Do you know How to Choose a WordPress Theme? In WordPress site, you have to choose a good theme that must possess a number of essential features. The first step, after WordPress installation while you are going to build and design a new site is to choose a good WordPress theme that matches your demand and suits for your site’s niche. If you build a website for e-commerce or business, then your theme should be designed for that purpose. On the other hand, if you launch a photography site, then its layout and design must match for that, nonetheless it will not look appealing, responsive and work smooth. That’s why for each site you need a theme that has special design, layout, customization features and stand suitable in all aspects of the site’s niche. A good theme provides these features.
There are thousands of WordPress themes, free and premium. The WordPress theme directory alone contains about 3945 popular themes and 8013 latest themes. Moreover, there are more than 200 theme companies who sell featured and premium themes. In this vast ocean of themes you may be confounded if you don’t know how to choose a WordPress theme for your website. Because as a beginner, you do not know what features should be included in the theme you are going to select and purchase in order to customize your site. It’s a matter of deep consideration. No matter to be worried. So, go through this guide and you will be able to know:
- How to choose a WordPress theme?
- What essential features should be included in a good WordPress theme?
- Is the theme really good ?
Page Contents
Responsive Website Design
Responsive Website Design is an important feature that should be offered by a theme that is good and suitable for a theme. Nowadays, people access sites through a number of devices such as Desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile etc. Statistics shows that mobile is the most used device that users prefer to others when access to internet and sites. So, the website should be responsive for all devices. In another word, the website should be designed in such a way that when users access or view the site, it should be easily adjusted, uploaded and compatible in all platforms—-be it mobile, desktop or tap. Thus regardless of a particular device, the web layout, contents, pages and posts should load and appear to all user’s device properly. Here, User Interface(UI) plays a vital role. If your site loads to computer and doesn’t properly appear via mobile’s layout, then assume that the site is not mobile responsive or mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendliness must be given priority. Because most of the people use it for portability and user-friendliness. There are many Responsive Themes for WordPress. Is your theme responsive? Is your site mobile-friendly? You can use free tools to check site’s responsiveness. Also, you can check whether your site is responsive or not with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.
Another important factor of Responsive Web Design is that you need not to maintain multiple version of your website, as your site’s layout is loadable and compatible to all devices. A single version is enough, as it is responsive to all device.
Social Media Sharing
Social Media Sharing is a great feature. It not only increases site’s integrity but also its user-friendliness. A site combined with Social Media Sharing lets the visitors to share the site’s contents to their audience network. It enhances site’s visibility and popularity.
Nowadays, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are great social media. Besides, there are Google+, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo and many more apps and sites where you can share your products, services, offers and other business related details as you like. The theme that you like to choose for building your site’s layout must include social sharing feature. If your theme does not provide this feature, then you can install social sharing plugin to avail this feature so as to increase site’s visibility to more and more social network. It is needless to say that now most of the themes provide social media integration feature that is a must for site.
SEO-Friendliness
SEO-Friendliness is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine like Google considers SEO as a ranking factor. A properly coded theme is lightweight, takes less time in loading and boosts SEO. In another term, a well-coded theme becomes responsive for all devices, loads within a few seconds and results in good performance. Whether your theme supports HTML5 or not must be taken into consideration. Use W3C Markup Validation to check your theme’s compatibility with HTML5. The result may yield many warnings but don’t worry. Ignore the warnings. Most of the theme developers endorse its features at their site and you can see whether it supports HTML 5 or not.
Another important feature of a good WordPress theme is Search Engine Readability. It implies that your theme should provide search engine crawlers important contents, pages and posts so that these may be indexed properly as well as quickly. The theme also should set keywords and rich snippets. Settings keywords properly help search engine crawling your site and display rich snippets on browsers’s tab as search result. From this aspect it becomes very conducive for SEO-Friendliness by maintaining loadtime, indexing contents for crawlers, providing rich snippets and helps lead organic traffics, conversion rate, permalink, slug, schema markup etc.
On the other hand, a theme coded improperly cannot load fastly, yields low performance and loses some organic traffic.
Easily Customisable
The WordPress site you have created must be customisable. Because customisability allows your site to stand unique from the rest. Using customisability feature you can make your site’s look and appearance distinguished from others. After the successful WordPress installation you need to customize the site with your theme’s built-in features. Here customisation implies that your site’s logo, favicon/website icon, color scheme, header and footer should be adjusted properly to make the site attractive in look and feel. The live preview option of your customiser allows you to see whatever you customise.
