Do’s And Dont’s Of Best Theme Selection For Your WordPress Website

Just like in the case of Plug-ins, one of the biggest decisions you have to make when building a website is the verdict on what theme to use. With thousands of themes available, choosing a theme can be a quite daunting task, and that’s why today; this topic is going to list out some few things to consider doing and avoid for theme selection.

The Do’s For Best Theme Selection WordPress

1. Consider Theme Category: Themes are grouped based on different categories like blog, business, e-commerce and other specific purposes, which indicate what kind of website the theme was designed for. For example, the themes you’re going to use for a Woocommerce custom price plug-in for an ecommerce WordPress site is different for other kind of businesses. Therefore, if you’re are looking to build a website for your business, be sure to search your themes on a business category.
2. Reflect On The Design / Functionality Of The Theme: Observe of the homepage is designed to have a slider or if posts do have their featured images displayed. Some themes are SEO ready; some are optimized for Adsense and etcetera. In addition, there are options that allow you to customize both the default functionality and the design of your theme. At the very minimum, go for a theme that allows for logo uploading, chose different color background schemes and different form of topography as well.
3. Go For Themes That Offers More Than Just One Layout: The number of page templates offered by a team should be taken into consideration. It is a great idea to go for a theme that offers at least two different layouts; one being the default template with a left side bar and the other having a template with no side bar. The Woocomeerce mix and match grid layout mostly used by most store owners is an example to take into consideration when choosing a theme in terms of layout options.
4. Look Out For Documentation / Support When Buying Sophisticated Themes: Themes that have support from its developers may only be available for premium, some other less sophisticated themes may have a support team but make sure you have a back-up plan before installing a theme on your website should incase anything goes wrong and you’re short of options.
5. Choose Responsive Themes: By responsive, it means the theme is been designed to look good on all mobile devices, including phones and iPad. Another thing to check out for here is loading speed, because it serves as a significant factor that affects conversion rates.

The Don’ts

1. Do Not Forget About Updates / Security: The most important thing about updating especially WordPress sites is for security purpose. Some website owners do not take updates as a necessary precaution and they are not even careful when using free themes. Most free themes do not offer updates automatically for its customers and that’s a loophole factor for hackers to thread upon.
2. Don’t Disregard Theme Compatibility Across Browsers: People around the world use variety of web browsers, so do not concentrate only on testing your themes on a single browser. Until you’ve confirmed that a selected theme works well across most browsers, and the user experience is perfect; then you can give it a go.
3. Don’t Use Themes That Embedded With Too Many Short codes: Do you know that the rate of shortcode implementation on themes can have a great impact on your site performance? When it’s time to switch themes, it becomes a problem removing a host of codes from thousands of pages. Avoid the use of shortcodes as long as you can, they’re for plug-ins and not themes. For clarity, when a plug-in break something, you can simply deactivate it, but when plug-ins is built into themes, you can’t do that, because they’re impossible to separate.
4. Never Use A Theme Until You Test It! Many developers / vendors will always tell you their themes are SEO friendly and save, but be careful because they may be full of errors. You can test a theme by using a WP test plug-in, XAMPP local host or go to Themeforest site to check for computability issues.