We all need a website for our business. As Bill Gates said a business not on the business, will go out of business. So it is our duty to make sure we avoid that horrible outcome at all costs right?
So where do we get our website? Most people and businesses who need a website go to WordPress, which is the world’s largest web publishing software. If you are planning to create content on a website, or build an eCommerce platform you will need the WordPress web hosting service. There are currently over 455,000,000 websites that are using wordpress right now.
If you have a website, you are still going to need to create a proper layout for the site. It needs a face. An appearance. Something that users can see and interact with. Also something that your search engine can read and find you. You are going to need a wordpress theme.
What’s A WordPress Theme?
A wordpress theme is what people see when they visit your site. From the navigation bar to where the shopping cart is determined by the wordpress theme file. WordPress theme is the graphical user interface that people interact with. A wordpress theme provides functionality and usability to the site. It provides the visual, the layout, the font styles, widgets, colours and the other little details of a website.
A good wordpress theme has the power of making people interact with your website for a long period of time. A good theme can attract people towards you and entice them. It also adds to the brand reputation and the brand awareness among people.How many of us have seen a good looking website and were unable to leave it because it just looked so good? As business owners, our aim is to make sure people keep scrolling through our website. Hoping they enjoy the joyful theme and pages filled with content. Indeed, a good wordpress theme makes all the difference in the customer experience.
WordPress themes are so easily accessible. Whether we are just starting out or have an already established medium sized business, wordpress can cater to all budgets. WordPress themes are both free and come in premium design packages. Being a premium theme means you have higher customization power and more features. But free themes are not any less. They are powerful and fulfills all the basic necessities of the customer and the search engine.
Free or premium, we must keep an open and conscious mind when choosing our wordpress theme. There are a lot of things we must consider when choosing the ideal wordpress theme for our website. It goes beyond the appearance and the visual of the theme.
Let’s take a look at all the facts you must keep an eye out for when choosing your wordpress theme!
Does It Meet Your Objectives?
Your business objectives always take precession when choosing any elements of your website. Different themes have different functionalities and usabilities. Some have the ability to secure payments or sign up for emails while other themes may not have the same feature. Some themes are made for simple portfolio purposes while others are for blogs. So depending on the type of business you have, and the reason for your website, you may need to look at all the features required for your theme and whether the designated theme fulfills your requirements.
Theme Speed
You don’t want your website to look good and work at the speed of a snail. People tend to get frustrated easily when a page is too slow. When the content takes too long to load. When the shopping cart is slow to process or when it takes too much time to jump to the next page. Little things matter in the process of building your website and one such is speed of your theme. The right navigation and optimized speed of the theme can make all the difference when driving traffic to your site. Google also takes note of how fast your site is and how much time people spend there. It determines how SEo friendly your website is. The faster it is , the more relevant the site is. Did you know that people tend to leave the site if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load?
A combination of tools can be used to test the performance and speed of the theme. Google also has some tools that you can use such as the Google Pagespeed Insights.
Responsive Design Of The Theme
Does the website open up nicely on the desktop but looks like a mess when viewed from your mobile? Perhaps that’s the consequence of using a theme with an unresponsive design. Most people do their shopping, reading, and consuming entertainment using their mobiles. Without a responsive design, you cannot increase the mobile traffic or improve the satisfaction of users. The improvement of user experience is crucial, especially since google made it a ranking factor that affects your visibility on the search engine.
Customization Capability
Sometimes we need to do a little fine tuning of our own to the prebuilt themes on wordpress. But some of the themes made by independent developers do not allow for much customization. A simple demo of the theme can tell you whether you can change it’s colours, switch up the styling fonts and change the overall appearance of the web page. The customization capability gives you the freedom to arrange the site according to your preferences
Reviews Of The Theme
Reviews are a great indicator of the performance of the theme. Always check for the reviews of a theme before clicking purchase or even before using the free wordpress theme. There are thousands of themes that are free and capable of meeting your objectives. But the deliverables and results of a theme can be easily identified by the status of the reviews.
Support The Necessary Plugins
The most desirable thing about wordpress is the availability of plugins to improve our functionality and usability of the site. But there are some themes that do not support various plugins for the site. It is important to check out the compatibility of your theme with plugins such as Yoast SEO plugins, security plugins, site speed plugins and e-commerce plugins and so many more. It is also good to check for the plugins that already come with the theme. This is an indication of an updated theme that is good for your website.