Customisation can be done in two ways, namely, coding and non-coding. Customisation by coding is applicable only for advanced users and developers who are well-versed in HTML,CSS etc. They generally prepare separate file with the help of Adobe Photoshop and save in PSD format. The plus point of this is that it is not a part of the theme per se. Hence, the advanced users can customise anything like colour, layout, setting, typography etc.
On the other hand, by resorting to non-coding way of customisation, you can use the built-in features to customise various options of your site.
Support and Update Features
Support and Update feature is a must for WordPress theme. Before launching a website, as a beginner, you may face numerous tinniest problems that need to be solved to work with your site in the way you want. If you are not well-versed in coding, you can’t manage many thing as well. You may face a lot of hurdles if you cannot update and support from the theme developers or community forums. That’s why select such a theme that provides active support and regular update.Support may be via email, ticket or live chat. Furthermore, auto-update enables the site to be dynamic and compatible and don’t need to change anything or modify regularly.
A good and popular theme endorses good documentation and other features in its footer section. So, purchase and install such kind of themes as provide regular support and auto-update.
On the other hand, a theme having no update and support will not be popular and die down though it may provide other good features. Most of the premium themes facilitate active support.
Browser Compatibility
As a user you may use different browsers to access and view a website. There are many web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, UC etc. Others may use what they like. All the browsers play the same role yet differ in interactions and some peculiar features. Whether your site properly uploads and works with the browsers or not is a matter that you should take into account while you are going to choose a good theme though you may not know how to choose a WordPress theme. Is your site compatible with different browsers? Check and taste it. Visitors will not be able to access and see your site combined with the theme if it does not become compatible with their browser.
The theme developers describe their theme’s browser compatibility in their theme’s description. Also you can upload and view your site from every browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc.
Typography
A theme’s Typography is a good feature that allows you to change font-family, font-size, font-colour, font-weight and link color. A website’s appearance must appear attractive in look and feel. To achieve this uniqueness for your site you have use the font’s attributes properly for header, footer, contents, headings and title of post. Some premium theme like Schema from Mythemeshop provides an easy-to-use typography. You can increase or decrease font’s size or weight, change colour for fonts.
Font’s appearance, family, color and size should be different in each case like navigation menu bars, footer link and post or page’s title.
Custom CSS
Each theme developer creates his theme in his own way. It has many built-in features like navigation bar including space for uploading logo, footer to insert links on privacy policy, terms of use, copyright,home page template and other outstanding features. Sometimes, for better outlook and feel you may need to change something in your site. This particular change may be done by using short codes that need to be added to the built-in Custom CSS.
All the premium themes provide this coding section where you can add and save certain codes to change, modify, reduce, increase or perform the desired function. The free themes generally do not give this advanced feature but I know Twenty Nineteen is a free WordPress theme, however, it gives custom CSS. You can add certain lines of codes therein as per your need. On the other hand, if you don’t know coding, then you can ask help from your theme developers.
Plugin Compatibility
Plugin is a great tool for WordPress. It makes your site dynamic and adds to it more functionality. To add a particular feature in your site you need to install a plugin that performs that function. That said, plugin allows your site to work in a way that you want and the plugin itself built for. But the matter of fact is that your theme should be able to work with plugins. The main advantage of plugin compatibility with theme is that you can install the essential plugins into your site and make your site more featured.
On the other hand, in case of incompatibility you cannot install required plugins to carry out specific functions. If you install and activate, your site may crush, and even may result in WordPress errors. So, I think you should install such themes as support plugins compatibility.
Rating and Review
The theme you want to install into your site should have Rating and Review. It gives you the scope to see other’s user-experience on this theme. The users express their practical experience on this section. You too can share your opinion, both the positive and negative.
That said, Rating and Review is must have to take and give user’s real experience. So, most of the themes developers provide a section for Rating and Review.
Multilingual
There are many other sites that run on languages other than English. In such an environment the theme should ready to be translated to that language. If the theme is ready to be translated, you can create a site in your own vernacular and customise as per your needs.
You can run multilingual WordPress site and need not to maintain use different themes, a single theme will suffice.
Widget Bundle
Your theme should include widgets in the footer, sidebar, page or post of your site. Setting widgets will help you insert various forms, section for post or page etc. As for example, Newsletter signup, email subscriber, audio, video, arbitrary text, tag cloud, recent post, menu bar, list of pages, RSS, custom HTML, social sharing etc.
Page Builder
Page builder is a feature of a theme that is helpful to shape and design a web page . Some themes have built-in custom templates for pages. Also, you can install page builder plugins to design and shape pages if you like, though it is not necessary.
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