Choosing a Right Theme for Your Wordpress Website
Everyone who wants to create their website with wordpress requires a theme to make things faster so that they will go live as soon as possible.
There are many premium wordpress themes provider available on the internet who provides quality wordpress themes with great customer support. While choosing a wordpress, many of us get confused to select the PERFECT theme.
I have come up with some important things that should be considered if you are planning to buy a premium wordpress theme.
Fast loading
The first and most important thing is that the theme should loads fast. If the theme doesn’t loads fast then it will obviously affects to your website loading time.
If your website loads slow then it will directly affects to your site traffic. No one wants to wait even for 5 seconds and if your site loads slow then users could not visit it again.
So if you want more traffic and great conversation from it then choose a theme which loads fast.
Should not depends on external plugins
If your site has lots of plugins installed then your site become slow. The more plugins you install the more your site slow down.
Another drawback of using more plugins with theme is you site may hack if plugins doesn’t coded with standards and secure code.
So the reason why we should avoid theme which depends more on plugin is to secure and speed up our website.
Good UI design
The theme should be designed well for easy to use user interface. Good UI is the key point to get more customers from your website. User love to visit your site again and again if your site contains useful information as well as easy to navigate user interface.
If there is too complex to navigate then users will become confused and you may lose those users.
Should be mobile first responsive
As of report, number of smartphone users are increasing day by day. They preferred to visit websites from smart phones rather than desktop computers or laptops.
If your business provides online shopping then you must have separate apps for iOS, android and windows phones. If you are not getting much profits from online shopping then at least your website should be mobile first i.e it should be responsive.
While choosing a perfect theme it should have compatibility with all major smartphone devices so that if you build your website with that theme then you will have a good website which works great in smartphone device and tablets too.
Good customer support
Good customer service is highly recommended by all customers whether they are new or existing. Support is required when you are configuring the theme and stopped or confused at some stage and requires help from experts then customer support should be able to help you quickly.
Before purchasing any premium theme, I recommend to do some research and find some real reviews of customer service so that you never been in trouble. You can easily find websites that review Wordpress themes and bring out the best knowledge users would look for.
If the thene you are planning to purchase don’t have good customer services then please please please don’t go for it because you will invite troubles and problems in your life.
Should have good customer reviews
As I stated above, before going to purchase any premium theme, do some google search and find some real reviews so that we will be sure that we are purchasing the right products.
While doing research for real reviews, you may get many fake reviews posted by theme author for marketing purposes. So if possible try to find real people reviews at least from 8–10 different websites.
It should have an easy to edit theme options and not hardcoded.
The easy User interface is another biggest and must have a theme feature because not every person is technical. Many theme authors have some part of their theme hard-coded without any reason. In this case end, users get confused to find where the things coming.
Nowadays almost all theme authors are providing drag and drop page builder which is much easier to manage then page templates.
So before purchasing a premium theme, don’t hesitate to check theme documentation and make sure theme has easy to edit theme options.
One-click demo installation
One-click demo installation makes your website looks exactly the same as the demo of theme authors.
Some themes have one-click demo installation and some have many options to be set up to make your site like demo.
If you want a plug and play like theme installation then make sure theme has ONE CLICK demo content installation otherwise either you have to get 5–6 hours to set things up or you have to pay professionals to set it up.
Child theme support
Child theme support is also the most useful and requested theme feature. So the theme you are going to purchase should have child theme support.
First of all,
WHAT IS CHILD THEME?
A child theme is a theme which derives all files and functions from other theme and use it in itself to display things.
So why child theme requires?
Suppose if the theme you are going to buy needs some customization as per your needs then you must have to customize that theme.
So what if the theme author released a new updated version with bug fixes and additional features? Simply you can’t update your theme to the latest version because if you update your theme, the customization you did will be lost. Similarly what if you need support for some issues after customization? Theme authors will not provide support if the issue occurred because of your customization.
So if the theme author provides child theme support then you can do your customizations in the child theme without touching a single file of the original theme you purchased. Plus you can also get theme support and new version updates whenever you want.
Multi-language support
The theme should support multi-language ability.
What is multi-language support?
If you are planning to run your website for different countries and different languages like English, Spanish, French, etc… then you need your website multiple languages supported.
For this feature your theme must support multiple languages otherwise you will suffer from many problems.
The key benefit of having a multi-language supported theme is, you can display different contents based on languages or countries.
RTL supported
RTL stands for Right To Left, meaning your website contents will display from the right direction to left.
RTL is not important feature for everyone but if you are from gulf countries or your language is Arabic or Hebrew, etc… then you must need to look at themes that support RTL.
Easy to update
The last and another most important feature is easy to update your theme to the latest release. Every theme should have this feature because not all themes are complete or bug-free. Everyone needs updates and new features.
There are two types of updates providing by theme authors.
(1) Theme author uploads an updated version to their server and we have to manually update our theme with those files. (risky)
(2) Theme author updates and uploads the latest version to their server. We get notifications to update our theme. (Safe and most preferred)
For an easier life, we just need to look for option (2) because it will automatically update our theme to the latest version without any issue just like WordPress update works.
Note: Before updating your theme, make sure you didn’t customize it otherwise you will lose all customizations.
