While starting a new website, choosing the right theme for your website is very crucial. It plays an important role in deciding what your visitors experience while visiting your website. How your website will look is decided by the theme. Since your blog is going to be the medium of communication between you and your visitors. If your website will not look good you will definitely lose your potential visitors.
In this article I will explain you the guidelines you should follow while choosing a simple WordPress theme for your website.
Free themes vs. Premium themes
The first thing to consider is whether you should go for free or paid theme? There are thousands of free and paid themes available. You can easily download the free one and customize it according to your need.
We often tend to choose free themes instead of paid ones to save money. It seems a good idea for you at the start but you will slowly realize the disadvantages of it. There are many problems with free themes –
- They are not updated regularly.
- You will not get support for most of them.
- They are not SEO optimized.
- They may have encrypted footers and are poorly coded.
Encrypted footers generally contains paid links which is not good for SEO.
- You will get limited and fewer features than any paid one.
- You will not get theme panel option in most of them.
Note: If you are new to WordPress, you must be unaware of the term theme panel. Theme panel is a custom admin page and it allows you to change your layout of the theme from the given available options in one click without the need to touch the code.
So only advantage that free theme will give you that it is totally free.
On the other hand for premium themes, you will get full support, time to time update, more features and even security of your blog. You will many advantages over free themes –
- You will get full support, since they are sold by companies and they don’t want unsatisfied customers.
- You will get many options for customizing the design according to your requirement.
- They are easy to handle and have many features that can be implemented by anyone.
- They are updated regularly and are always compatible with latest WordPress version.
- They are SEO optimized.
- Footers are not encrypted
Things that you should keep in mind while selecting any theme for your website
- Your theme should fit according to your purpose of your blog –
Before selecting your theme first think about these questions about your blog
What is the purpose of your blog and what the content will be like?
How do you want your blog to look?
Do you want your blog to look simple and elegant or complex and loud?
There are some of the questions that matter while looking for the design of your theme. Your theme will decide how your blog will look. So it is very important to choose a theme that suits according to your business requirement and contents.
Go for a theme that has clean layout, good color combination, awesome fonts and that pleases you in every way and appeals your customers.
- Responsive Design –
Responsive design simply means your website will look perfect on any device whether it be a laptop, a mobile phone or a tab. There are many themes that are not responsive in nature. You can’t compromise with this feature of the theme.
You can read our article on “Why you should choose Responsive web design from the beginning”.
A responsive design plays an important role in SEO of your blog also. Read this article “Top 9 SEO Benefits of Responsive Web Design”. You will get to know how it plays an important role in SEO.
- Features and customization –
In WordPress features are handled by plugins. But there are many themes which have inbuilt functionalities, so choose a theme according to your required functionalities. Then you don’t have to bother about installing a lot of plugins for every required feature.
For example – If you want to build an e-Commerce website then choose a theme that is made particularly for it. It will give you the advantage of having functionalities related to it.
Highly customizable theme is selected so that you will have many options for your layout. You can easily customize your site yourself. Since the same theme is going to be used by many customers so it is very important that your theme is highly customizable so that you can change your look of the website to differentiate from others.
- Security and Performance –
Don’t compromise with the speed and security of your blog. This is often neglected by many. Choose a theme which loads faster and is secure.
Now How will you know whether the theme is secure or not? Buy your theme only from the trusted theme shops and look for the customer ratings and reviews before deciding it.
- Browsers Compatibility –
Since your visitors will be using different browsers so it is very important that your theme looks perfect on every browser.
Test your theme for how it looks on every browser before selecting it.
- Support of the plugins –
Make sure that your theme supports all the popular plugins since plugins are the second most important thing after theme. You can’t simply do anything without it. Every functionalities of your website requires a plugin. ( Unless you can code your own functionalities ).
- Multilingual property –
Choose a theme which support translation into multiple languages. You users may want to read your blog in other language than English, so it plays a very important if your target audience are from other countries.
- SEO friendly –
Your theme should be optimised for SEO otherwise this could affect your site’s performance on search engines.
- Page Builder –
Page Builders are WordPress plugins that is used to make the layout of the page by just simply drag and drop mechanism. It is very easy to create pages using page builders.
Many themes come with pre-installed page builders. So choose a theme which already uses the popular page builder plugins. Some popular page builders among them are Visual Builder, Divi Page Builder, Beaver Builder, Elementor etc.
You can also purchase these builders individually and use it on your website.
This is all about the steps that you should follow before choosing a simple wordpress theme for your blog.
If you still have any doubt or query do comment below and let us know. We will be happy to help you. Do Subscribe our Newsletter here and keep yourself updated with Weboftwo for more such interesting articles 🙂 .
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