Choosing a WordPress theme when you are building a wordpress website can be tricky. Not because of a scarcity of themes but because finding a theme or a template that fits your business to the T is a challenge. So, how do you go about selecting a WordPress theme after having gone through multiple WordPress plans? What are the parameters that one should take into account while choosing a WordPress theme? This article is an extensive guide that will answer most of these queries. First, we will learn about a list of things that should be taken into account while choosing a template and then, we will leave you with the top 3 WordPress templates based on the parameters we discussed. So without further adieu, let’s take a look at some key pointers that should go into your research while choosing a WordPress theme or template.
1. Aesthetically Pleasing
Users decide whether they want to do business with you or not in the first thirty seconds of scrolling through your webpage. A good looking website is like giving your customers a peek into what your product or service can offer them. Which is why ensuring that your website has a clean layout, great colour combination and splendid typography is extremely important. When all these elements come together on a canvas that your website is, no person has the audacity to take their eyes off it. While narrowing down on the theme you choose, make sure that the entire website maintains consistency of its theme with blogs, posts etc.
2. Industry-centric
We might have started off with the ‘looks should be better than the engine’ argument but hold your horses. We feel that aligning your theme with your category of business is a must. There is no compromise here because if a user can’t make out what business you are into, how will he or she be intrigued enough to go through the rest of your website? Make sure you sync your theme to your industry.
3. Browser Compatibility
You don’t know what your users prefer when it comes to browsing through websites. Some prefer Chrome, some prefer Internet Explorer, Firefox or even Safari for that matter. Make sure before you launch your WordPress website, you have made your website compatible with every browser under the sun.
4. Security
While selecting a WordPress theme, security is something you must be wary of. A great way to develop a safety mindset would be to avoid trusting user input or any third party APIs. Or even any kind of data inside your database without verifying it. Instead, make sure that you trust the functions provided by WordPress.One more way ensuring you choose a safe theme or template is by going through reviews to gauge how safe that theme is.
5. Plugins & Extensions
Getting a WordPress theme for the website is one part. But extending its functionality is an equally important aspect. Some concerns of a website like seo, social media, page load time etc. are universal in nature. In order to reduce a good amount of workload, WordPress allows for plugins and extensions. While choosing your WordPress theme, make sure what plugins are allowed for those themes keeping your requirements in mind. Some freemium extensions include Yoast for SEO, Schema for rich snippets, W3 total cache to enable caching in WordPress and Jetpack for overall performance of your WordPress website.
6. Multilingual Ability
If you as a business are catering to markets worldwide, especially to non-english speaking countries, make sure your wordpress theme supports other languages as well. If you as a business are willing to enter into a market and adapt yourselves to the environment and the culture of that country, so should your website by being able to switch languages.
7. Responsiveness across platforms
Responsiveness across mobile, tablets and desktop is the order of the day. Make sure your WordPress website supports all platforms and maintains a great user experience throughout all the platforms.
Apart from these pointers, also put other parameters like support tools, page builders, simplicity of website (which you should consider while keeping the aesthetics in mind) in your list.These parameters will leave no stone unturned while you are choosing a WordPress theme for your website. After selecting WordPress plan for your website when you are going through these parameters, allow us to give you a glimpse of some of the best themes that WordPress has today for particular industries. We suggest that you pick a pen and start rating them on your own with the parameters we gave you,
Here we go!
1. Scara
Scara looks nothing short of exquisite. It has a clean layout with fine typography for you to leverage your brand identity. It is more suited for e-commerce where you can also enable shopping cart plugins.The card format used to showcase products completely works because it also allows you to dive into the details vis-a-vis product description. A total delight if you are planning to open an online store.
2. Square
Square is probably the best theme for real estate. Its three styling formats namely, general, map and creative give us enough idea as to how a real estate business should showcase its business. The general square theme is very search oriented with the onus on price, location and type of apartments/houses whereas the map puts its entire onus only on which part of the city the user would like to buy their house. A robust and friendly theme with enough plugin options.
3. Crypton
Crypton is a theme that fits best with the technology and finance industries. The thin edged cards which are divided into large and small sizes gives the theme a very sleek and sharp look. Not only so, but the theme provides three different versions to its users: the main version, classic version and the boxed version. It is cross compatible with fully responsive page layouts. It also has a powerful and premium page builder with an inbuilt WooCommerce plugin. Definitely a steal we say.
We hope that this article has given you enough guidelines to know how you should go about choosing a theme or a template for your WordPress website. While skimming through themes it is but natural for one to feel that a particular parameter isn’t really worthwhile. Or you may also feel that a particular theme that you like is falling short of the listed parameters. In such cases, break no sweat. Use your fine sense of judgement and give yourself that freedom to reason out why you feel it is better to go with your gut feeling.Till then,happy searching.