With a plethora of WordPress themes available, choosing a WordPress theme or a template while building a WordPress website can be difficult. But if you ever come across some of the best WordPress websites, you will find recurring thoughts or ideas that emerge from these themes in terms of what makes them stand out from the rest of the websites. Is it the visuals or is it the ease of navigation? Or is it the overall experience given by the website? As we examined WordPress websites across different industries, we could collate some interesting parameters that made the difference for the best ones. So, before choosing a WordPress hosting plan, here are a few musts we figured out when you are choosing a WordPress theme or template. Sounds interesting? Let us deep dive further to know more.
- Visually Stunning
For a website, aesthetics is one of the key elements that drives more and more visitors to the homepage. Before you select a really appealing WordPress theme, ensure you do a blink test, a 3-5 second exercise to see whether you like the theme or not. One of the major reasons to take the visual essence into consideration is that all the eye-appealing elements like a clean layout, great colour combination and splendid typography matter when it comes to a user’s experience. Moreover, these elements as a whole also affect other assets on the website like blogs, contact pages, forms etc. So, while choosing a theme for your website, make sure that you cater to the eyes.
2. Specific to Industry
As you take visuals and graphic sense into consideration, do ensure that you stick to your industry. Just remember, in a bid to choose something visually appealing, do not compromise what your category is all about. You might have seen many websites that look good but do not tell us what business they are into. Always remember, users have a low attention span and anything that confuses them will drive them away instantly. So, while choosing a theme or a template for your website, make sure you align your theme to your industry.
3. Compatibility with browsers
There are many web browsers that users browse through interchangeably. Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer or even Mozilla Firefox to name a few. Since we cannot know the user’s browser choice or preference, it is safer to ensure that your WordPress theme is compatible with all the browsers.
4. Add-ons and Plugins
While choosing a WordPress theme, one of the most important things to take into consideration is the functionality of the website. Which makes plugins, addons and extensions immensely critical while building a website. In order to extend the functionality of your WordPress website, make sure you choose an add-on and plug-in friendly theme. You can double the efficiency and functionality of your WordPress website by leveraging plugins like Yoast SEO, JetPack, Akismet and Schema. So, make sure you buy a WordPress theme accordingly.
5. Responsiveness, Safety and Security
Today, by and large, users browse websites through mobile, tablets, desktops etc. Moreover, since browsing takes place through multiple platforms, securing the WordPress theme is critical. A clever way to ensure safety throughout all the platforms is to avoid using any third party APIs which may jeopardize the situation. Instead, one can ensure the safety of the WordPress website by trusting the functions provided by WordPress itself (which get updated with their versions).
6. Test-drive ready theme
All said and done, but if you don’t get to test the aforementioned parameters on the demo version of your theme, then really no use buying it. Hence, we have put this pointer behind everything else. Test driving the parameters will allow you to check out other features as well if they are provided by your WordPress theme. Go through the menu option of your theme to check whether customization is possible. Also, check which other layout options are available within the same theme just to gauge the range offered by the theme.
We hope with these six stringent rules, your decision to choose a WordPress theme will become much easier. In addition to the parameters we mentioned above, a good way to measure the effectiveness of a theme is to check if it has multilingual ability, in case you are catering to international users or clients. Also, make sure that you take other things like support tools, page builders, simplicity of the theme and user interface into account while making a sound decision. In a bid to choose the best WordPress theme, we recommend you to go through Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plans. It is one of the most trusted and reliable brands providing WordPress hosting solutions to customers worldwide. Hope you had fun reading this article. Till then, happy theme shopping!
