Choosing The Best Free WordPress Themes

Using Wordpress is great because of the endless options available when choosing amongst The Best Free WordPress Themes.However, because you don’t exactly know what to look for, this can be overwhelming for beginners. Furthermore, a poor decision on theme selection will make development quite stressful.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that as a result of picking the wrong theme your web development experience is a nightmare! The first site that I built The Burlesque Baller, was way more challenging than it needed to be! Like any other poor white trash developer on a budget, naturally I was drawn to free. I cycled through hundreds of themes and the trend seemed to be to bait you in with pictures and presentation. Coming in the form of a “light theme,” More often than not these bait themes sucked and were not the Best Free Wordpress Themes.

Once you install the theme somehow an essential option or feature is only available with their premium version! I ended up investing $60 bucks in a premium theme thinking it would speed up the process. However take it from my experience, just because a theme costs money, doesn’t guarantee quality! That being said, also note that just because a theme is free, doesn’t mean it sucks!

When it comes to software suprisingly enough some of the most amazing and high end products are FREE!!! For example, 90% of all the websites hosted worldwide are run off Apache. Apache server software is open-source, meaning it doesn’t cost you anything! Therefore, the only benefit you necessarily get when paying for a theme is more options and more selection.

Building your first website requires you to learn quite a bit as it is, so let’s try to keep things simple! Chances are you will be developing in a desktop environment, so the first prerequisite is crucial.

Make Sure Your Theme Is Mobile Responsive

The trend of accessing the internet from a mobile device will only increase as technology advances. Therefore a theme’s responsivity for mobile is very important when choosing The Best Free WordPress Themes. When you are developing in a desktop environment it is easy to oversight how your page looks on mobile. There is no excuse for not testing your page with alternate devices and screen sizes, a responsive theme is a must.

Having a website that isn’t responsive will hurt you in several categories:

• If your an E-commerce site your products failing to display properly can devastate your conversion rate.
• Lower Score means less keywords
• Your Keywords you’re ranking in wont be at the top of search results.
• Other Web developers including me will laugh at you and make jest of you with pranks such as Teepeeing Your house!

Getting Paid? Get A Woocommerce Compatible Theme!

If you’re domain’s not going to be selling anything, then you don’t have to worry about factoring a payment gateway. However WordPress sites requiring a payment gateway, make sure the theme is compatible with Woocommerce. Woocommerce can be one of the most painful parts of the page development process! Therefore, you don’t need any more additional snags to hem you up when trying to get through boring shit like taxanomes!

Furthermore, choosing Woocomerce compatible templates will smooth the development process with The Best Free WordPress Themes.

Identifying Good Spots To Dumpster Dive For Themes.

So now we know that we want something responsive on all platforms, and can take payments if needed. The next question is where to go about looking for the Best Free WordPress Themes. You can definitely search for themes right inside of wordpress, but personally I do my research within a search engine.

Some of the best themes when it comes to mobile responsive are built using a CSS framework of some sort. One of the most common CSS frameworks on the market is “Bootstrap.” Bootstrap just went beta with version 4.0.

Choosing a Bootstrap theme gives you the added benefit of using all of the tools in the framework’s toolkit! It most certainly is a game changer to be able to make multiple columns, menu bars and the like.

Bootstrap also includes several popup modals, a feature over a hundred WordPress plugins try to charge you for!

With a little javascript know how, and a snippet of code, you can have popups trigger when someone hits your landing page! Of coarse at this White Trash Web Developer’s favorite price… FREE!!! I found these 25 freebies  made by “Colorlib.” Only 1 or 2 of them are intended for E commerce. They definitely are some of the Best Free WordPress Themes

My Friend’s Portfolio is a decent example of what you can make out of these wonderful themes!  I only have the front page completed, but it looks beautiful none the less! As a result of the Parallax effect this “Shapely Theme uses it has a very stylish look to it! As beautiful as this theme is, it is no wonder it’s one of Colorlibs Best Free WordPress Themes.

Another sweet Portfolio/Blog Theme

Hopefully in the near future i’ll find an excuse to use this theme for something because its sweet! At first I thought it used the CSS framerwork called “Materialize” but it’s just simply the themes title. None the less, as a result of this themes lightweight and terrific layout, it’s worthy of mention!

