15 Fundamental Tips to Choose WordPress Theme

Tips to Choose WordPress Theme: Beginners will get overwhelmed with thousands of theme options to choose from. As WordPress counts more than thousands of active themes for every niche.

And theme selection is the primary task when you heading towards web design. You want your website to stand out unique in the digital crowd. So, to maintain the legacy of your brand, theme selection should be a vital step in web design.

Then, it comes to how to choose a perfect theme out of so many options on WordPress.

To solve this million-dollar question, we have come up with the Fundamental Tips for choosing a WordPress Theme.

Fundamental Tips to Choose WordPress Theme

Simple and Minimal Design

Your theme design should be clean and simple which easily catches visitors to the website. Most importantly, end users, these days fall for minimal and clean designs.

Complex and messy designs drab the actual website content. Your content should be the highlight of the website, not the additional mess.

While most websites piss off users’ minds by adding so many colors, animations, layouts, and more. You may think it looks good, but let’s face the reality. Messy and complex designs don’t look professional. Simplicity helps in maintaining the visual presentation of your content and brand. You must ensure to choose a minimal and clean theme design while going for a selection.

Functionality

The next factor that makes users stick to your website is to maintain simple functionality. Make sure that your chosen theme should have easy functionality.

Nowadays, users want the features should be easy to locate and mostly placed on the homepage. If in case, the user finds it difficult to locate the elements, he will immediately press the back button and leave your site.

This should not happen as it will instantly down the user experience of your website. To keep it simple and easy to navigate, you must find a theme that has clear navigation features to use. This is the smart move to have more visitors stick to your website.

Easy to Customize

The latest trends go with how unique the website appears. This implies having a fully customized theme.

Or it might happen that the actual theme design does not match your level of satisfaction. You need some customization on your website to make it unique and fully yours. Thankfully, WordPress themes are fully customizable even for beginners. That means you don’t need to use any coding skills or the cost of hiring a developer. There is demo content available with every theme where you can find the features to customize well. You must check on the customization availability to ensure advanced features.

Responsive Design

The selection of the theme must reach the level of having a responsive design. Your website must look the same on every screen size. Whether it may be mobiles, laptops, and tablet PCs. And most importantly, organic traffic comes from mobile devices as of the latest trends. Users mostly prefer mobile devices to access any website rather than other devices.

It is vital to keep this factor in mind during the selection process. In case, you have chosen a non-responsive theme, it will not fit on other screens but the desktop. You’ll need to create another website that fits mobile screens. That may be time-consuming and confusing for the users as well. As they will find different interfaces for every device screen. To avoid this, you must rely on choosing a responsive theme design.

Version Updates

A great website depends on which theme you have chosen. That said, the whole foundation of the website hikes up when it loads perfectly. Keeping the design aside, you must ensure that your website loads faster with great performance.

Well, this is only possible when you have chosen the latest updated theme. The version of the theme decides the loading speed, features, SEO, and performance.

Therefore, to avoid affecting the overall performance of the website, you must go for an updated theme. Also, the theme must support the latest version updates ensuring upcoming features and trends.

Quality Code Base

Quality codes also define how the theme would repay in the future. The higher code base leads to superb performance and loading speed. While the poorly coded themes will not have a longer life. They eventually get hacked or other issues may occur while operating the theme. You must perfectly ensure that the theme you choose has a good quality code base.

Compatibility with other plugins

An ideal theme must be willing to hold additional plugins that maintain the functionality. Therefore, it is highly recommended to choose a theme that comes compatible with other plugins as well.

Your theme would not be a complete package to have everything for a perfect website. You need additional support features and that comes with installing plugins. Plugins can be used for adding multiple functionalities such as E-commerce, SEO, security, contact forms, and much more. And the themes willing to hold such plugins are said to be a good choice. While those with no plugin compatibility will eventually create issues when added plugins.

Browser Compatibility

Because of the higher usability of common browsers like Chrome and Firefox, designers mostly avoid using them. While this factor should be avoided by not allowing cross-browser compatibility.

Not everybody uses the same browser as Chrome, there may be other browsers usability as well. So your website should be willing to access on any browser the user asks for. And therefore, it is vital to consider cross-browser compatibility while choosing a theme.

Woocommerce Ready

There are most users designing websites for their online stores. And they look to design a website that perfectly enhances their online store.

Luckily, WordPress has made it easier so far by adding the Woocommerce plugin support. So if you are trying to build an online store, then you must go for a theme that supports Woocommerce. It is the leading platform for trading online products using great features for self-hosted websites. You just need to check whether the theme chosen has functional product pages and the capacity to hold an online store.

SEO-Friendly

Your theme matters a lot when you aim to have good search engine ranks for your website. SEO bots analyze the whole website when it comes to ranking on top searches. From appearance to speed and performance, almost everything is counted by the bots. So, it is advised to choose a theme that is fully optimized for search engines. While this is again fishy, as most themes promise of having a fully optimized interface but fail. This may not happen, so you must check whether the theme is optimized by running validation tests.

Check Pre-built Templates Support

If you want to save time from building the necessary pages, then you must pick a theme with template support. Themes with templates offer pre-built pages like the homepage, About Us, contact, and more. You simply need to customize them according to your needs.

Therefore, while selecting a theme you must check whether the theme supports a variety of templates or not. If it does, then you must go with the variety that supports more pre-built pages.

Helpful Customer Support

A theme’s customer support feature comes when you have queries regarding the design of the theme. Or it is common to have queries even if you are thorough in designing websites.

A helpful support team will serve you with the best possible answers and ways to solve your issues. While you will find such amazing support service depends on the theme you have chosen. Premium themes always offer great support with yearly or monthly subscription plans. While that for the free themes may vary in offering fast support services. So, you must go for a theme that has an active support team even if you choose a free theme.

Ready for Translation

Your wish to have a fully-translatable theme is a direct way to acquire a global audience. While most designers go for this feature to roll their websites worldwide.

Thankfully, WordPress supports this feature in its themes. You just need to look for more languages offered in a theme.

A multi-lingual theme will be able to adapt more languages to the website. This will help global visitors to visit your website and translate it into any language.

Ratings and Reviews

Now, this is the most vital part you must observe in a theme while choosing. Your selection process will come to a conclusion when you have analyzed the reviews and ratings. This gives an idea of whether to go for the theme by the previous users.

You can easily watch out for the reviews on the theme page itself in case of a free theme. While for the premium ones, it will be on the theme sales page.

Check Pricing Plans

WordPress themes are categorized into Free and Premium ones. Free themes don’t need any payable amount to get installed. While for the premium ones, you need to pay according to the features.

This can be a user’s perception of whether to go for a free theme or a premium theme. If you think your website must acquire unique content and if you can pay, then a premium theme is an option.

While it is highly recommended for a startup to go for a free theme when you just initiating the journey. As you will not regret having a free theme even if your website doesn’t acquire good returns.

Conclusion

A theme is a vital supplement whenever you decide on a website design. However, it becomes crucial to choose from thousands of theme options in WordPress. Therefore, we have made it easier for you to find out the best. You just need to checklist the above factors while going for theme selection.