wordpress

When you are developing a blog, picking the best theme is important for your success. It is hard to decide between free WordPress themes vs. premium WordPress themes.

Your blog’s overall design is determined by the theme you select. Selecting a free WordPress theme can be puzzling and time-consuming.

Bloggers like free WordPress themes because it is easy to set up and can be used to create a website like a blog, private, corporate and selection site.

Today, we’ll discuss how to select the best free WordPress themes for your website.

The Key Features You Should Consider

When picking any WordPress theme, there are certain key features you should consider. If your future theme doesn’t mark well in the arrays below, it won’t matter how cool features it surrounds.

Let’s have a look!

#1 Speed

If your site is slow, it doesn’t matter how fascinating or showy it is. Slow sites get abandoned – fast! Google ponders site speed in their search ranking algorithm.

Fast page-loading speed does not just increase the overall user experience of a website but has also been established to improve search engine rankings, conversion rates or online revenue.

Here’s a test you can use to find out how overfed a theme is-

  • Go to the Pingdom Website Speed Test
  • Enter the URL of a theme’s demo and notice the page loading time and how many HTTP requests are made.

#2 Try for Simplicity

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”-  Leonardo da Vinci

So many WordPress themes have lots of colors, flashy animations, complex designs, etc.

Go for a theme that has a simple design layout that helps you support your objective. It needs to appear good but without granting on usability and simplicity.

Ensure that the theme’s appearance is not too complex. The aim of web design is to help users find the information they need and to help site owners reach their goals at the same time.

#3 Responsive Themes

Responsive themes amend their layout across different screen sizes and devices. A noteworthy number of web traffic is generated from mobile and tablet devices.

astratheme

Google displays mobile-friendly websites on top of its mobile search results. Nevertheless, if your site’s topics and demographics, all websites need to be quick to respond and entirely mobile equipped.

Maximum WordPress themes are already responsive by default. Ensure that the theme you are picking for your website is mobile-friendly.

The best way to decide your responsive theme is good/bad- Run a demo – copy the URL of the theme’s demo page and paste it in Google’s new mobile-friendliness tool.

#4 Support Plugins

The real supremacy of WordPress comes with WordPress plugins. These plugins help you to do anything with your WordPress site.

While there are adequate of WordPress plugins, some are essential WordPress plugins for every website such as Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, etc.

addplugins

Confirm that your WordPress theme supports all popular plugins. If you are uncertain, ask the theme developer about it.

#5 Security Issues

Security should be a top priority if you looking for a theme. If your site gets hacked, it will take hundreds of hours & dollars to fix the condition.

A quite of a few affects the security of a website, comprising hosting, plugins and password strength.

You can avoid most security problems by installing the good plugins, selecting a quality web host, and keeping your installation of WordPress updated.

Also, only download themes created by a trustworthy developer, such as the WordPress.org Theme Directory. You can avoid any theme that doesn’t have many downloads or reviews.

If a theme has security issues, then users have possibly preferred up on it and marked it in their reviews for future consumers.

#6 SEO-friendly

Your WordPress theme plays a key role in your site’s SEO responsiveness. If your beautiful theme is generating poorly coded HTML, then it could affect your site’s performance on search engines.

When you enabled your theme with one of the many good SEO plugins, then your site is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ around.

It could be problematic for learners to evaluate a theme’s source code on their own.

A good technique is to install an extension for the Chrome browser, such as MozBar or SEO Site Tools, to run some speedy SEO checks on a theme’s demo.

You can also see if the page creates proper HTML5 by testing it with W3C Markup Validation service.

#7 Ratings and Reviews

An important indicator of a WordPress theme’s quality is ratings and reviews provided by their users. If the theme is sold on a third-party marketplace, then you will notice customer reviews.

For free WordPress themes, you will see the ratings section and it will show the number of reviews and stars given by customers. If you click on rating stars like 5 or 4, then it will display you all the reviews given by users.

theme-score

Nearly all WordPress themes can get a few bad reviews but if the number of bad reviews is oddly high, then you should read them wisely.

You can also check the installation number, with a higher number of installs is also better, since it customarily means the theme is comparatively well tested.

#8 Customization Ease

A customization dashboard has become standard in a lot of themes. This keeps you from the disturbance of having to make direct changes to theme pages.

Your customization requirements may differ, but, a theme should have the expertise to edit key design features such as the color scheme, fonts, and the appearance of the home page. And, changes, like swapping to a two sidebar layout, or moving sidebars from left to right, should be presented inside a good theme.

customize

Additionally, plugins such as Visual Page Editor make it stress-free to build complex page structures without having to touch code.

Conclusion

There is no such thing as a surefire method for selecting the best WordPress theme.

All you can do is prepare yourself with as many facts & figures as possible in order to make a wise decision.

DSIM Team
DSIM Blog is created to help you to know all aspects of Digital Marketing ranging from basics of Digital Marketing to Advance Level Topics, Read our posts and feel free to reach our team for any queries.

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