There are tons of WordPress themes available to us either for free or for a charge but choosing a WordPress theme out of them is difficult. Usually, the paid theme is better than a free theme as they provide a ready-made structure to begin and more options to customize the layouts. In case if you are not a tech-savvy, then tech support is always available for you. Themeforest is one of the best places to buy paid themes and there are around 12,000 WordPress themes available to buy. So, it becomes difficult to pick one of it and you may invest a lot of your time to choose which one to go with!
Choosing the right theme is very important as it gives shape to your website. Usually, you won’t change theme very often so choosing the theme becomes one of the important tasks in designing your website. Below are some do’s and don’ts which can help you out while searching for a theme.
1. Do make a list of features required
Before even proceeding towards the search for a theme, you should make a list of features that you need to have in your website. Try to make a list with priority so that you can make a decision if some features are required or not at a later stage. Most of the marketplace provides an option to filter what kind of themes you want, so make sure you use that option to get the best available theme which ultimately helps you in choosing the WordPress theme you want.
2. Do choose a responsive theme
Recent studies suggest that apart from Desktop & Laptop, people are using Mobiles & Tablet as well to visit the website. The number of users using Mobiles are increasing rapidly. So you should make sure that in case if someone is looking at your website from their phone, it should work without any hiccups. Your website should work seamlessly on all major devices like Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, and Smartphones. Most of the WordPress themes nowadays offer this by default, but make sure you do a check before buying or working on it.
3. Don’t choose a fanatical theme
It’s good to have quality features in your theme but its a very bad practice to have unnecessary features in your theme. Keeping non-required features activated on your website may hit you hard in long run, as that can slow down your website, affect the performance (like loading of the website) and many more issues can come up. Always keep your website cluttered free, make sure you disable the plugins/features that you don’t want on your website.
4. Don’t proceed without testing thoroughly
You may find the theme absolutely useless if it’s not matching your feature list. It will be a total waste of time and energy if testing of the theme is not done properly. Go through each and every feature list and test it out with the demo provided by the theme developer. You can also ask a pre-sale question if you have any doubt. In ThemeForest, you can put your comment on the product page with your question. Someone from the developer’s team will respond to you. Try to get the majority of your requirements satisfied before going forward.
5. Do keep color combinations in mind
Most of the paid themes do allow changing of colors, but the free theme may not. Make sure you connect with the developer of the theme and confirm this point before proceeding further. Choose the colors which match your logo, ideally, that’s the best practice to follow. You can use this wonderful tool, called Coolors, which can help you to get supporting / matching colors to your primary color.
Below is the list of some portal which helps you in choosing the WordPress theme:
Note: I don’t have any affiliation with the above websites.
great post, it really helps a lot of beginner WordPress developers like me. Thanks for sharing