Did you know that WordPress has almost 10,000 free themes to choose from? In 2022, Themeforest offered over 12,000 paid WordPress themes, and both of these numbers continue to increase every year. Choosing a WordPress theme is no easy feat these days, and it can quickly become an overwhelming task.
But don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place. WordPress Gang has got you covered.
In this article, we’ll be giving you five excellent tips to help you find the perfect theme for your website. Let’s dive in!
A site’s appearance is the most important thing to a website- it’s the first thing your users will see. There are two critical aspects to knowing if a theme is a right fit for you:
The most important thing for visuals is simplicity. Your website should look sleek and be easy to navigate, so you can best convey your brand. Having a website full of animations, special effects, and tons of colors is not always the best, as it can easily overwhelm your users. Websites with a pleasant user experience are more relevant than trendy website effects.
The best way to test for things like this is to try out the live demos for potential themes. Exploring these demos can give you a fantastic look into how your site will look and function before biting the bullet on a theme you might not like.
It is challenging for you to find a theme that perfectly fits your every need. You will always need a little bit of customization, and it’s essential to take this into account when looking at potential themes. If you’re stuck with a theme that you cannot make simple modifications to, it might not be a good fit for you.
It’s important to check which page/theme builders (WP Bakery, Elementor Pro, Thrive Builder, among others) your theme works with and see how customizable it is. This will let you know how easy or difficult it may be to change your website.
At WordPress Gang, we recommend getting a theme compatible with a drag-and-drop editor such as Elementor. With these, you’ll be able to keep the same theme builder while still having the flexibility of learning a new tool over and over again.
54% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, primarily smartphones. That’s a considerable amount, isn’t it?
It may sound overwhelming, but many people in today’s world prefer to browse websites from a phone versus a computer. If your website doesn’t work well with mobile devices, you could be losing over half of your potential visitors every month.
Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.4 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017 before consistently surpassing it in 2020.
© Statista 2022
It’s essential to check whether or not the theme of your WordPress choice adapts to mobile devices. This is known as responsiveness, and most themes should include it.
Theme creators will often claim their products perfectly fit mobile, but this is not always the case. You should always check to make sure the theme is responsive, and thankfully it’s easy to do. All you need to do is resize the browser window you’re using, and the website should respond and adjust based on the size.
Those using Chrome as their web browser can quickly simulate different mobile devices through Chrome’s Developer Tools by hitting “F12” and clicking the phone icon in the left corner of the console.
Your theme will also play an essential role in the SEO of your website, as search engines will crawl through your pages to index your site for their search engine. Because of this, the theme you choose must be SEO optimized, but similar to responsiveness, not all themes may be what they advertise. You can use the W3C Markup Validator tool to view the results of the demo site for your chosen theme, and it will let you know whether or not it was well coded and easy to crawl.
Excellent site performance is a key metric for how well a site will rank on search engines, and it goes hand in hand with SEO. Websites that load quickly will have higher SEO scores than slower sites, which puts them above the crowd.
Now, you may ask yourself why this matters. Most users view slow-loading web pages as a poor user experience and often will not continue to use the website. Compared to a faster page, users tend to stick around longer and have an improved experience overall, leading to continued visits.
93% of people have left because a website didn’t load quickly enough
hubspot.com
It’s a difficult task to choose a theme for your WordPress website. We hope this post helped you make a more informed decision on how WordPress themes work and how impactful they can be to your website.