There are thousands of WordPress themes already on the WordPress platform. These websites are utilized in blogs, online businesses, video themes, magazines, and so forth. As there are plenty of WordPress themes, it only begs one important question, how to choose the best WordPress theme?
There are factors to consider when choosing the right WordPress theme, such as its features, your WordPress version, and more. Keeping these factors in mind, we have put together some important things to consider when choosing the best WordPress theme.
1. Understanding Your Business Needs And Budget
Understanding your business and budget’s core requirement is probably the first priority in finding a WordPress theme. Whether it’s a blog, magazine, or video theme, it depends on many factors.
Once you have determined the nature of your business, it’s now time to find the theme that better resonates with your business. For instance, magazine websites require an image-related theme; they should offer a lot of space for placing visual content.
Another important aspect to consider is the budget of the theme. When deciding on your website’s theme, you need to determine whether it’s viable or not to invest your money in buying a WordPress theme. Some people don’t recommend free themes as they don’t provide space for developers to be creative; it’s not entirely true.
There is a lot of free themes that give a lot of space for creative input for developers to customize and make their website unique. However, it may not have premium quality support that provides instant support and guidance to developers whenever they are stuck in coding or in the process of web development.
2. Determine The Code Quality And Standards
Never go with a WordPress theme that is of poor quality and standards of code. It can hugely damage the performance of your WordPress website. For instance, it could slow your website’s loading speed, overload your database, or even become vulnerable to cyberattacks. Therefore, you must choose a WordPress theme that is up-to-date with the latest coding standards and quality.
This may sound quite easy, it’s not. You won’t be able to go through every single line of code of every WordPress theme.
There are two ways to do this.
The first method is to go to reliable providers of WordPress themes. Research on WordPress providers that are operating for years with a plethora of themes under their disposal. Then, shortlist only those free themes which have the most downloads.
In this way, you’d be able to prevent yourself from getting into a theme with poor coding.
The second method depends on a Theme Check plugin, which helps you find errors and bugs on themes and, thus, finds the right theme with top-notch coding standards.
3. Ensure Whether Theme Offers Updates And Support
If you have bought a premium WordPress theme, you won’t have problems finding support and updates for your WordPress website. There are tons of forums, tutorials, online tickets, and so much more to support the developers. Moreover, you can send out emails to WordPress themes and get guidance and support.
On the other hand, there are a few hindrances to free themes. As developers won’t be able to make time to provide support on a product that is available for free. You can look through the WordPress forums to determine whether the developers are active and respond to queries quickly.
Moreover, a theme has to be regularly updated with new security patches and fixes of bugs. If a theme doesn’t update regularly, you better refrain from getting that theme in the first place.
