Choosing a theme for WordPress

There are many different considerations when choosing a theme for WordPress, because a theme has a huge impact on the user experience of your visitors. The speed of your website, the security of your website and the overall performance. Therefore, choosing a theme is a consideration you should make. Let's take a look at the things to consider when doing so.

A theme for your WordPress website is the foundation of your website, without a theme a WordPress website is nothing. And with the wrong theme, a WordPress website can be unstable, slow and provide a negative user experience. With a theme from WordPress itself, many people are always satisfied. For those who want more, there is a theme that can be installed through the admin environment of WordPress itself. Or you can buy one from a provider like themeforest or others. For around 50 euros, you often already have a theme. If you go beyond that and hire an agency to design your theme, the costs can add up quickly. It all depends on how much budget you have for your website. A startup will opt for a quick and inexpensive solution. SMEs that want certain features on the website in addition to just an online business card will quickly spend more.

Always educate yourself and read others' experiences with any solution, and contact us for more information if needed. We've seen it happen more than once that people end up switching to another theme because, for example, an ordering system wasn't possible after all. These are often expensive problems if you don't discover them until later. So be prepared and do your homework on your theme. Both for purchased themes and for free themes.

The security of a theme

To check the security of a theme, there are actually only a few steps involved. The first thing you should do is check how many updates are published and if this is done with reasonable regularity. You can read the reviews on the Internet and check if this theme has been in the news frequently because of security breaches. This can be checked in various sources. If you find leaks here that took a long time to be patched or were ignored for a long time, this is a sign that you should stay away from the theme.

Also, it is important that a theme is suitable for the latest stable PHP versions, which is important not only for security, but also for the speed of a website. More on this below.

Determining the speed of a theme in WordPress

To determine the speed of a theme, a number of factors need to be considered. Like any WordPress website host, we recommend hosting on an SSD package. WordPress benefits from the faster load times that SSD drives offer, and we also recommend using a MariaDB database. This is a newer true open source database that can be considered the spiritual successor to MySQL.

Also, pay attention to the values displayed by Google Pagespeeds. This is an important metric for both your visitors' final user experience and Google ranking. A fast website brings many benefits to the user. And it can also ensure that your conversion rate increases and that there is more interaction on your website in general.

Of course, a theme is tested in perfect conditions with the given specifications, so you should always keep in mind that these numbers can be a bit higher. If you use our Total SSD packages it will be fast, with our Managed WordPress Hosting packages it will be lightning fast, thanks to the dedicated resources your website will receive. This, of course, explains the price difference between these packages.

Requirements and features that are important for you

With a website, you can have several visions for what you want to have on it, yes or no. A large number of requests will always be standard in a theme. For example, a responsive design that makes your website suitable for mobile devices with different screen sizes. And as many pages as you want. However, certain features, such as a blog post slider on the homepage, may not be included by default. So take a look at all the features you want and make a list of them. You can then keep it with you when you are looking for a theme for your WordPress website.

Of course, discuss this with your colleagues to find out what features might be important to them. You may be too close to them and overlook them. Most popular WordPress themes like Astra and GeneratePress offer a lot of functionality, security and speed.

Installing a theme builder, why or why not?

A theme builder is a plugin that is installed along with your theme. This is often a way to make websites a little more personal. This software is always a big drain on the WordPress website. And is often used by cheaper website agencies to create their "own" theme. Always keep this in mind when looking for an agency.

Theme builders will also lose popularity starting with WordPress 5.9, WordPress itself is in the process of expanding this to a select number of themes. This could cause some excitement in this market. And we look forward to the changes that will occur.

Have you already found a WordPress theme for your website? Or where has the decision been for you? Let us know via social media! We'd love to hear what you're working on right now.