Here’s the Lowdown on Finding the Best WordPress Theme for Your Blog

A large number of people are using WordPress to create websites easily without getting involved in complex coding practices.

To create an appealing, professional, and user-friendly website, you need to select the best WordPress theme for your blog.

A Website created with a high-quality theme is likely to attract a great number of people and give more business opportunities to its owners.

Luckily, there are lots of free and premium WordPress themes to choose from. And you

Most individuals, especially those who are in relatively inexperienced in website creation and optimization, often make silly mistakes in the selection of WordPress themes.

Thus, they suffer a lot in the long run.

Before selecting a theme for website creation, you should evaluate it from various angles. This helps you to make smart selections, create a stunning website, and grow your web-based business rapidly.

Take a look at the following twelve important points you should keep in mind when choosing a WordPress theme:

1. What’s the Best WordPress Theme for Your Blog: Free or Premium?

There are numerous free and premium WordPress themes, which makes it difficult for Bloggers to choose the right theme for their websites.

Most people wonder why they should select premium themes, when free themes are available. Well, just take a look at the following chart:

After scrutinizing the above chart, premium themes look much better than free ones.

But, don’t get involved in this needless debate. Evaluate your website needs, budget honestly and make the decision accordingly.

If a free theme meets your needs, then go for it. When you need to update your site’s theme, you can easily switch to a premium theme later on.

Either way, you’ll find a vast selection of free and premium themes here, no matter what niche you’re in.

2. Cross Browser Compatibility

Tech-savvy people use multiple browsers to access websites. Therefore, cross-browser compatibility is an essential feature of all good websites.

For example, if your website performs well on Google Chrome, but visitors are unable to access it through Firefox, then you will start facing losses in your web-based business.

Therefore, you should choose a good theme for your site that is compatible with all leading web browsers.

3. SEO Friendliness

Search Engine Optimization is a process of increasing your site’s visibility on Google & other search engines.

Therefore, selecting an SEO friendly theme will help you to easily deal with various SEO tricks, such as metadata, titles, page elements and headings.

So, you must check whether the theme has SEO features or not. For this, you need to read the theme’s description, document, and related promotional materials.

4. Support for WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins are widely utilized by both technical and non-technical individuals to add additional features to their websites in order to meet the increasing demands of the targeted audience.

You can face a lot of problems if your site’s theme conflicts with the plugins you are using. Therefore, you should check whether the chosen theme supports various WordPress plugins or not.

5. Simplicity

Ensure that the theme you choose is not complex. Most web developers tend to create fancy websites with complicated styles, bright colors, style icons and unnecessary animations, etc.

Ordinary visitors love to visit simple and visually appealing websites frequently. Your website must provide the desired information to the targeted user.

This will help you to increase your site’s traffic to a great extent.

6. Responsive To All Mobile Devices

Choose a theme that is responsive to all mobile devices. If you want to make rapid progress in your web-based business and increase your online presence in a short span of time, just make your website responsive to all devices.

This will help users to access your website easily on all mobile devices. Google, the world’s leading search engine, considers it an important factor when determining the ranking of websites.

If your website is not responsive to mobile devices, Google will downgrade its ranking in its SERPs. As a result, your audience size will be restricted.

This will cause a great loss to your web-based business and you won’t survive long if you don’t fix it soon.

7. Loading Speed

The loading speed of a website or its pages is directly linked to its overall usability, readability, SEO ranking, and performance.

If your website is slow, it will frustrate visitors and they will leave your site immediately. Such displeased visitors will never revisit your site and take interest in your offerings.

So, you should compare a number of themes. Shortlist them and check their loading speed one by one. For this, you can use some handy tools.

Make sure to choose a theme that is speed-optimized and then evaluate it from other angles.

8. Security

Security is one of the most important aspects that can result in several sleepless nights for website owners.

From time to time, cyber criminals and hackers hit news headlines with the successful hacking of websites.

While choosing a theme, you should ask for the help of WordPress developers and find out how secure the theme is.

Check the presence of bloated codes, spammy links, and other security loopholes. You can also communicate with other customers to learn the status of a theme, in terms of security.

Generally, Premium themes are more reliable than free themes in this regard. However, you should check all these factors from your side and choose a theme that has appropriate plugins and password strength.

9. Customization Features

Occasionally, you will have to customize your website to change its overall appearance. It helps you to attract new visitors and keep the existing ones loyal to your brand.

So, while choosing a theme, you must see if there is a custom admin panel or dashboard on the page to customize the theme whenever you need to revamp your site.

10. Widgets and Widgetized Areas

Good themes have widgetized areas and some custom widgets. All these help you to increase the functionalities of your website.

So, you need to choose a theme which has some custom widgets, such as tags & categories listing, search, advertisement, archives and posts/comments, etc.

11. Availability of Social Media Buttons

These days, people view social media notifications more so than E-mails.

It seems that the whole world has become social media “savvy”, making it mandatory for business organizations, IT firms, companies, and entrepreneurs to have their social media presence.

So, to achieve that goal, your theme should have social media buttons. This will allow users to share your content on different social media channels easily. And that has SEO benefits.

12. Sufficient Space for Advertisements

When you work on monetizing your WordPress blog, even a single click matters a lot to you.

A good number of people look for online ads (related to products/services) posted on your website. Therefore, the theme you are choosing must have enough space for advertisements.

This will help you to show relevant ads to your visitors in sufficient numbers to get the benefit of their earnings easily.

Concluding Remarks

The above twelve theme tips are important factors that you should keep in mind while evaluating different WordPress themes.

Keeping them top of mind will enable you to choose the best theme for your WordPress site.

Author Bio:

Tracey Jones is an experienced WordPress Developer by profession and a technical writer by hobby. Presently, she is working with HireWPGeeks Ltd., a leading WordPress CMS customization company with a global reach. She is a passionate blogger and always on the lookout for learning something new. You can follow her company on social media sites like: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

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