Today I will explain to you things you should look for before picking a WordPress theme or Templates. With so many choices available, how do you choose a WordPress theme? The WordPress ecosystem has grown exponentially in the last few years and there’s a never-ending supply of WordPress themes coming from independent developers and marketplaces.
Most WordPress theme developers have a demo website where you can thoroughly evaluate the various features of their themes and these live demos can help you decide whether a theme is worth having or not. The not only design is the most important factor but many other things you must check before choosing a WordPress theme.
Tips for Choosing a WordPress Theme
Theme Must Be Responsive: While testing for responsiveness, pay special attention to how the various menus, inline tables, and search boxes behave as you resize the browser. If you are buying a new WordPress theme, make sure that it uses responsive design and this looks good on all screens from 27″ monitors to 10″ tablets to 4″ mobile phones.
The theme must be fast enough: The Google tool will help you quickly analyze the performance of various web pages of a WordPress powered site and you should prefer a theme with a page score higher than 70. Take the URL of the live version of a WordPress theme and perform a speed test.
Check the theme customizable or not: A theme should allow you to switch to a different color scheme or let you use another font family without having to fiddle with CSS. While any WordPress theme can be edited, you need not have to go to a programmer to make minor changes. Can you change the width of the sidebar, or remove it completely, without changing any HTML?
The theme update time: Don’t go for themes that are elegant but haven’t been updated in the past six months or ones that aren’t compatible with the most recent version of WordPress. Look for the changelog where theme developers detail new features that have been added to the theme and the various bugs that have been fixed over time.
Check script code: I would also prefer to go with WordPress themes that use CSS sprites and icon fonts for small graphics. Open the HTML source of a WordPress theme and count the number of <script> tags. If you find half a dozen scripts embedded on that page, it may be a good idea to explore other themes.
Check the code is semantic: View the source code of your WordPress pages and look for semantic tags like section, article, footer, etc. Well-formed semantic HTML5 markup helps search engines better understand the structured information inside your web pages. You can also use the W3.org tool to know the semantics data available in a WordPress theme.
Code must be intelligent: A good theme should conditionally add JavaScript – the slider related JavaScript code should be included on pages that have the slider and not on every page of the site. WordPress theme developers rely on JavaScript and jQuery plugins to add “visual” features like sliders, star ratings, social sharing buttons, syntax highlighting, animated transitions, etc. but these elements increase the weight of the page.
Must check they offer support: Do they have a support forum? Are the theme developers actively answering user queries? This will also help you discover other websites where that particular WordPress theme is currently live. Once you buy a new theme, you’ll most definitely have questions regarding installation and customization of the theme.
The theme must be original: Websites like Medium or Quartz have excellent designs and you can easily find dozens of WordPress themes — both free and commercial — that are exact clones of these beautiful websites.
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