For new website owners, it can be difficult to understand the significance of an effective Wordpress Theme and design. If you’re intent on making a success of your online business, the overall determinant isn’t necessarily your wonderful product or service alone, but often your website and its entire user interface plays a key role. The layout of your site holds a captivating power to your audience which can lead to the kinds of traffic and backlinks that hold the potential to greatly enhance your page ranking from Google. The trick here is to make yourself a website that’s a joy to behold in terms of both strong usability and aesthetics. Why is concentrating on how your website looks so important? Well, for every subject or service your site covers, there are thousands of other pages out there are offering exactly the same thing. Put simply; they want the same visitors and customers that you want. If you must have the lion’s share from the competitive market, it all starts with your website design – “YOUR WordPress THEME”.

So, how do you get the best WordPress theme for your website? If you aren’t a web developer, you’ll actually need to go deeper into finding the best design. This is vital because virtually all WordPress themes are very important in the sense that all serve different specific purposes very well. No theme is useless, but it has a particular use, and your job is to find out which layout suits your needs best. For example, if you’re building a website for commercial use or simply for product sales, you’ll need a different WordPress theme to what you would for a site which will mostly be focused on students’ database analysis or focusing on news or political research. There’s clearly a lot to take in when picking what your new website is going to look like. But fear not, because below we have a list that offers a walkthrough of 10 foolproof approaches to take into consideration when choosing a theme for your website.

The 10 foolproof things to consider when choosing theme for your website

What You Want To Build

This is the beginning of your journey – and knowing exactly what you want to build is the most significant hurdle to overcome on your path to success. Are you creating a business, portfolio, blog or niche website? Your answer directs you to the suitable theme.

Paid or Free?

Of course, premium WordPress designs generally look considerably better than free themes especially in design and user-interface simplicity? Although many free WordPress themes seem just as aesthetically impressive, however, the difference can often be found in their functionalities. While definitely not a rule-of-thumb, in the world of WordPress design, you tend to get what you pay for.

Content

Your content is your business – and one of the best ways to keep your audience engaged is to have quality content up on your site at all times. The difficulty here is that your business needs your love and attention 24 hours a day – but even the most passionate of website owners can’t commit to 24/7 engagement. So, while you’re away from your business, it’s down to your content to keep your audience coming back and reading more. You can’t overestimate the luring power of quality copy to keep your old customers or drive new ones.

Simplicity

Simplicity really does matter when deciding on a website theme. A design with a good layout that completely supports your website goal is what you need. However, it’s imperative to consider your audience or customers while choosing your theme. The more simplified your website design, the better the navigation and usability will be for your target audience. Fundamentally, it should be as simple as possible and never complicated.

Don’t Neglect Responsiveness

The necessity of having a responsive site can’t be emphasised enough.
In the age where mobile devices are taking up the lead of internet usage, you’ll need a responsive WordPress theme that can easily adjust to fit any screen resolution to suit your client or audience requirement at all times and in all situations.

It’s impossible for your clients to stay connected to their PC around the clock, and if your theme isn’t responsive, you run the risk of losing out on your share of traffic. Also, mobile-friendly websites are generally displayed higher on Google mobile searches and it’s essential that you’re able to tap into that too.

Available Plugins

The real power of a WordPress theme is dependent on the plugins that bring the best out of your website functionality. It’s imperative to make sure your website layout supports all the popular plugins before choosing the theme. You can ask the theme developers to verify as much before picking your design.

Compatibility With Browsers

Just because your theme works perfectly with your browser, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will perform as competently with all other available browsers that your visitors may be using. Although most of the WordPress theme developers rigorously test their designs for browser compatibility, there’s every need to ensure that your website has optimum accessibility before taking the plunge and constructing your site around your favourite theme. Check if your layout can conveniently run on Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer etc. and also verify that they’re mobile friendly too.

Check for Translation

You’re picking a theme with the primary goal of providing your visitors with an optimum experience when accessing your website. So, why not get a WordPress theme with Language Translation ready? Many of your users may be visiting your site from overseas, and catering to a non-English speaking audience could expand your reach exponentially.

Support Options

It’s worth looking into whether the WordPress themes you’re considering offer technical support. Most of the free designs don’t have the function of calling for external help, but virtually all paid themes do. The support option is a convenient way to reach out to your theme developer to redeem any harm done to your layout while using it. If this option isn’t available, you’ll risk having to find a solution alone.

SEO Friendliness

Your choice of theme also has ramifications on your SEO. It has a considerable impact on your site’s search engine rankings if your HTML is poorly coded. Determining whether your layout is beneficial to SEO is a difficult challenge for you to analyse on your own, so be sure to have this verified by the theme developer.

Bonus Tip:

Although it pays to be wary of five-star reviews when good ratings can easily be bought and sold online, it’s worth bringing a highly rated theme into consideration. User experience is always going to differ in subjectivity, but looking for the layouts that people seem to be happy with is a very effective way of separating the wheat from the chaff when browsing the hundreds of themes that WordPress has to boast.

Author Bio:

I’m a founder of WPKube, a popular WordPress resource website. My work has been featured & mentioned in a wide range of publications, including Smart Insights, The Next Web, SpeckyBoy, Creative Blog, The Huffington Post, SEJ and Smart Blogger.