How To Pick The Perfect WordPress Theme For Your Blog

WordPress is the most used publishing content CMS all over the world. It lets you write content for blogs very easily by installing a good WordPress theme. Today, we are going to look at how to pick the perfect WordPress theme for your blog.

There are over 10,000 WordPress themes on its official website.

That is a huge number. So, then how do you narrow down your search for finding the best WordPress theme for your blog?

Choosing the Perfect WordPress Theme For Your Blog

It starts with determining what all you will need from the theme, what are you going to do on your website, etc. If you want detailed information about every popular wordpress theme bloggingidol is the perfect resource.

First Create A List Of Features You Need

The key to all the below steps to fall smoothly is to first understand what are the features you’d need from a WordPress theme

In order to get there, the official WordPress website has something called the Feature Filter.

For me, I would choose a theme with;

Accessibility Ready
Mobile Responsive
SEO-friendly
At least 3 column layouts
Supports Sidebars
Lets you custom design Header and Footers
Has a Blog section

These are the bare minimum requirements I would need if I were to pick the perfect WordPress theme for a Blog.

Never Pick Themes With Lots Of Bloatware

This is a crucial step in order to make your website run fast and perform better.

Feature-rich themes are just so good, you just can’t let them go. But, be sure they do not hurt your site’s performance in the future.

Wisely select the themes that have a lot of features, but see to it that you turn off those features when not needed. This is the most you can do if you aren’t tech-savvy and don’t know a thing about PHP and/or CSS.

Make Sure The Theme You Choose Is Responsive

Nowadays, most of the themes shown on the WordPress repository are mobile-responsive.

You will always need this feature, as it makes your site easily accessible and readable by your visitors.

After installing a theme, you wouldn’t want to actually code differently for each and every device’s visibility. Otherwise, what is the point of even getting a WordPress theme?

Simple customizations here and there are totally fine, that is acceptable. But, not as a whole.

Therefore, get a Mobile Responsive WordPress Theme.

Look For Themes With Different Layouts

By the word Layout, I mean how the content would look on your website’s page, single post, category pages, 404 pages etc.

It is not good to have a single layout style for all of this. That does not make your content stand out on its own.

For example, I use a theme that has got at least 4 to 5 pages and post structures for my site’s pages and single blog posts respectively. Remember, I wrote about having 3-column layouts in a theme. This comes in handy when you want to select a 3 X 3 Grid-styled Category page or Blog Page structure.

Know Your Color

Colors are a visually appealing parameter of a website.

It is important to know your Brand’s color beforehand so that you can easily make the decision of choosing a theme that offers that kind of a color scheme.

Plus, remember most of the websites have a light color palette unless otherwise the niche or industry needs darker colors to exemplify the site’s content.

Many WordPress themes offer multiple color palettes and an intuitive customizer to recognize the best alternative palette if you do not like the first one.

The Theme Should Have Easy To Read Fonts

This point is important to capture your reader’s attention.

You cannot bore your visitors with tons of textual content that is so hard to read, they almost get a headache after completely reading an article.

Reading should be fun. For that, you have to select a theme that includes easy-to-read fonts.

Later on, you can go for font pairing. To give a good look to all your headings against paragraph content.

I always go for the combination of Arial and Helvetica fonts.

Test the Theme Before Buying

I agree that WordPress showcases lots of free themes, and it is okay if you want to start off with a free theme in the beginning.

But, it is highly advisable to test any theme before you make your decision.

How will you test a theme?

Get one of the free themes from WordPress and apply it on staging sites or staging environments. This is possible by third-party staging sites or some hosting providers also offer this kind of feature.

Download and install a child theme, and see what all you can do with the theme.

Create a homepage, write some content, make some pages, tweak your sites colors, fonts and appearance, and see how well your site responds.

This is how you thoroughly test a WordPress theme.

Always Buy A Premium WordPress Theme

If you are a beginner or starting out new, it is fine going with free WordPress themes.

But, down the line, as your website grows, you will have to go for a premium theme.

The perks of having a premium WordPress theme are that you get all the theme’s official documentation and support from the developers and other experts, in the form of chat or email.

If you mess up something in your theme, they can easily navigate you and help you resolve the problem, without causing further damage to your website.

Plus, many theme developers only offer import and export options for all the files, if you purchase their premium license. This is an important point if you wish to change themes in the future.

Conclusion

I hope this guide has easily given you the gist of an idea of how to pick the perfect WordPress theme for your blog.

Just follow these steps, and you will be okay with your website.

The best point about WordPress is that you can always change themes if you find some interesting features down the road with other latest themes.