How to choose The Right WordPress Theme for your Blog

Jai sethi
6 min readJun 19, 2022

Because there are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes are available, most of the bloggers especially the beginners find it difficult to choose the perfect theme. The overwhelming situation arises when you have lack of genuine guide and not understanding the needs appropriately.

The most perplexing matter is each theme is better than the other with look or functioning. So, how would you get over with this difficult situation? To overcome this real fight, I have written this article by describing the points in details. After reading the post, I’m sure, you’ll face no more complexity before selecting a theme which fills your requirements up to the mark.

Is It Necessary To Be Careful while choosing wordpress themes?

This question may pop up in your mind, “why should I choose the theme carefully?” Of, course you can buy a theme which has the most positive review or you can follow a special recommendation from your friend.

WordPress is notably a large market where you can find almost all kind of niche-specific theme. That’s why each theme represents a particular industry.

Your WordPress theme must be germane to the exact niche you’re working. For instance, if you have a photography site then you need to select photography themes so that images look great. A blog should be interesting to read and visually appealing.

Prefer Good looking Themes

Good looking means a combination of a lot of things. But, above all, simplicity is undoubtedly a criterion that can’t be debated. The most beautiful objects in the world are not complex.

You can find WP themes with a number of color variations, obtrusive layouts, and filled with a huge amount of options on the design. Maybe they’re essential. But sometimes, you can ignore them.

An overly complicated presentation may bring you more troubles with less traffic. That’s why a simple theme is a wise selection which ensures eye-pleasing user experience and a maximum number of visitors.

GeneratePress theme is also a great option for any type of blogs, It comes with two versions, Free and Paid, You can see a quick comparison of GeneratePress Free vs Premium Version.

Don’t get me confused here. You surely need a beautiful theme but not that one which can’t offer great services. Users feel comfortable where they find the information without much complexity.

I’m giving you here a list of simple and beautiful WordPress themes.

Responsive is Not Optional Anymore

Your site must work very well on multiple devices with different size of the screens, otherwise, you’ll lose some of the most valuable traffic. Not a just a random number of people browse from the mobile phones but the users from handheld devices are extensive that one can’t deny the importance of keeping their site mobile-adaptive. You must choose responsive WordPress themes.

Google already revealed that it arranges the search result differently on the mobile phones. No matter what is your site about or what are the targeted locations — the website must be responsive.

Most WordPress themes of today are mobile-friendly and based on Bootstrap. Anyway, if you want to check instantly if a site is responsive or not, you can do it by resizing the browser screen. When the screen is getting smaller the site should automatically adjust without breaking the layout.

Bootstrap WordPress themes can help you gain more visitors since they perfectly fit across the multiple devices. Since some developers still use fixed layout you should be careful before choosing a particular theme.

Browser Compatibility

Don’t get narrow here. All users don’t come from Chrome although it’s the most popular browser on the planet. Users can browse from different browsers and your site should accommodate on the various platforms.

Make sure the theme works on other browsers except from your default one. The site at least works on the top popular browsers as Chrome, Internet Explorer and Edge, Firefox, and Safari. The rest will be fine and there are not too many users of them.

Using browser compatibility testing tools, developers test the themes to ensure the site won’t break in different settings. Although they mention it in the description as which browsers are compatible with this theme, you can check this yourself, as well.

Plugins Support

WordPress is so powerful platform because of the plugins which make this awesome CMS more reliable and user-friendly. You can achieve the power to perform various tasks with the countless plugins. If you want to enjoy the benefits that these plugins provide you must choose a theme that supports them.

Not necessary your site will be compatible with all the plugins available out there. But there are certain plugins which are considered as the mandatory tools and you need them for your betterment. Yoast, W3 Total Cache, Akismet, JetPack, Gravity Forms — these are some of the most needed plugins.

Before buying a theme, check which plugins it supports. If you want something specific you should ask the developer about it.

Multilingual Ready — A Real Gem

English is a popular language and widely used whether offline or online. That necessarily doesn’t mean people from other languages can’t enjoy their language in the websites. Fortunately, WordPress will help you to publish your website in multiple languages.

Translation ready WordPress themes will allow you create a stunning website which is ready to translate to other languages than English. If you have the plan to build a multilingual website then make sure your theme supports that.

Page Builders for Easy Creation

The benefits of a drag and drop page builder are immense. Not only the novice will love it but the nerds can enjoy it because it saves time in a large scale. Also, the builders give the users a great chance to create beautiful websites instantly. That requires no coding knowledge, firstly and lastly.

Premium WordPress themes mostly come with a default page builder. For Example: Divi Theme , it comes with it’s own divi page builder. Sometimes developers build it for the particular theme only and in other cases, they buy the license from a premium builder plugin and let it use their customers.

Well, the best option for you will be to choose themes that come with the most popular plugins such as Visual Composer, Site Origin’s Page Builder, Themify, or Divi. If you can possibly buy a page builder for yourself that will be very helpful that you can apply to other themes as well.

Support Options When You Need Help

Generally, premium WordPress themes provide support while the free WordPress themes lack of it which creates troubles for the users. Nobody is the ultimate coder and sometimes even the expert ones can fall a situation where they might some sort of help. It happens because the mechanism was developed by someone else.

Only the original creator of a theme can help you out when you’re stuck at some point regarding the theme, especially on the technical issues. Make sure you chose a theme that has an amiable support system where people get the solution when they need.

WordPress themes include documentation, also. Before you select a theme check if it has the clear and well-described documentation so that even the people with a little coding knowledge can customize accurately. In other words, themes that help you with necessary support are the best themes to buy.

Obviously SEO Friendly

Check the theme whether it’s SEO-friendly. Is it needed to be checked? Yes, of course. If you don’t have a bit of idea, SEO is the catalyst to survive on the highly combative battle. The site with the better SEO has the power to gain primary victory. Although there are other metrics regarding SEO the theme should be structured based on the Google’s recommendation.

There might be dirty elements inside a good-looking WordPress theme and you’ll get eventually pay for it. As a beginner or a novice developer, you might not probe the code and find out the status of SEO. FYI, most of the premium themes mention it if its pages are optimized.

For a general notion, the high-quality themes mean they are on the top-class for SEO. Pay for the best in order to get the optimum quality while you’re on the race of big competition.

User’s Reviews Tell a Lot

Check what users are saying about a particular theme before making the decision to purchase it or not. Because the buyers already bought it so they know what’s inside it so their insights are very useful. I must say it’s a genuine signal.

The third-party marketplace like ThemeForest, you will find the ratings and reviews on the bottom of a theme description. Also, you can see the number of persons reviewed it and gave star ratings.

It’s possible to get an idea how a theme is and what quality it holds by reading the reviews. Even, you are going to find some of the negative sides of a theme. Either way, you should be careful while checking them out.

Wrapping Up

I have already added the best WordPress themes which cover almost all niches. You can read the post and decide which one goes with your requirements. For high-performance multipurpose WordPress themes, I’ve written a long post. Don’t miss to check it out, as well.

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Jai sethi

Jai sethi is a professional blogger and digital marketer, you can find his work on bloggingsurfer.com