How to Choose the Ideal WordPress Theme for Your Website?

Just think of a hungry caveman visiting a food buffet. Yes, we can guess the overwhelming response against such a mouth-watering splatter for a hungry belly.

A similar experience in a little different context can be found when a WordPress beginner for the first time starts finding a suitable theme for his website.

Every other theme looks more gorgeous than before and in the process, he gets overwhelmed. On top of that, there are both paid and free themes to choose from.

How a beginner can step aside this overwhelming response and can actually choose a theme which is more useful and appropriate for his purpose?

Well, here we explain the key considerations for choosing the right theme for your new WordPress website.

Go For a Simple and Easy Theme

Since most website visitors have less patience to pay attention for hours on a website, they detest complexity and design that unnecessarily consume a lot of their professional time. This is why simplicity enjoys so much popularity in website design.

A simple theme easily maintains a consistent look and feel across all device screens and maintains optimum usability. Most important of all, it takes less time for a user to find the content and relevant feature he needs. A simple design consumes less effort and time of users.

Simplicity is not just about a stripped-off design with bare minimum elements. In the context of a website, it should also offer conventional design elements to push business conversion.

Make sure the theme offers easy to understand menu design and CTA buttons and accommodates relevant widgets for optimum usability.

Must-Have Advanced Website Features

Some website features are common and almost every other theme comes equipped with them. But there are also advanced features that put a website ahead of others in terms of usability and user experience.

If you have certain features in your mind for your WordPress website, make sure you choose a theme loaded with those features. Of course, for some features, you have to look for appropriate plugins.

To find themes quickly with the right features, you can use the WordPress Feature Filter. You can further customize your search by limiting your search within free or paid themes.

It is important to make sure you have the desired website design in your eyes before you try to find an appropriate theme. It is advisable to go for themes with just the most relevant themes as less is always more effective when it comes to WordPress design.

Choosing Multilingual or Translation-Ready Themes

The world is increasingly getting closer irrespective of the linguistic differences thanks to the ready to use translation features and multilingual capacity of digital platforms. It is increasingly getting common for websites to target multilingual audiences all over the globe.

Creating a WordPress website targeted toward a global audience requires your WordPress theme to support multilingual presentation or translation. This is why it is important to choose a translation-ready and multilingual theme for your WordPress website.

Page Builder Support

Building a WordPress website using drag and drop page builder is super easy but not all WordPress themes come equipped with pre-installed page builders. In that case, you need to use a separate page builder plugin.

If you go for premium WordPress themes, there are several high-quality themes with page builders pre-installed. But there are also cons of using such themes.

Often these page builder themes come with a lot of unwanted code that needs to be cleaned for smooth performance. A WordPress development company offering you support can always take care of this.

Out of The Box Theme Support

Most free WordPress themes do not have any support for development and maintenance. Though, there are few free themes with good developer support for users. Since, in case of any performance issue or difficulties, you need the support of developers, go for a theme with great support options.

Besides the out of the box support options, you should always go for themes with very detailed documentation to guide you on each and every aspect of development and issue handling. Most premium themes offer good documentation and out of the box support option for the users.

Go for Theme With the Most Readable Typeface

WordPress is widely used by blogging and content-rich websites that frequently publish content.

Naturally, the readability of the content is a key consideration for choosing the right website design.

The font family used by the theme will impact the look and feel of your website and readability.

On the other hand, you should also choose themes that maintain conventions and consistency in terms of typeface choices.

Make sure the theme uses simple, sophisticated, and highly readable fonts like Open Sans, Sand Sherif, Josefin Slab, Vollkorn, Arvo, etc.

Instead of using a separate plugin for font, using the same font family is always a good option.

Don’t Forget to Test the Theme

You can’t just choose a theme without really being sure of its underlying performance attributes and features.

This requires testing the theme by using a plugin. There is a Theme Check plugin to help you evaluate a theme easily for your purpose.

Before going alive with all your website content and the theme, make sure you make a final review of the website look and feel.

Consider every aspect of the look, feel, and usability, the loading speed, and website performance against your expectations.

In case there are gross differences against your expectations, you can try another theme.

Use an SEO Friendly Theme

Not all themes are equally SEO friendly and it depends upon the HTML code generated by the website.

Even a great looking theme simply because of generating poor HTML code can negatively affect the search engine rank of a website.

Obviously for a beginner without a coding background, it is difficult to make an analysis of the source code of a WordPress theme.

This is why people choose premium themes that declare that their WordPress themes are optimized for search engines.

If you still want to check whether your free WordPress theme is generating good HTML code, you can just check for the same by using the W3C Markup Validation tool.

Apart from checking HTML code, ignore other warnings made by this tool.

Consider High Ratings and Positive Reviews

Finally, you should always give value to what other WordPress users say about the themes and what are their experiences in using a particular theme.

Make sure you have a closer look at the ratings and reviews of a WordPress theme.

When you open the integrated theme marketplace of WordPress, you can easily see the ratings of every theme along with several customer reviews. In other third-party marketplaces like Elegant Themes, you can also check the theme reviews and ratings.

You can also read a lot of blogs featuring WordPress themes for diverse website niches and categories.

A few bad reviews just don’t make a theme bad unless most of the reviews are negative about that theme.

Lastly, you can always search Google for themes of your choice and carry out research across various web sources. Putting a question explaining your specific theme requirements and design expectations among the WordPress community members is also a great option.

Conclusion

When there are so many considerations up there for choosing a theme, how can you take it lightly?

No, you cannot.

Choosing a premium theme is always a safe option unless you are really an expert to customize everything for your website purpose.

Originally published at https://techblogcorner.com on October 6, 2020.