Are you wondering how to choose a WordPress theme for your site? If so, then you’ve come to the right place!
Your theme impacts not just the design but also the performance and user experience, both of which are key to ranking well in search engines.
The official WordPress theme repository provides over 13,000 free themes that you can use for your site’s design. With so many themes available, knowing what to look for to match your goals and ensure SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential.
Therefore, to help you choose the best WordPress theme for your website, we’ve prepared a perfect guide on selecting WordPress themes and what to look for.
Let’s get started.
What is a WordPress Theme?
A theme is a combination of templates and stylesheets that determine the appearance and design of your website. It defines how your website looks to your visitors.
In WordPress, themes are the templates that allow you to customize and style your WordPress site to fit your business, organization, or vision. They primarily define how your content appears on your site.
A theme normally consists of different styling elements, such as,
- Colors
- Font sizing
- Layouts
- Element sizing and positions, and more.
You can easily customize WordPress themes and control how your content looks.
WordPress also provides themes with features optimized for different niches. You can select the theme that fits your requirements. You can get free themes from the WordPress themes directory for almost every niche.
Why Choose the Right WordPress Theme?
You need to be clear that your WordPress theme isn’t just about how your website looks; it’s the backbone of how it functions and feels to your visitors.
Let’s say you visit a site. If it’s messy, unorganized, or hard to navigate, would you stay? Probably not!
The same goes for everyone. Therefore, a good theme ensures that your site looks professional and is easy for visitors to explore.
Here are some key reasons why choosing the right WordPress theme is so important:
- A clean, modern design can grab attention and keep people browsing.
- A well-designed theme makes your website easy to navigate.
- Lightweight and optimized theme helps your site load faster.
- Search engines love websites that are well-structured and mobile-responsive.
- You’ll want to customize your theme, but a poorly coded theme makes it difficult or requires hiring a developer to switch or update.
How to Choose a WordPress Theme? (10 Tips)
There are things you must consider and look for in themes before getting the theme. Let’s take a look:
1. Works Well with Your Purpose
Before choosing a WordPress theme, you must figure out what you need. You’ve got to know your niche and the purpose of your site. Once you clearly understand what you need, you can start searching for themes.
WordPress provides themes for almost every type of website. For more information, you can check out our articles on different types of websites.
Different types of websites display content and structure the site differently. For example, a blog website often displays and organizes content from the most recent to the oldest. Conversely, a photography website should allow you to showcase your photos elegantly.
Fortunately, WordPress has themes specifically built for almost every type of site. You just need to try to check which themes provide the best features.
2. Compatibility with Page Builders
Page builders are very important in creating your website. They allow you to design and position different elements on your site easily. Most page builders use easy drag-and-drop tools to create and edit your website.
Having a page builder allows you to design different site pages, such as a landing page, contact page, forum, and more. In fact, page builders offer greater freedom to non-coding users to create stunning landing pages.
So, it’s better to choose a WordPress theme that is compatible with popular and feature-rich page builders. Some popular page builders are Elementor, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer.
Some themes also come with built-in page builders, which allow quick and easy page building and designing without installations.
3. Minimalist Design and Responsiveness
Having a responsive and mobile-friendly website is very important for providing your site visitors with a pleasing browsing experience. Mobile-friendly and responsive sites mean that they can run on different mobile platforms with no issues.
This means that your website should have a variable width that readers can easily adjust according to screen size and should not restrict or hide your content. It should also be able to add different navigation menus and options for convenient touch navigation.
Hence, you must choose a WordPress theme with a responsive and mobile-friendly design. You should be able to make an elegant site that can be run on mobile devices of every size with no hassle. This unlocks you to more potential audiences, as more than 50% of traffic on the web is from mobile devices.
4. SEO Friendliness
Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site and content allows your site to rank higher in the search engine results. This will allow you to gather more visitors and quickly grow your site.
SEO is optimizing your site to make it more efficient, readable, and fast. Search engines love these optimizations; they’ll help your site appear at the top of the search results list. With a higher rank, your site will likely get new potential customers.
Therefore, you need to choose a WordPress theme that is SEO-friendly. Moreover, the theme should also allow you to use external SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and more.
5. Support Plugins You Need
WordPress allows you to extend your site’s functions and features using different add-ons and extensions called ‘plugins’. They’re a piece of a program that brings more features and optimization to your site.
The official WordPress plugins repository provides you with more than 59,000 free plugins to add to your website. Utilizing these plugins properly can help you optimize your site for better speed, performance, and efficiency. You can also easily take care of the backup and security using different plugins.
However, all this is possible only if your chosen theme is compatible with respective plugins. For a functional and featureful website, having a plugin is very crucial. Therefore, if a theme doesn’t work well with major plugins, then that brings a huge disadvantage to your site.
Therefore, before you buy a theme, you should select one that runs smoothly and is compatible with all the important plugins.
You can check the detailed guide about what a WordPress plugin is to learn more about it.
6. Compatibility with Browsers
People often use and prefer different types of browsers to access the web. As of record:
- Google Chrome is the most used, with more than 68.38% of users on the web. (Source)
- Safari is second with 17.09%. (Source)
- Followed by 4.92% of Edge users. (Source)
Your websites should be easily accessible by all these different types of browsers, as you can’t control the users. You should get a theme that allows all these browsers to access your site without hassle.
If your theme isn’t compatible with browsers, your site won’t be able to load properly for visitors. A theme incompatible with some browsers results in a huge traffic loss. Therefore, it’s very important to go with a theme that is compatible with almost all major browsers.