An Import Note That Needs Mentioning!

When it comes to pages working properly, and loading fast with wordpress this simply can not be stressed enough. DOWNLOAD AS FEW PLUGINS AS POSSIBLE! Yes, it’s true they can simplify our lives and make things easier so why hold back? Because of several reasons:

• More plugins means more stuff running in the background, which will cause more loadtime!
• Vulnerabilities could become available to an attacker, especially with plugins rarely updated.
• Two plugins might not play nice together and cause one another to malfunction
• Some plugins can actually completely crash your website, for an E commerce business that’s devastating!

I’ve had Wordfence, a security theme completely break a website. Sure, I had backed up the site a day prior, but because I lost my work for that day, my 2500 long word blog was LOST! If you aspire to become a great developer, you WILL DEFINITELY break a couple installs of WordPress! However, If anyone is gonna destroy my webpage I’d rather it be me, not some stupid plug I didn’t need.

Therefore if you find a Theme that has a rediculous amount of plugins as a prerequisite, it might be best to avoid it. Chances are if you’re using a shared host, you are gonna need to have your setup be as light as possible. So make sure you periodically look over your plugins and eliminate plugins you deturmine to be baggage! A couple pointers:

• Don’t use Analytic Plugins, instead use Google.com/analytics and put your UA tracking code in the header/footer.
• Some plugins are useful but expend there helpfulness right away! Child Themify for example certainly makes the process of arbitrating your child theme quick! However because you have no use for it afterwards, uninstall it, you can always download it later if needed.
• Code it, don’t install it! Because those plugins have got to go!

Sure it’s possible to have 50 plugins running and actually get a smooth, fast load time. However, as a result of my first premium theme purchase being damn near 30 plugins it was a nightmare! Had I used a lighter theme, getting my load times down wouldn’t have taken weeks of tweaking! Plugins are meant to make your life easier not harder! Because they can be potentially doing uneccessary crap in the background less is always better. 

What Is The Best WordPress Theme?

I couldn’t answer that questions outright. One of the funnest things about making a website with a CMS is window shopping for themes! Which is why my article focused on the foundation of finding one for yourself. I cannot say I have an absolute favorite theme! Because I develop a wide range of websites, I can say I have one that I use the most.

The first, god I hate this phrase it sounds so retarded “drag and drop” setup I used was “Visual Composer.”On the plus side, visual composer has some nice options and features, however that thing is HEAVY! Even though I see things from the perspective of a programmer, I must humbly admit to the benefits of this theme.

Kill the suspense, While it can’t be listed amongst the Best Free WordPress Themes, it’s certainly the most versatile! Divi is more than just a theme, because it’s the swiss army knife of themes! The lightweight, simplicity of it’s visual editor blows visual composer out of the water! When I develop in a wordpress environment, my production time is 200-300% faster real talk! It has many notable features, however one of my absolute favorite things in it’s toolkit is blank page?

WTF do you mean blank page?

You heard me right, yes a page that’s blank is it’s best feature in my opinion and Why you ask? Because from a marketing perspective landing pages are one of the most crucial tools in your toolkit. I’ve seen only one other theme with this feature built in, not to say more don’t exist. Now, as of recent a plugin was released for producing a blank page. My coding definitely is at the level needed to just make one myself, but heres the thing. All the features and benefits this theme has makes it worth the money Elegant themes is charging!

Not only do you get access to Divi when you pay for yearly access, but you get access to every single plugin and theme Elegant offers! Had my first premium theme purchase been “Divi” rather than than “Orion”, my first success would have came much quicker.The only real negative I see in purchasing yearly access is you might miss out on a lot of learning oppertunity. Because there pretty much isn’t a thing their plugins combined with Divi 3.0 can’t do effortlessly.

So if your a developer like me, who enjoys learning computer systems inside out, this isn’t going to teach you anything. However, if you’re like I was entering a dropship niche a year ago, you want to get up and running quick! Your looking to get your shop up, and start on the grind to get the SEO game rolling. That is a whole MASSIVE chapter in and of itself which I Intend to cover and divulge my knowledge in other articles.

Hopefully as a result of reading this article you got value from it. Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter, I have yet to even send one Newsletter out, but plan to soon lol!

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