6 Ridiculously Easy Steps to Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Website
With thousands of options available, it can feel like a daunting task to choose a WordPress theme. And there’s a lot at stake too: your theme will impact your website design, performance, features, safety, maintenance and scalability.
But with this proven 6 steps process you’ll learn how to choose a WordPress theme for your website easily and effectively.
Step 1: Planning
As with everything in life, you need to know where you’re going to get there. Is your business in need of a corporate website to showcase your services? Or do you want to sell products online through an e-commerce site? Maybe you’re just starting and need a blog to build your audience.
Once you know what kind of website you need, define clear goals and outcomes you want to achieve with the website. Is it generating leads through a contact form? Selling products directly? Get newsletter subscriptions?
The last step in the planning process is defining what pages are necessary for your website to achieve your outcome. If you’re unsure about what pages you need, you can find similar websites to the one you need and draw inspiration from them.
For example, a basic corporate website could look like this:
- Homepage
- About Us
- Our Services
- Blog/News
- Contact Us
Step 2: Free vs Paid Themes
There are tons of free themes available on the WordPress.org directory. The most popular ones are quite clean and modern, well updated and maintained, properly coded, lightweight and offer Gutenberg (and in some cases Elementor or other page builders) integration.
With so many good things about them, you might be tempted to go the easy way and get a free theme, because, well, it’s free.
But, unless:
- You’re just starting and have literally no money
- You want a super simple website that can be ready in a couple of days
- You plan to have just a basic blog
Then investing in a paid theme is a much better decision: you’ll get better design options overall, tons of templates inside each theme, predesigned pages and element blocks, included paid plugins, lots of integrations and regular updates.
Most paid themes are between 35-$90 so you won’t break the piggy bank and it will make a massive difference.
Step 3: Choose a WordPress Theme Marketplace
There are plenty of WordPress theme marketplaces offering thousands of theme options. The top 5 most popular ones are:
1) Themeforest: THE WordPress marketplace. With more than 15.000 themes available, most of them ranging from 29 to 59$. Part of Envato Market, which includes, AudioJungle and GraphicHive
2) MOJO Marketplace: 770 themes available, most of them ranging from 49 to $59.
3) Elegant Themes (Divi): Exclusively offering child themes, extensions and layouts for the popular Divi theme. Divi’s cost is $89 yearly.
4) Studiopress (Genesis): Focused on offering themes for the Genesis framework. Prices range from 59 to $129.
5) Templatemonster: offers around 2400 WordPress themes, most of them ranging from 70 to $85.
Unless you have worked previously with Divi or Genesis and it’s your framework of reference, Themeforest is your best choice to start with. It will make your life a breeze when you choose a WordPress theme and creating an account on it will give you access to the rest of great Envato Markets that you can use in the future to get graphics, plugins and more.
Step 4: Searching on Themeforest
Go to Themeforest. Input the keyword that better defines your business (accountants, hair salon, law firm, etc.) If you don’t have a clear keyword or want to explore more options when you choose a WordPress theme leave it empty. Now it’s time to configure the search filters.
Filters criteria:
- Select the best category for your website.
- On sales, select high and top sellers.
- On ratings, select 4 stars or more.
- Once the results display, sort them by best match or, if you didn’t use a keyword, best sellers.
Let’s dig in and start analyzing the themes displayed. Open in a new tab the first 10–15 theme results. On each theme overview page, check the following factors:
Average rating: Apply the Bob Marley principle: “The higher, the better”
Comments: Checking the support comments will give you an idea about the theme development team responsiveness and common problems other buyers are facing.
Creation and last updated date: The longer a theme has been around and the more frequent the development team updates it the better.
Compatibility: Check what plugins it’s compatible with and what WordPress core versions it supports.
Theme features: You’ll see a long list of features the theme offers. See if they are important to what you need or not.
Plugins included: Many themes include at the same price paid plugins that can be very useful (sliders, page builders, addons, etc)
Page builder used: Is the theme based on Gutenberg, Elementor, Visual Composer? The more familiar you are with the page builder the better. If not, then Elementor or Gutenberg are great options.
Templates included: Templates are designs that you can apply to the theme so it can have a different look and feel.
Based on the previous criteria, if you like what you see so far go ahead and click on live preview.
Now it’s time to analyze the templates and check which is more adequate for your website. The key element here is understanding a basic web design principle: consistency is key. Each element of a design must be consistent with the rest of elements.
Fonts, colors, spacing, graphics, images… they all play their part in a team effort to deliver a great design.
Imagine the greatest web design you’ve ever seen. Now think how it would look if you replaced the font with the infamous Comic Sans. It’s an extremely painful example I know and I’m sorry to use such a dirty tactic, but I’m just trying to illustrate the point.
So why is consistency important when selecting a template? Because the more design elements you change in that template, the more possibilities you have, unless you are a web designer, to end up with a worse design.
If you find a template that is very similar to the end result you’re looking for and you just need to do very small edits and change the content, then your website will end up looking as good as the template does.
Now based on the templates you like, make a list of WordPress themes + templates to choose from that would work for your website.
Step 5: Narrowing Down Your Options
You should have a list of themes and templates inside those themes. Let’s narrow down the results even more.
Responsiveness: Check the chosen design on phone and tablet to make sure it looks good on both. You can do it on real devices or you can save time by using the built-in Chrome developers responsive tester. It’s accessible by right-clicking and then selecting “Inspect”. Most traffic nowadays comes from mobile devices so make sure the template displays properly on every device.
Load speed: many themes offer by default a lightweight and optimized template that will ensure your website loads fast. You can test the speed optimization score and loading times at Gtmetrix.com
Bugs: Some templates will have obvious bugs so avoid them.
Pages included: Does the template include most of the pages you need? It will save a lot of your time
Element blocks included: Similar to the pages, many themes include predesigned blocks that you can easily include on any page, for example a team section, image carousel, etc.
After doing this analysis, you should have a short list of candidates to choose from. It’s getting easier, right?
Step 6: Final Theme Selection and Purchase
From the previous list, if you’ve done your homework, you should have great options to choose from. Any of these will work well, so choose the WordPress theme you personally like the most.
Purchasing it is really easy, you’ll just need to enter your details, select your payment method (Credit card or Paypal) and select if you want extended theme support, but If you work with us you won’t need it *wink wink*
After the purchase you’ll get access to the files and purchase code.
And that’s it! Now you know how to choose a WordPress theme effectively for any of your websites.
Summary: 6 ridiculously easy steps to choose a WordPress theme for your website
1. Define what kind of website you are looking for, your main goals and pages needed.
2. Decide between free vs paid themes. If you can afford it and unless you need something really simple, go with a paid theme. It’s definitely worth it.
3. Choose a WordPress theme marketplace. There are plenty of them but Themeforest is your best bet.
4. Use Themeforest’s search filters appropriately. Then select potential themes you could use by applying our 8 criteria: Average rating, comments & support, creation & update date, compatibility, features, paid plugins included, page builder used and templates included.
5. Narrow down the list by analyzing each theme + template based on its responsiveness, load speed, absence of bugs, pages & blocks included.
6. Choose a WordPress theme from the previous list, purchase it and then get access to the theme files + purchase code.
Originally published at wpsanta.com/blog
