browser you are using, but something may have happened on other browsers.

The most sophisticated browser compatibility testing tools are used by WordPress theme developers to test themes rigorously for browser compatibility.

The theme may be clearly mentioned on their website. But if not, then you can always run some basic tests to check the theme on different browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.

Don‘t forget to test your website on different browsers on mobile as well.

4. Supported Plugins

WordPress plugins provide the strength of WordPress. These plugins enable you to do almost anything with your WordPress site.

Although there are many WordPress plugins available, some plugins are essential to every website. Like Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, and W3 Total Cache.

In case you are unsure, ask the theme developer whether it is compatible with all popular plugins.

5. Translation + Multilingual Ready

There are thousands of WordPress sites that are not in English. You may need to create a website that is not in English. There is a possibility that you intend to create a multilingual WordPress site in the near future.

The theme that you choose should be translation-ready, and multilingual WordPress plugins should be supported.

6. Page Builders

A page builder is a WordPress plugin that allows you to edit a page’s layout using a drag and drop interface.

There are many premium WordPress themes that include page builders. Some of the developers of these themes use only their page builders.

When using a page builder to create landing pages, a lot of unwanted code can be generated. In the event that you switch themes in the future, those pages will require some cleaning.

You should select themes that come with one of the most popular page builder plugins available. You can also buy these page-builders separately so that you can use them with other themes.

7. How to Get Support if You Need It

The downside of using a free WordPress theme is that there is no guarantee of support. The developers behind some free themes provide excellent support, but some free themes do not offer it.

If anything goes wrong with your WordPress theme, then you’ll have to figure it out yourself. It is also possible to pay a third-party developer to solve the smallest problems.

If you choose a WordPress theme, make sure that it has good documentation and support options. The majority of premium WordPress themes include detailed documentation and 1 year of email-based support.

8. SEO Friendliness

WordPress themes play a crucial role in your site’s SEO friendliness. A theme that looks good may generate poor coded HTML, resulting in poor search engine performance.

Beginners may find it difficult to analyze the source code of a theme on their own. Therefore, many premium WordPress theme developers will tell you that their pages are optimized for search engines.

Also, you can verify that the page generates properly formatted HTML5 by checking it with the W3C Markup Validation service. There are however many warnings generated by the W3C tool, but they do not need to worry about.

I hope you have found this article helpful in selecting a theme for your WordPress site.