Being a WordPress website owner, one of the silliest things that you may end up with is implementing a theme designed and catered under the supervision of an inexperienced designer.
Your website’s visual presence is highly important. Thankfully WordPress has a lot to offer to its customers so you don’t have to worry about falling behind when it comes to choosing the right theme.
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Features to consider while choosing a wordpress theme
You can easily pick a theme that may captivate the attention of your visitors and customers from a wide range of themes present in the WordPress Theme Directory. But, everything that glitters is not gold. That’s why I have listed down a list of critical features that website owners need to address before picking a theme for their WordPress website.
Why is it necessary? Because if you fail to observe these critical features, you may end up facing the following problems:
- Theme Upgrade Problems
- Theme Integration Problems
- Increased Security Concerns
- Theme Customization Problems
- Negative Impact on SEO
Hence, ensuring that you don’t end up yourself in a Theme Dilemma following are some of the critical features that you wish to observe before choosing a theme for your WordPress website.
Theme Source
As I mentioned it before, all that glitters is not gold. Before, you go ahead with making a selection of a WordPress theme for your site, it is necessary that you identify the source of the theme. Who designed it? Whether the team is responsive or not? Whether they update their themes with WordPress updates or not? These are some of the important questions that you should keep in mind when purchasing a theme.
Despite the fact, some themes are indeed more than amazing when it comes to design. Beautifully done, they may offer you an eye captivating impact. However, the only problem is they do not offer a ready support. At times, the design may shine out on your desktop screen but does not turn out to be responsive to other technologies and devices.
Hence, to avoid such issues it is highly necessary that you (as a website owner) must do thorough research on the theme provider before making your relative purchase. Theme source is highly important and it is something that you may never compromise on.
Here are some collections in which we have handpicked some of the most awesome, mobile responsive and super fast WordPress themes for you.
- Top notch wordpress magazine themes.
- Beautiful wordpress portfolio themes.
- Super fast, SEO ready themes for wordpress.
Theme Customization
Most themes in WordPress offers extensive customization. What’s more is that they all offer a personalized control panel to add custom features to your WordPress website. The changes made using such control panel directly improvise the style sheets. Also, you should make sure that whichever theme you are choosing for your website, it has image optimization as well.
Your theme basically comes with a pre-installed theme customizer but if not, then you can download the number one theme customizer plugin from the back-end of your WordPress dashboard. One of the highly effective Page Builder for your theme is Visual Composer: Page Builder.
However, it will be much helpful if you get a theme customizer pre-configured with your theme.
“WordPress has more than 28,000 themes in the Official Theme Repository. This number is significantly increasing with each passing day”.
Theme Responsiveness
The world has transformed and advanced to a new technological age. Smart Technology has become quite a significance among most users across the world. Today, an estimation represents that 30% of all website visits are coming from smartphones and tabloids. Hence, it is extremely necessary that your website is fully compatible with smart devices.
All thanks to the vast WordPress community that surrounds theme development, most themes on the market are mobile-friendly and responsive. So, if your theme provider lacks mobile responsiveness for your website, it is definitely a no! Trash that theme because it’s not worth it.
But that’s not all. Even if you choose a mobile responsive theme, keep in mind to check it before you go ahead with implementation. Google now offer mobile friendliness tool that can help you run a demo before you go live with a specific theme. Make use of it, wisely.
Theme Documentation
Documentation works as a stamp of authenticity. A properly coded website will not lack when it comes to documentation. Theme documentation is necessary as it may ensure the credibility of your WordPress website on the market. However, documentation is not the only procedure that needs to be addressed. You may not trust the words of your theme provider, if you are not sure about the theme source, it’s compatibility or customization features.
Without effective documentation, a theme can simply fail to be functional in the long run. There won’t be a guarantee whether it will send out successful updates with the latest versions of WordPress. Plus, documentation can provide you a better insight on all the features of the respective theme. Also, it may also help you with the content elements and much more.
Continuous Updates
Although, a small asset to address, WordPress themes should be regularly updated in order to stay compatible with the latest WordPress updates. So when you are searching for a good theme provider, keep in mind to rule out the ones that do not provide you continuous, frequent and regular updates.
Continuous updates ensure the critical security of your website and offer much more. So, if your WordPress theme doesn’t have a regular update, it may end up into becoming a real time hassle for your online presence. Not only that, but it may result in failing to comply with the current WordPress standards. Make sure that you get a WordPress theme that follows regular updates.
Website Performance
Website performance is of utmost priority. If your website suffers setbacks such as slow page load time or website downtime, then your website is not performing well enough. The theme plays a significant role when it comes to your website performance. It has a direct impact on your website’s speed and performance. If your website is based on a heavy theme, there is a hard chance that it will run smooth.
It depends entirely on you the type of theme you select for your WordPress website. So, when you are going towards choosing the right theme for your site, select the one that has a lightweight and faster design. To analyze your website performance, you can use the following online tools such as Pingdom or Google Page Speed.
Impact on Functionality
Themes are correlated with plugins attached to the back-end of your website. At times, a code on your theme can result in causing direct hindrance for certain plugins attached at the back-end of your website. It can go as far as ultimately resulting in shutting down plugins at the back-end.
But, before you move ahead with making the decision which theme will fit best to your needs, it will be a great option if you go through the list of plugins that are integrated with your website. Also, check whether the new theme is entirely functional with all of your plugins or not. You can also test your theme with the plugins by launching a staging site on WordPress.
Robust Support
Last but not the least, Robust Support by theme providers play the most important role when it comes to theme selection. Ready support for your website guarantees that your website will not suffer any downtime. Moreover, they will be available to help you out with any problem that you will face while setting theme attributes.
So that’s all folks. I hope you enjoyed the article on the top 8 Critical features that are necessary for every website owner to address before making a theme selection. WordPress is a vast platform it accounts for more than 27% of the Internet around the world. But, not all websites launched on WordPress becomes a thriving success. Learn why some WordPress websites fail to be successful than other ones.
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