If you are building your website on WordPress, with the implementation of a great theme, you can have your website up and running in no time. The hardest part may be to choose the theme that you want to use. Today’s themes come with what seems like unlimited options and knowing what you actually need could be hard. While I can’t help you choose the theme, here are some guidelines that we use to help us choose a theme when necessary. A while back we went through this process and at that time, we found a theme that we were happy with and have used it for all our websites that we have built ever since.
Popularity
If you are buying a theme on a platform like Themeforest, they list the number of sales for each theme. Make sure that your potential theme is being bought by other people. If there are only a handful of sales, they may not be real sales. Usually there is a reason that a theme has so many sales, and that is because it is a good theme and people are happy with it. Use the number of sales as an indication for a good theme.
Support
You need to make sure that there is support for your theme for 2 reasons. Firstly, you want to make sure that the theme is constantly being updated. There are always changes to WordPress, and the theme needs to make sure it does not conflict with those changes. Most of those changes are focused around security, so if you don’t want your site to be hacked, these are important. Secondly if you have any trouble setting up your theme, you want to know how responsive the theme author is to help you. Many themes have forums or a help desk that has a lot of information about the theme and common issues that people have had. Themes that offer good support could end up saving you a lot of time and money. Here are 2 different theme options and it clearly says when they were last updated. Obviously choosing the one that is more recent makes more sense.
Reviews
Check out the ratings of your potential theme. If you are purchasing your theme on a platform like Themeforest, customer ratings are listed. Take advantage of this and see what people have to say about the product that you are about to buy. If you have questions, sometimes they are common questions and you can find the answers in the comments as well. People that have actually tested out a product have a much better sense of it.
Page Builder
Not all developers like to use page builders but if you are not a developer (like me) but like to be able to lay out pages and build them how you want, then you will want a theme that uses a page builder. Elementor, Fusion and WP bakery are some of the popular page builders. They have tons of options that make building a page with great features really easy. You can build your page to have as many elements as you want and don’t need to worry about designing every single element of the feature because it is already there. The below image is just some options that you can easily add to your page. All you need to do is choose the element and then you can customize it for your needs.
Demos
There are certain themes that come with pre-built demos. The ones that I have seen are simply gorgeous. They are professionally done with great colors and layouts. Obviously, everything can be customized for your brand but technically you could upload a demo and have a great site in a matter of minutes. You will probably need to use your own images and color scheme but the layout of your site is all there. This is a great framework to get started with and then you can continue building your site from there, saving yourself tons of time in the process.
Good luck finding a theme!