With WordPress is creating a name for itself in the domain of website development, it has become a matter of utmost importance to take care of the overall look and feel of a website. This is where Themes come into the picture. Themes are a collection of files that modify the way a website appears and focuses towards making the site more interactive, user-friendly and easy to use. To ensure continued traffic and user satisfaction, a website needs to have a theme which maintains a synchronization between business aspects as well as human interaction. WordPress provides options to choose from many available themes, a lot of which are free.
To decide which theme is suited for a particular website, one needs to take care of quite a few things to ensure best results. Let’s have a look at the major decision-making factors and delve deeply into them. These would surely help in deciding the best theme for a WordPress website.
1. Keep it Simple
The most important thing to look forward to is the fact that a website appears simple and clear. One should never go with a theme which is cluttered and comes with a lot of features. This would not only make the website look uninteresting, but also affect the performance of the site in the long run. The theme should have attributes like images, background color, layouts and other related stuff in just the right proportion. Themes with a lot of features, which seems attractive, more often than not have security flaws in their code which might lead to considerable issues and hamper the seamless functioning of the website. A simple theme would easily let users locate whatever it is they are looking for on the website and ultimately prove to be user-centric which is what is required out of a theme in the first place.
2. Responsive
The chosen theme must be a responsive one, which means it should be easily accessible over multiple ranges of devices irrespective of their screen size. Having a responsive website is no longer optional anymore. In the majority of cases, more than 50% of the website traffic comes from devices like smartphones and tablets. If a website is not responsive then the users are sure to shift to a similar website which has this feature, as responsiveness and mobile friendliness of a website greatly enhances the user experience that the sites provide on devices with smaller screen size. Most of the WordPress themes available nowadays are responsive, however it is best to verify the same from our end as well before selecting one. A WordPress developer can get this information from the description of the theme itself and can also cross verify the same by testing out the responsiveness of the website after applying the theme.
3. Load Speed
The load time of a website is yet another important factor to be considered while choosing a theme for one’s website. If a site load slowly, users are sure to find a faster alternative if available. Themes which contain many features or heavy images and layout should not be used unless and until absolutely necessary for these features play a major role in slowing down the load speed of the website. The speed at which a theme loads can also be checked by looking at the demo page of the particular theme. Some themes also come with an animated preloader which informs the user about the process of loading of the website. Search engines also consider load time of a website as a parameter to determine the rank of the site in its search results. Hence, load speed is definitely one of the major aspects to look out for while deciding on a theme.
4. Customizations and Plugins
Any WordPress site greatly relies on the integration of its plugins for proper functionality. Be it a blogging site or an e-Commerce store, plugins make up almost all the necessary and important features which help in the functioning of the day-to-day activities on a website. It is a major misconception that all themes fully support all WordPress plugins; this is not the case. Some plugins might not function as expected with a particular theme and some might not even function at all. So, in case a free theme is being chosen, a WordPress developer should test the plugins before finalizing on the theme and for a paid one, the development team of the theme should be contacted and all doubts should be clarified.
Themes should also support customizations of layout, color, and images to some extent, so that necessary optimizations can be made as per the business requirements of the website. Since customization options allow one to change the look and feel after the WordPress website development without even touching the underlying code, this factor should also be kept in mind while deciding a theme for the WordPress website.
5. Cost (Free vs Paid Themes)
One needs to decide beforehand whether the website is to have a free theme or a paid one. Let’s see the major difference between the two so that one can easily decide which one to opt for according to what is being desired. This would facilitate the selection of the best theme for WordPress website.
a) Free Themes
Most of the themes which are available without any cost are those that come without any support in context to issues or bug related to the same. A majority of these themes are not properly maintained and some also come with vulnerabilities in its codes which opens up the website to security threats over the internet. Despite this, a free theme can be chosen based on its reviews and rating. One can easily try these themes and figure out if all the plugins work properly and decide if this is what suits the requirement.
b) Paid Themes
These themes come with a support which is quite useful in case of any issues which a WordPress developer faces while using the theme. These ensure that the code does not have any security issues. Since it is not possible to try out the features of the theme, it is recommended to discuss all the plugin and other integration-related concerns before selecting the theme. The look and feel of the theme can be evaluated using the demo which these themes offer.
Undoubtedly, the theme of a website has a major role to play in providing a rich interface to users and also helps seamless location of information or content over the website. In order to decide which theme to use, the aforementioned aspects need to be considered and based on the business requirement a proper one is to be selected. Themes can be accessed from places like Theme Forest, Studio Press, Elegant Themes and many other websites which offer both free and paid WordPress themes.
It is advised to perform optimum research and testing before finalizing a theme for a WordPress website. This would enable the selection of a theme which not only enhances the visibility and functionality of the site for the users over the internet, but also provides the flexibility to make changes through customization options available with the theme.
Endnote:
These tips will surely be helpful to any WordPress developer who needs to look at the set of parameters before finalizing the best theme for his WordPress website.