The WordPress themes library mostly has cross-browser compatible themes, which are well-tested before deployment, so you often don’t have to worry about them. However, checking if the theme of your choice is compatible with different browsers makes it safer.
7. Easy Customization
Although WordPress allows you to select a theme for your site from thousands of free and premium themes, you might want to customize it further to make it look unique from other sites using the same theme. Making changes to fit your idea or business perfectly should be easy for a theme.
Having a theme that lets you easily customize it and add new functions and features is crucial. The themes from the WordPress library often provide a good range of customization options. However, the customization range still lags behind that of some popular premium themes.
You’ve to look into the customization options that the theme provides to differentiate your site from others easily.
8. Frequent Update and Support
You can always come across different problems while setting up your theme.
You might need help setting up the theme or overcoming any issues. It can affect your efficiency and productivity. To minimize the effect and get help during those situations, it’s important to look for a theme with better support.
Also, you need to choose a theme that provides frequent updates. Online security threats are rising daily. Updates often include more security measures against those vulnerabilities and a better security system.
For example, in the video below, we’ll show you quickly how to look for a theme’s recent updates in the WordPress.org theme directory.
However, some of the free themes may lag behind here. At the expense of being free, these themes mostly don’t provide reliable support and frequent updates. They often have a forum of users where you can add your problems, but it doesn’t guarantee a solution or fast answer.
However, most premium themes provide fast and reliable support with frequent updates. They provide dedicated support and good documentation to help you overcome any obstacles.
Updates and support help eliminate different issues with the theme, ensuring a smooth, long-term working theme. So, it’s important to choose a WordPress theme that has good support and gets frequent updates.
9. Cost and Expenses
The most crucial thing when choosing a theme is the cost. You must be very mindful of the theme’s cost and your budget. Going with a theme above your budget is not wise and can cause more problems.
The WordPress theme directory provides you with a good selection of free themes. Some free WordPress themes like Astra, OceanWP, Neve, Zakra, etc are really good products. You can make any type of website with these free themes.
They provide you with free support and updates, too. But all the free themes may not be good. So, be careful while choosing free WordPress themes.
Let’s quickly look at what free and paid themes can offer.
| Free Theme | Premium Theme |
|---|---|
| It can be a good option if your needs are minimal. | Comes with advanced features and better design capabilities. |
| Hidden costs may arise for additional features. | Offers superior customization and higher quality from the start. |
| Can be a good option if your needs are minimal. | Ideal for those needing premium features and professional designs. |
| It may lack essential features, requiring upgrades. | No upfront cost, but it may lead to unforeseen expenses later. |
10. Better Ratings and Testimonials
Even if you have a list of some of the best themes that satisfy all your requirements, you can’t guarantee they work well. You won’t be able to tell if it’s good or bad without trying each and everyone out. This is where checking the ratings and reviews comes in.
Ratings and reviews can be a great deciding factor when choosing your theme. You can check if people like the theme by reading the reviews. People post their experiences and feedback on how the theme has worked for them and whether it’s worth getting.
Themes also have different testimonials from users on their sites that can help you decide whether the theme is worth getting.
Let’s take a look at some of the popular themes in the WordPress directory.
You can easily find the ratings and reviews for all the themes for the WordPress library. Also, you can check reviews by some renowned bloggers to find out how a theme indeed is.
Some of the Best WordPress Themes
Now that we’ve explained 10 points for choosing the best theme, you may be able to pick one easily. If you still need some suggestions, then here are our top recommended themes:
1. Astra – Most Popular Free WordPress Theme
Astra is one of the best WordPress themes, with 1 million active installations, which is 10% of all WordPress websites. This theme comes with 300+ prebuilt websites that are ready to import. Plus, you can adjust this theme’s colors, fonts, and layouts to match your style without any coding.
2. Avada – Best Selling WordPress Theme at ThemeForest
With 1,000,204 sales, Avada is one of the popular premium themes for WordPress websites. It comes with 120+ design layouts and elements and offers 108 pre-built websites that you can import with just a single click.
3. Divi – Popular Multipurpose Premium Theme.
Another popular theme is Divi, a theme and page builder combo that offers simple, no-code editing, advanced design systems, and powerful AI tools. With this theme, you can choose from thousands of pre-made designs and hundreds of unique building blocks, making site-building easy.
4. Storefront – Best eCommerce/Online Store Theme
Next, we recommend Storefront, built by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This theme features a bespoke integration with WooCommerce itself, plus many of the most popular customer-facing WooCommerce extensions. It also has several layout and color options to personalize your shop.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can I change my WordPress theme later?
Yes, you can switch themes at any time. However, some customization and content layout may need adjustments after the change.
2. What’s the difference between a theme and a template in WordPress?
A theme controls your website’s overall design and layout, while a template is a pre-designed page layout that can be used within a theme.
3. What should I do if my theme is not compatible with my plugins?
You may need to update the theme, choose different plugins, or switch to a theme that offers better plugin compatibility.
4. How often should I update my WordPress theme?
It’s important to update your theme whenever an update is available to ensure security, compatibility, and access to new features.
Conclusion
And that’s all, folks!
We’ve concluded our article on how to choose a WordPress theme for your website.
We hope that you understand how to pick a theme now. But if you still have any questions about this article, please comment below. We’ll be happy to help you.
If you have any suggestions, please let us know; if you like this article, please share it with your friends and colleagues.
Also, check out our other articles, such as what a WordPress plugin is and how to choose the best one.
For more guides, explore our blog. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated with our content.
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