There are a lot of things to love about WordPress.
One those things that we love especially is the rich theme library. The library is full of options both free and paid and there are themes specific to a great amount of industries. When you first wade into the theme library it can feel overwhelming especially to WordPress beginners, but with so many options there’s likely a useable skin for your design out there.
We recommend being focused when starting your search for a theme, understanding your design and functionality needs is important. We have a few more thoughts on what to think about when choosing a WordPress theme for your business.
What do you need from your WordPress website?
We want you to look at this from an inbound perspective. You want a inbound site that meets all technical checkmarks. To make an inbound website on WordPress the theme you choose should be:
Simplicity
Complicated, flashy themes can often mean slow themes with bogged down coding. Whereas you want a theme that will provide lighting face loading and response time. We refer to this as the themes performance and a poorly performing website from a technical standpoint will mean less traffic, less leads and more money left on the table.
Responsiveness
The theme you choose should absolutely be responsive. This is an unquestionable requirement, if you do choose a theme that does not include built in responsiveness you’ll need to pay for someone to do this later.
SEO
Look for a theme that states that it is optimized for SEO. Yes, you can add a plugin like Yoast to ensure that your on page SEO is strong but you also need to be concerned with the coding of your website. If the theme is poorly coded this can directly affect your ability to rank on a search engine.
Functionalities
What do you need your website to be able to do? Can this be accomplished by using various WordPress plugins or would a theme with built in integrations do the trick? For instance, take a real estate website. A real estate website will need to have a listings function, do you purchase a theme that is already set up to house these listings or do you use a plugin?
Our best advice is to lean on your WordPress developer, they can check the coding of the theme for quality and through your functionality discussion can do the research to find a theme or plugins that help you meet your online needs.
