When you enter the process of Building a website or a personal blog, Choosing the right design theme for your purpose is definitely one of the essential steps worth lingering on.
During the process, you will have to choose between thousands of themes, free or paid, with each theme looking better than the last – definitely confusing.
So to make the process of choosing the right theme easier, I will share with you several important tips that accompany me in the process we use here at Mondo.
Website design themes. Original Hebrew article artwork.
What should you pay attention to when choosing a WordPress theme?
WordPress is designed for building all types of websites, so your uniqueness must be prominent and clear. Each theme was created and designed to serve a specific purpose, to convey a certain message or energy the moment a visitor encounters it.
You need to settle, before anything else, on your vision – What should your site convey? Whom should it address? What is the purpose of the site?
After that, the theme should serve that need and work with the content. For example, if your site deals with politics or news, you should choose a theme that encourages readability and displays a lot of text comfortably.
Many themes come with endless customization options. It is important that the theme is written correctly. If the theme is not coded and written properly, all of these options can actually make real customization, or the use of certain plugins, harder for you, and then you are "stuck" with a theme where every change you want to make will cost you hours of development with a programmer.
On the other hand, there are thousands of WordPress themes that look amazing but will slow your site's loading down excessively. and nobody likes visiting a slow site, especially not Google which always gives a higher score to faster sites, as the well-known saying goes: "all that glitters is not gold".
Your theme fills one of the most important roles on your WordPress site. It is your face for visitors and, of course, for search engines.
Now, let's take a look at the steps we should take to make sure we choose the best WordPress theme for our site:
1. Always strive for simplicity
Simplicity is not a dirty word, and in fact, from many years of experience as a UX designer and art director, I crown simplicity as the first rule of design.
There are many themes loaded with colors, complex layouts, animations, etc. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, but in most cases we don't really need all that clutter. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, said Leonardo da Vinci.
Look for a theme that will display your content correctly and look good thanks to what you plan to display. Make sure the theme's style is not complicated and cluttered; our goal is to encourage visitors to read and view, and to promote our site at the same time.
If a theme looks great but does not convert visitors into subscribers, it is not a good enough assessment for us. It's nice that the visitor is impressed by the design, but our goal is to build an audience and promote the business.
2. Responsiveness is not even a question
No matter how beautiful the theme is in the desktop version, it must be fully responsive.
Responsive themes are themes that adapt their structure and content layout according to the screen width of the device on which they are displayed. The share of visitors from mobile devices today can reach over 50%, depending on the type and content of the site.
Google displays responsive sites at the top of search results from mobile devices. It doesn't matter what the site's subject is or who it is intended for – the site must be responsive.
The easiest way to check whether a theme is responsive or not is simply to shrink the browser window and see whether the theme reacts and adapts itself to the change.
A deeper form of responsiveness testing is browsing to the site Google’s Mobile Friendly Test
This check will display warnings and notes, depending on the theme address you enter.
3. Browser compatibility
It is very likely that the visitors to your site use different browsers. The theme may look amazing in one browser but be broken in another.
This is where browser compatibility comes in. Most theme developers are familiar with the issue and know what to do and what not to do in order to create an identical browsing experience across browsers, as far as possible.
Usually the theme's page will state which browsers it is suitable for, but if it doesn't, you can always run a basic test and load the theme on several different browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.
Also, run a similar test on several browsers on a mobile phone; it is advisable to run the test on both the Android and iOS operating systems.
4. Supported plugins
WordPress plugins are really your way to empower your site and give it special powers. These plugins let you do almost anything you want with your site. The number of existing WordPress plugins is endless, but there are a few plugins that are must-haves for every type of site, such as Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache and more.
The number of existing WordPress plugins is endless, but there are several plugins that are must-haves for any type of site, such as Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache and so on..
Make sure the theme supports the use of popular plugins.
5. Translation and multilingual support
Most of the themes you will find online are English-language themes built for English-language sites.
If you want a really easy life, look for a theme that meets all the criteria we set out and also supports RTL, meaning it supports languages written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
I know that if you limit the search this way, you will greatly narrow your results. If you give up right-to-left templates (which means you may need to bring in a programmer to localize the template), look for a template that supports multiple languages and has a translation option.
6. DRAG & DROP-STYLE PAGE BUILDER
Page builders are in fact a WordPress plugin that allows us to create pages without the need for programming, using the Drag & drop method (dragging and dropping elements).
There are many premium themes that come with a Page Builder plugin as part of their system, which in effect limits us. If the day comes when we want to replace the theme, all the content built by the theme's Page Builder may break, so it is advisable to look in advance for a theme that supports one of the popular Page Builder plugins, so that all the work on the pages is not tied to the theme itself.
A highly recommended Page Builder, with Hebrew as its native language, is WIPI.
7. A theme with a mom and a dad
When you are looking for a theme, it is advisable that besides being pretty, impressive, responsive and supporting every plugin on earth, you also read a bit on the Facebook page of the company that develops it, browse their support forum if there is one, read the posts, the problems other customers ran into and, more importantly – the company's answers and responses.
Finding a theme with 0 issues is a nice fantasy; you need to make sure there is someone to talk to when you run into a problem.
8. SEO FRIENDLINESS
The weight of search-engine friendliness and SEO in the structure of the theme you choose is very large. A theme that looks excellent can still be written in invalid HTML code, and that will completely affect the site's performance results in search engines.
It is not a simple task for those who are not well versed to examine a theme's source code themselves, so most theme owners state on the theme page whether the theme is search-engine friendly.
You can also test whether the page produces proper HTML5 using the W3C Markup Validation tool.
9. Ratings and reviews
As I mentioned earlier, involvement and community in the world of themes give you an additional advantage. Real customer reviews and ratings cannot be faked (for the most part).
Read the comments, go over the reviews, it's important. Note that in my opinion there is no theme that has no negative reviews; there is always that one dissatisfied customer. It's important that you know how to look at the number of commenters and the number of reviews. If the number of negative reviews is unusually high, move on.
In summary
The purpose of this article was to give you tips for choosing the right WordPress theme, I hope I managed to give you relevant information with which you can now choose a theme more wisely.
If you ran into any conflict in the article, or would like to add information or comments on the topic – I would love to hear your comments at the bottom of the post as comments. Good luck!
