Choosing The Right WordPress Theme

What To Look For When Choosing A WordPress Theme

Having a lot of choices is not always a good thing. When faced with lots of options, you can be overwhelmed by the decisions that you have to face. This can lead to poor choices and lots of time-wasting!

Knowing a few identifying areas that you need the theme to perform will help you filter out many of the themes that will be wrong for your needs.

It is the same filter process that you use all the time. For example, suppose you were to go out and look at buying a car. In that case, you rule out the cars that are unsuitable for your needs, ‘it must have 5 doors’ ‘it has to be under a 2-litre engine’ etc., once you have gone through the filter process, the choice is a lot more palatable.

This post will go through some of the most important factors for you to consider when getting a new WordPress theme.

Free Theme or Premium Theme?

There are thousands of them, either! A few years ago, the price of the theme was a good indicator of the quality that could be expected. Free themes were usually poorly coded and used for data capture. However, developers in the WordPress community have recently created thousands of great free themes to choose from.

Take a look at the pros and cons underneath.

Premium Theme Pros

• More updates

The most compelling reason to choose a premium theme is that such themes are typically updated more often. Given the rapid evolution of the WordPress content management system (CMS), having a theme that is regularly updated to patch new security issues is critical.

• Less recognisable design

Because free WordPress themes are so popular, it’s not uncommon for tens of thousands of websites to use the same free one. Premium themes are less common, meaning your design is more likely to be unique.

• Better documentation

Most premium themes include a detailed PDF explaining how to get the most out of them. Such documentation is less common with free themes.

• Ongoing support

Premium theme developers certainly offer the best support, usually through a public forum, live chat and an email ticketing system. Free themes usually have a public forum for support.

• No attribution links

Many free themes require a link to appear in the footer crediting the author. While this is becoming less common in free themes, you can be sure that no links are required in premium themes.

Premium Theme Cons

• The price

You’ll have to invest anywhere between £40 to £200 in a premium theme.

• More configuration

Most premium themes have their custom administration panel, with various customisation settings, which can take a while to learn and set up.

• Unwanted features

Premium themes include many bells and whistles, such as multiple slider plugins, a portfolio manager and extra skins. While these make a theme very versatile, many unwanted features will bloat the theme.

Generally, the most important aspect of a theme, whether free or paid, is the quality and care that’s gone into making it. The quality of the code will influence everything we discuss in this article, from security to page speed.

The easiest way to gauge quality is to read what customers are saying. For example, if a theme has a public support forum, read what issues people are having and how responsive the developers are in resolving them.

Is The Lightweight Theme Or Feature-Heavy?

There is great importance in SEO terms in having a fast-responding website. A website with a quick loading speed has been proven to increase page ranking, conversion rates, online sales and revenue. You should always avoid sluggish themes.

There are ways of checking if a theme is sluggish before using the theme. For example, if you go to the Pingdom website speed test and check the URL of the theme demo, see how many HTTP requests are made and how long the page takes to load.

It would be best if you stayed away from a theme with hundreds of HTTP requests that take over 3 seconds to load.

Here are a few things that lead to a sluggish website.

• Too feature-heavy

Be aware of themes containing ten sliders and 20 pre-installed plugins with lots of Javascript animation. It sounds like you are getting a good deal. Still, a website that has to call on 50 different Javascript files will fail to run smoothly.

• Overuse of large file formats

The keyword here is “overuse,” which is a bit subjective. Try to clarify themes that use many full-width images, background videos, etc. Less is more.

• Poor coding

Poor coding significantly impacts website performance, from wildly scaled images to inline CSS injection. In addition, poor code usually means a theme hasn’t been updated in a long time, so always check a theme’s update history.

Design And User Experience Link

The purpose of a theme is to make your website look great and show off your brand in the best design possible. While design can be quite subjective to personal taste, you will boost your chances of finding a well-designed theme by following a few steps.

First, search on websites where the best designers sell their themes. ThemeForest is my favourite. Still, plenty of other good ones are out there, including StudioPress and Elegant Themes.

Secondly, spend some time looking around the demo. Does the website feel easy to use? Is there enough white space? Is there too much clutter? Does it excite you? This is where your gut feeling plays an important role.

Finally, choose a theme that is cross-browser compatible and has been built with accessibility in mind.

Mobile Responsiveness

While mobile traffic varies between industries, most reports agree that, on average, about 30% of all website visits now come from mobile and tablet devices.

Regardless of the exact ratios, there’s no excuse to use anything but a responsive theme.

Thankfully, virtually all reputable themes are mobile-friendly, so the lack of responsiveness in a theme is a red flag.

Most theme vendors allow you to filter out themes that are not responsive. Another good option is to look through a curated list of responsive themes.

One of the best ways to determine whether a responsive theme is good is to run the demo through Google’s new mobile-friendliness tool.

SEO Link

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ when enabled with one of the many good SEO plugins.

However, many themes render all on-site SEO mistakes, such as omitting header and alt tags, full-blown duplicated content and dynamic URL errors.

When choosing a theme, look for “SEO optimized” or “SEO ready” in the theme description, but don’t trust it blindly. Many developers include this to check a box and sell their theme.

Knowing that a designer has at least considered SEO when developing their theme offers some assurance.

A good practice is installing an extension for the Chrome browser, such as MozBar or SEO Site Tools, to run quick SEO checks on a theme’s demo.

Explaining what to look for is beyond the scope of this article, but that has been covered in depth by Joost de Valk.

 

Ease Of Customisation Link

A customisation dashboard has become standard in a lot of themes. This saves you the hassle of making direct changes to style sheets.

In addition, plugins such as Visual Page Editor make it easy to build complex page structures without touching code. While some of these editors are somewhat limiting, overall, they’re very beneficial to get a website looking great with little effort.

Suppose a developer has a demo of their administration panel. In that case, I’d recommend playing around to make sure you can customize everything you need.

Security

A lot affects the security of a website, including hosting, plugins and password strength. This should be a matter of time; consider it when selecting your theme.

When buying a home, one of the best ways to gauge security is to see what residents say about it. The same is with a theme. Take a look at the comments sections and filter for security. See what people who have used the theme have to say. If there are no comments, or not many, then I wouldn’t be using that theme.

Evaluate themes on community websites like ThemeForest, where all customer reviews are displayed by default. This level of transparency reveals the truth about themes you wouldn’t get directly from a developer’s website.

While buying a theme directly from its developer’s website is fine, only after evaluating it on a community website with transparent reviews.

If a theme has a security loophole, then customers have probably picked up on it and flagged it in their reviews for future customers. At the same time, the developer might have fixed such issues.

The ratings from customers should give you an idea of a theme’s overall quality.

Conclusion

While ticking off all of these boxes might sound ambitious, the truth is that they’re interrelated, and they all come back to a single point: Themes should be built with quality in mind.

One of the best things you can do when choosing a theme is to learn about the person or company who made it. Suppose they have a reputation to live up to. In that case, their themes will undoubtedly be of higher quality than developers who don’t.

Of course, no theme is perfect, and you’ll almost always have to make some compromises. That being said, with the recommendations in this post, you are hopefully better informed to avoid the really bad themes and to choose one that is fast, well coded and SEO-friendly and includes all the features you need.