Top Criteria to Consider for Your WordPress Theme

While launching your WordPress site, you may have across a myriad of theme options. Free and premium, simple and erratic, minimalistic and elaborate… Is it good? Yes and no. Yes, because you are most likely to find what you want, and no, as the variety of choice is overwhelming. To make your life easier, you should consider the following yardsticks before opting for a WordPress theme:

• 1. Quality. Decide whether you want a free or paid option. While free themes are always alluring budget-wise, premium themes have undeniable benefits: their own custom administration panel and more customization settings. However, your main criterion of choice should be the quality. The most reliable and perhaps easiest way to assess quality is to read customer reviews. You can also read what others have to say about a particular theme on public support forum. Also, you should consider how promptly and effectively the developers are responding to the issues.
• 2. SEO. WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly platforms if you choose a proper SEO plugin. However, it’s not completely errorless. When selecting a theme, check out if it’s described as “SEO optimized” or “SEO ready”. A caveat: trust but test. A lot of developers might put this description to just to sell their theme. What you have to do is to install an extension for the Chrome browser, such as MozBar or SEO Site Tools, to run SEO checks.

• 3. Design. Like it or not, people subconsciously choose to read the content which is “served” with appealing design. Of course, design can be quite subjective, but still you can follow some basic rules to pick the best theme for your site. What you have to do is to search on websites where the outstanding designers sell their themes. Besides, you can browse the demo of the theme and trust your gut feel. For instance, if the theme doesn’t seem exciting and enticing, or your eyes hurt when you look at it, it’s perhaps not the best choice.
• 4. Security. Your site is constantly posed to threats. To avoid some of the risks, you should buy a theme directly from its developer’s website, but beforehand, do so evaluate it on a community website with clear-cut reviews. The overall customers’ assessments should hint you whether the theme is well-protected or not.

To sum up, one of the wisest things you can do when choosing a theme is to gather as much information about the developer as possible. If they have a reliable reputation and overall positive reviews, you should give more perks to their themes.

Having in mind that no theme is perfect you will have to make some compromises. With the recommendations to consider in this post, you will be informed and thus more protected against a low-quality or not-so-user-friendly theme.