adpapa Editor
15 May 2020
In this article, I want to talk to you about seven different things you should be considering when picking your WordPress theme. So every single website needs to have a theme and we’ll talk about a little bit what page builders coming and how that makes things a little bit muddier than it used to be.
Every website in WordPress must have a theme and picking the right one can seem like an overwhelming task. Here are seven things to think about to help you make the right decision.
The first thing you want to keep in mind when picking a theme is the company who is behind the theme. This is something that most people don’t think about. You go in search of a theme, you look for one that looks pretty and you go with it. However, the company track record is a huge consideration because not all companies are going to be around tomorrow.
You don’t want your website to be deprecated and your website to be abandoned if that were to happen so picking the right company up front is huge. When you search inside the WordPress repository for the themes, you can see the ratings reviews number of active installs all that good stuff.
You want to make sure that the company is supporting it, growing it and listening to customer feedback as they go. Number two is the business model that is supporting these companies who develop these themes. So WordPress is the open source WordPress community they have their own revenue streams. Is it directly tied to the success of the 2019 theme? Not so much.
You want to make sure that not only is the come is the theme good-looking however also is the company behind it in a good state are they making money to where you can trust your online business with their software.
My third tip is performance. You know we don’t want a slow website, nobody wants that. So what you can do is if you’re looking at a couple of different websites or a couple different themes and you want to test them out. You can use a tool like Pingdom that will run some speed tests and the main thing you want to be looking at, is not so much the fully loaded time because there’s a lot of variability that can come in that you know it’s depends on what type of a connection you get the first time you run it however what you want to look at is the page size and the total requests as well.
Some of these performance scores can be kind of indicative of what’s going on with your website. Speed is a big part of article SEO and blog SEO generally. When it comes to page size Astra is actually a little bit smaller than the default 2019 theme and as far as other performance metrics it looks just as good so don’t assume that the free default WordPress theme is going to be your best performing theme is really not true number four is workflow and this is a personal thing whatever workflow works best for you what works best for me as being able to have some good global options being able to set the colour of my buttons and never have to worry about the colour of my buttons again and things like that.
Different themes have their own customiser styles, you know. A lot of different options, it can be a little overwhelming and you can find yourself hunting and picking for the right selection for your own changes.
So picking the workflow that works right for you even some premium themes that are not free themes they don’t have as many options as some of the ones I mentioned here. You want to take a look at your workflow and see if your theme is meeting that need.
Always consider customisation options, so when you’re in the customiser does it allow you to change the header, the font size, the headings, etc? Some of those different things there it seems a little silly right now however if you find a theme that doesn’t allow you to customise that level of granularity in a logical way.
If not, you can find yourself really frustrated and not having a good time when it comes to changing all the typography of your entire website, so customisation options you want to look for things like being able to set how wide your your container layout is. Do you like a very narrow blog, or do you like a very wide blog?
I think there is better all the different options you want to make sure your theme has number-6 integrations and this is kind of a cherry on top of things so when you want to build out a real business you don’t want to just have a blog you might want to also sell things using WooCommerce and so you want to make sure your theme has good cut good customiser settings with the WooCommerce area where you can change the layouts of your products that your pages and all those different aspects.
You may also want to bring in a learning management system like a learn dash into your website and this is very theme dependent on whether the layouts the styles of a learn dash or a lift or LMS will be well supported with your website the list goes on and on obviously of all the different functionality you can add to a website the main thing you want to look for though is that the web the theme you’re using has broad support of the most popular tools that are out there in WordPress.
Lastly number seven this is the personal one right like it needs to work for you and what I would recommend you do is set up a dummy website.
Just use a couple as a test bed and test it out see what it looks like play around with it and see if it works for you you know some of the best themes out there I’m not as big of a fan of just because my own personal preference and what I look for in a website however if you keep in mind all the things we just talked about the real deciding factors what website theme are is it going to be good for you.
What’s going to make you happy to work in because you’ll be working in it quite a lot in the future alright guys so that was seven different things you should be considering when you’re figuring out your own WordPress theme.
