If you decide to start working on WordPress you should know the second points. One of the advantages of the WordPress platform is, directly, the availability of a huge number of different themes for the site. A wide range of free and premium themes gives you the opportunity to make your site stand out from others created on the same platform. Read more about how start on WordPress –>
While the look and feel of a website theme is likely to be the deciding factor when choosing a theme, we will still give you 5 tips to consider when choosing a theme for your WordPress site.
Design and plugins
From an objective point of view, themes create the design of the entire site, and plugins should provide additional features when working with it. However, not all themes correspond to this, and often you can find a bunch of unnecessary functions and features in themes.
This approach of developers to creating a theme is justified by the fact that they do not need to spend time in the future supporting their product. Moreover, in this way they reinsure themselves against copying and using their ideas, on which a lot of time and effort was spent by someone else.
But some of them do have a lot of requested additional features, especially those that affect the appearance of the site and its functionality. This includes placing custom posts in the slider or adding presentations. However, for the end user, using shortcode features that include buttons, columns, and other page elements along with user posts that are available in the theme can have long-term implications.
If you opt for a theme that has most of these options available, regardless of plugins, then using the theme in the future can turn out to be not a very pleasant process. But, if the plugin is used, then the theme can be changed without changing the functionality on which the content of your site depends.
With this fact in mind, it is very important to know how the additional features of the chosen theme are provided. If it does not provide plugin support, but the theme contains many additional features on WordPress, then you should be careful in choosing this theme.
Animations and effects
When choosing a theme for a website, it’s very easy to get caught up in the presence of a lot of bright design features. These can be animations, effects that appear when scrolling the site page, the presence of sliders, etc.
While at first glance, these theme features may seem very important, they can also have a completely different effect on site visitors and spoil the impression of it as a whole. Such “stuffing” of the site does not ensure its competitiveness.
The most striking example of how to attract the visitor’s attention and place all the information on one page is the use of sliders. They became especially trendy back in 2012 and are still present in most WordPress themes.
Should I buy a free version?
Of course, it’s always nice to get something for free, especially if you only offer paid functionality around. However, as they say, free cheese is only in a mousetrap. And it is precisely the case with a free theme that may turn out to be another trick.
And while many developers do make some or all of the themes available for free, not to mention the website template kits that are available on WordPress.org, this is not always the case. Downloading a free theme from an unknown source can easily infect your computer with a virus.
Another thing to note is that using a free theme means your site will look like hundreds, maybe thousands, of others who have chosen the same template.
Also make sure that this topic is provided by the support service. If it’s not accompanied by other suggestions from the developers, then it won’t be worth it for them to spend their time updating it and checking to see if it keeps up with and conforms to changes in WordPress.
If support for your chosen theme is important to you, be it free or paid, the free Theme Authenticity Checker plugin can scan your site for malicious or unwanted code.
Product should be supported by its developer
When choosing a theme for a site, it is very important to make sure that this product is supported by its developers. Some so-called “theme clubs” allow you to view their support forums and documentation online before selling you one of the themes.
Before purchasing a theme, this makes it possible to track how quickly the creators of the product respond to user questions. If possible, it is highly recommended to stay up to date with all the theme updates. Sometimes they are published on the company blog or published in some publicly accessible source.
Control panel
When installing a theme, more work will be done through the options on the site page. This control panel, depending on the selected theme, can help you perform actions such as uploading a company logo, changing the background color, font, and more.
Since this is a very important part of the theme, it would be good to try and see how practical this feature is to use. And while some developers insist on creating their own settings panels, in reality they may be completely unnecessary.
There are great free plugins out there that make it easy to add well-designed features to your theme of choice. That is why those patterns that do not correspond to this will simply disappear in the near future.
To sum up
If you are faced with choosing a particular WordPress theme, then a lot of factors can play a decisive role. In most cases, this is how attractive the page looks. And only and only then – how much does it correspond to the functionality of the site that you want to create.
Luckily, if you take into account all of the above factors, you will not only increase your chances of getting a visually appealing theme, but also a theme with really user-friendly functionality.
And before you make your choice of topic, ask yourself, what is really important to you when creating a website? And how often in your life have you regretted the choice you made, not relying on other people’s advice?
Source: hostens.com
