WordPress is the number one website building platform with thousands of themes that respond to every niche. So, when the time comes to choose the theme of your site, it is certain that you will have a huge range of suggestions! Of course, this can make your choice even more difficult, as the infinite alternatives may confuse you and make you choose a theme with little value for your business needs!
With many years of experience in the web development industry, we have been called upon countless times to guide our clients in choosing the right WordPress theme for their business. In this article we will give you some much needed tips for choosing a WordPress theme, so you can get a site that will fully meet your needs!
1. Choose a light and fast theme
The theme you choose affects many parameters related to the success of your website, starting from the loading speed and ending with its performance in search engines, such as google!
If you are wondering how you can check the performance of a theme in terms of its speed, you can use some very useful online tools that evaluate many parameters that affect the speed of a site! The most popular tool to do all these necessary measurements is GTMetrix, which is free and you can use it both in free themes and in demo versions provided for paid themes! When checking the speed of a theme, you must always keep in mind the final form of your site, as well as its requirements!
E.g. a theme for an e-shop with many products must be very fast, as it will have to manage a large amount of information!
2. Choose an easily customizable WordPress theme
No matter how “ready-to-use as a WordPress theme is”, it’s almost impossible to cover every need of your business! This happens quite simply because every business is different and has its own needs and goals. Therefore, the theme you choose should give you extensive customization options, so you can make all the changes you might want quickly and easily!
Tip: Prefer themes that have popular builders pre-installed (eg Elementor, Bakery, etc.)
3. Check the responsive design of your theme
When we say that a theme is responsive, we mean that it responds to screens with different sizes, such as those of mobile phones or tablets. In recent years, the vast majority of WordPress themes are responsive! However, this does not mean that their responsive design perfectly serves the navigation experience of mobile or tablet users.
Nowadays over 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices! Therefore, a bad responsive design is going to negatively affect a large percentage of potential customers who visit your site! For this reason it is advisable to carefully check how all pages of a theme play on all screens!
4. Good technical support of the theme & regular updates
The site is a dynamic presentation of your business, therefore the need for modifications to its content and functions can be very frequent! Even for the good operation of a site, it is necessary to make frequent updates which aim to cover security gaps but also to offer new functions! So before making the final theme choice we need to consider how good technical support is provided through it and how recently it has been updated! Usually purchased themes offer packages that include updates and technical support for a period of 6-12 months, however you will find more specific information in the support policy of each theme!
5. Pay attention to Reviews
Reviews are a very important advantage in the hands of online consumers! Of course, this also applies to the case you want to buy a WordPress theme. Therefore, before purchasing a theme, it is necessary to check the reviews of other users, as well as how many downloads of the specific theme have been made!
Free VS Purchased WordPress Themes
A free WordPress theme will not cost money at least at the beginning and is an easy solution for creating an amateur site. However, choosing a free WordPress theme can be extremely damaging for a business website. The lack of regular updates and support and the security problems are sure to create serious functionality problems that will make the need to change the theme necessary.
In order to save money and time needed to transfer your site to another theme, it is better to choose from the beginning a purchased WordPress theme that will work properly, will be updated regularly and will be as close as possible to your needs!
In this article we have presented some of the parameters that we take into account in order to come up with the right WordPress theme for each of our clients!
You don’t have to make this difficult but crucial choice for your site yourself!
Contact us so we can choose together the best WordPress theme to meet your needs!