Points To Mull Over Before Investing In A premium WordPress Theme

While designing a WordPress website, the first decision that you need to take is whether you want to go ahead with a free WordPress theme or want to invest in a premium one. But, once you decide to buy a premium theme, the next problem that you encounter in which one to buy. Here are Points To Mull Over Before Investing In A premium WordPress Theme.

There are so many options to choose from, that its natural for the website owners to get overwhelmed about which theme they should buy. As far as design and overall layout are concerned, there is a myriad of amazing choices in each niche.

If you have no idea that how you can shortlist the themes and are confused about which one would ideally suit your requirements, then, here are some vital points that can help you to narrow down the potential choices and choose the best theme. You can judge all the themes from the below-given perspectives, and it will make it easier for you to arrive at a decision.

Website Niche

The first and foremost point which you need to consider is that what is the niche of your website. Whether you want to start a blog or a business website, whether you are looking forward to starting a travel portal or want to develop an eCommerce website, whether you want to develop an informative website with blogs & articles or want to develop an e-learning website.

Depending on the niche, one should select the theme. A theme designed for a specific niche will not work well for the others. For instance, if a niche has been designed for an eCommerce website, it will not suit a blog or a content-oriented website. Thus, before purchasing the theme, ensure that its ideal for your web domain.

Customization

There are plenty of good premium themes, but, one needs to take a wise decision while choosing one of the best themes.

Unless you are able to customize your theme, your website will look quite similar to the other WordPress websites which have used the same theme. Thus, while choosing one of the premium themes, it’s vital that you ensure that it allows customization.

The premium theme in which you invest must include basic inbuilt customization abilities. Most of the vendors sell the theme by telling the customers that the theme is customizable, but in order to do that, one needs to open up the code and edit it manually. Not everyone is savvy enough to edit the code and thus, you need a theme which has inbuilt customization functionalities through which anyone can make the changes in the underlying appearance of the theme.

The customization abilities which you must look for include:

Customize the logo placement
Editing of homepage layout
Customization of an underlying color palette
Ability to add header and footer scripts
Multiple Menu Placements
Editing Footer Elements

Also, the ability to customize the sidebars, widgets and other features can prove useful for your WordPress website.

Responsive Design

One of the utmost requisites for the success of a website in today’s mobile devices driven world is that your website should be able to adjust its display according to the screen size on which it is being viewed.

Today, most customers prefer browsing the internet from their mobile devices, and a website which has not been optimized for all sorts of devices will not only annoy your visitors but can also affect your Google rankings.

It is, therefore, exceedingly important that you choose a responsive WordPress theme for your website or blog, and inquire this before paying for the theme.

Also, don’t just rely on what vendor is saying, it’s imperative that you check the responsiveness of the theme yourself by taking the demo theme, installing it and testing its responsiveness and user-friendliness on different screen sizes.

Information Architecture of the Theme

While most us believe that the primary aspects of the theme are the colors or fonts, but in reality, a theme controls the overall layout of the website, the navigation options as well as the different user interface options.

Also, the information architecture of the theme implies that how the information will be placed on a website depends majorly on the theme.

Ultimately, you are developing the website for your online visitors who would not just look at the color and overall looks of the website, but, will also interact with it. Thus, while deciding about purchasing a premium WordPress theme focus on what type of footer widget it provides, how your information and web content will look, how easy it would be for users to navigate to the different places and what layouts does the theme provides.

Plugin Compatibility

When you are spending money on a premium WordPress theme, it’s important that you check every aspect of the theme with respect to your website’s current and future requirements.

Plug-ins are like the apps for the WordPress websites that facilitate various functionalities. By using apt plug-ins on a WordPress website, one can optimize the website for the search engines, users and can gain a high traffic influx. There is a myriad of plugins to choose from in each category and website niche.

But, before selecting a theme, it’s important to ensure that it would be compatible with all the plugins that you want to use on your WordPress website. If the theme that you have purchased does not support all the required plugins, it would be a mere waste of time and money.

One of the problems which many website owners face is that they don’t know that which plugins they would use and thus, it becomes difficult to ensure compatibility of the plugins with the theme.

In such scenario, you can check the list of the recommended plugins for each website niche and ensure that the theme you are going to purchase is compatible with those plugins. One can also check the theme documentation to find out about the theme compatibility.

SEO Friendliness

One of the aspects of the premium WordPress themes which cannot be ignored is its SEO friendliness. In today’s time, when there is a cutting-edge competition between the businesses, you cannot afford to have a website which is not SEO friendly and does not have good search engine rankings.

A theme must be able to support the “Technical SEO”, that is, The website allows the Google to access and understand it properly.

Google does not view the website like we do. The design elements and overall look don’t matter much to Google, instead it looks for the aspects like how fast the website is, what are the SEO elements of each page like keywords, meta descriptions, page titles, headers etc.

If your website has the below given technical SEO issues, it will not be ranked well by Google.