Choose Right Theme for your WordPress Website

There are a very large number of attractive WordPress themes available today. You may find it confusing and overwhelming to pick a theme for your WordPress Website. A lot of time may go in perusing through many themes. Here are some tips to help you choose the best or right theme.

Free vs Paid

There are both free and paid themes available. Depending on your budget or requirement you can opt for free or paid. Free themes may not have quality coding. They may not be updated regularly or be backed up with support. Free themes also run the risk of being abandoned by their creators. On the other hand, paid themes have robust support as well as detailed documentation. Their quality is usually better and generally have more features and functionality. Also, they are regularly updated and have superior security.

Know your requirements

Make a list of features you desire in the WordPress themes. Using that as a criterion search for suitable themes. This way you can eliminate themes that do not meet your requirements easily and effectively.

Questions to ask yourself are

1. Which is the type of website I have in mind?

2. What is the goal of the website?

3. Should there be a blog on the website?

4. Can the theme be modified in the future?

Keep it simple

Too many features may confuse or distract the audience. Don’t go for fancy stuff unless it reflects the purpose of your website. The reason behind using a simple as well as the clean theme is that it let folks spot the important stuff namely your content. As per statistics, simple themes make visitors stay on your site relatively longer and give more business in terms of orders placed.

Is it responsive

You cannot afford to have a non-responsive theme. Many folks use their smartphones for browsing websites. The theme should work well and look good no matter which device is used. For your information, search engines give higher rankings to responsive websites.

Suits your purpose

The theme should not look unrelated to your WordPress website. For instance, a theme depicting a flower looks unsuitable for a website offering legal services. The theme must match your content. For instance, an image-rich theme is suited to firms specializing in photography.

SEO

The theme must be SEO friendly. Certain themes have badly coded HTML. Hence, they make the site rank poorly in search engine results.

Speed

Visitors are likely to leave a site that is perceived as slow with pages taking a long time to load. Make sure the theme doesn’t slow your website. Also, it should load quickly and in an acceptable amount of time. A useful tip is to choose lightweight WordPress themes instead of feature-heavy themes as the former load much faster.

Browser compatibility

Visitors may use different browsers to view your website. So, you need to check whether the theme works well on the major browsers.

Superior user experience

The WordPress theme should have an attractive design and be easily navigable. The former should draw in relevant users and offer ease and simplicity of use.