Trying to pick the perfect WordPress theme is a tedious task. It is fairly common to see new users struggling with WordPress themes, changing them countless number of times. One would spend time and effort in customizing and editing the theme as per their requirement, and eventually will move on to another theme. This is not only a tiring and exhausting effort but is also bad for your website, as it leads to unsatisfied user experience.
There is a reason why all successful WordPres blogs and websites spend hours on figuring out and customizing their blog theme. It’s because design and look matters to the visitors. When looking for a theme, one will have a ridiculous amount of free and premium themes to choose from. Rather than being perplexed, one must be sensible in picking up the right WordPress theme, by looking at certain crucial aspects and features that the theme offers. Here’s some of the main things you should take into consideration before purchasing a WordPress theme.
Customization
Easy customization is a significant aspect to take note of. If you’re not comfortable digging into the code of your theme, make sure that you choose a theme that offers plenty of customization options from the WordPress backend. Better yet – find a theme that requires as little modification as possible.
Nature Of Your Website
This is one of the most crucial aspects to take into consideration. The type of website you’re going to be building should determine the theme you pick. Let us say you have a blog based on sports, you cannot pick a theme suited for science blogs. Or say you have a fashion blog, you cannot pick a music theme. Properly understanding your target audience, and you’re website type will help filter out the themes and come up with those that best suit your needs.
Support
When selecting a theme, you might want to prefer a theme with active customer support. Post-purchase support is one of the most significant factor for any user. You want to select a theme where the author is dedicated towards providing support, and keeps the theme updated to ensure support for new WordPress versions.
Navigation
You can come across themes that provide you with tons of columns and rows, different layouts and tables and what not. But a visitor might easily get confused, or frustrated with the complicated navigation. You wish to lay out a simple and clear path for the user. Clear navigation will help prevent people from jumping off your page.
Search Engine Optimization
WordPress offers many different solutions when it comes to on-site search engine optimization. Many prefer SEO to be handled by WordPress plugins. Plugins such as Yoast offer various features, such as creating XML sitemaps, add custom RSS footer etc. However many themes these days offer built-in SEO – and many times this may interfere with an SEO plugin. Make sure you factor this in when choosing your theme.
Responsiveness & Mobile Friendliness
In the current day and age when people access the internet through all sorts of devices, you might wish to not pick a theme that is unresponsive. Select a theme that provides you with the feature of making your blog readable on any device, whether it may be a desktop, mobile device or a tablet. A ton of visitors will visit your blog through mobiles or tabs, and you cannot afford them to turn away because of incompatibility of your blog.
Pretty much all modern day themes come with this feature and that is significant since this is one aspect that you might wish to not compromise.
Built In Features
WordPress offers all sorts of different themes, both paid and free. Each comes with a varied arsenal of features such as customized error pages, built-in plugins, different comment styles, custom dashboards, options to manage advertising or various ways of promoting your website or blog through the social networking sites. If you know you want an appointment calendar on you’re website – look for a theme that already has this built in. In the long run it will make things easier for you.
Conclusion
Remember, it’s almost impossible to find a theme that satisfies all the above criteria. What you must do is set your priorities, realize which of the above features and aspects hold more significance for your website, and choose based on that. All the above aspects are correlated and will come in to play at one point or another in the life of your business. Your chosen Wordpress theme is a representation of what your business stands for, it defines you and your business and that makes it all the more important to pick the best theme you possibly can.