• WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet with knows CMS’es
• 500+ new WordPress websites go live every day
• The WordPress directory features 55,000+ plugins

The point I’m trying to bring home with these statistics is that WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS today, and, sure thing, there’re reasons for that:

With its limitless collection of free and paid themes, this content management system is easy to customize and use for any business or personal needs. WordPress has made online presence affordable for people of any skill level, and it offers tons of features to suit every niche, taste, and budget.

The only challenge here:

When setting up a WordPress site, you get it with a pre-installed default theme. It’s a no-brainer that you want to customize and personalize its look the best way possible. For that, you go to the WordPress library and start choosing the most beautiful theme to install right here and now.

But there’s a catch:

With hundreds of options available, it’s not that easy to do. A beautiful WordPress theme design can’t serve as a core driver if you plan your website to work well and bring results. A few more elements are worth checking before you switch to a desirable WordPress theme and layout.

After reading this article, you’ll know the core factors to consider and check when choosing the most suitable theme for your WordPress website.

Seven questions to ask before choosing a theme for your WordPress blog

• Does its visual look meet your business goals?

Depending on the content you’re going to publish on your WordPress website, make sure your chosen theme visually matches it. Whether you need a blog, an online store, an online courses website, or a website for a SaaS business, each business will have some goals. Such goals can be a newsletter subscription, the purchase of a good/service, a course enrollment, a demo registration, and more. Make thorough research and create a minimum wireframe for your site, before choosing a theme.

Now, what you should know is that not all themes allow you to make significant design changes. Some things might differ between the free and the paid plan.

For example, maybe you can’t make changes to the colors and typography. And this is a total no-no.

Choosing a WordPress theme that will help communicate your brand identity to the audience is essential. Color and font psychology matter a lot, and they need to complement the layout you choose. In the example below, you can recognize the logo colors even inside icons. Color consistency across a website with the purpose of enforcing the brand is a must for brand recall. Here, you can even see custom-made visuals in the brand colors…but this is something you will need to figure out later in your web design process.

Source: Bid4Papers.com blog

Some WordPress themes look better when used for culinary blogs, others — as clothing stores, and some will fit business landing pages perfectly. If you doubt whether your chosen theme fits your brand type and identity, feel free to “spy” on a few competitors or draw inspiration from your favorite websites.

Also, please check if a theme is too heavy with animations, complex layouts, and other interactive elements. Not only can it look messy to visitors, but it will also negatively influence your website’s loading speed and overall performance.

Think twice if those extras do matter and if your system capabilities can handle that. Fancy websites can attract visitors, but they won’t return if they can’t use them. Do your best to choose a simple yet elegant, not overly complex theme that will meet your goals.

• Is support for this theme reliable?

With so many free WordPress themes available, it may be tempting to choose one and save some cash on a website’s launch. The problem is that such themes often come with no technical support: Once you have issues with setup or whatever, you won’t have anyone to contact for assistance.

When choosing a theme, check if customer support is available, whether it’s free or not, and how long you’ll get it after assigning.

Most paid WordPress themes come with several months of premium customer help, which you can renew monthly or annually afterward. Do your best to assign a theme with solid support and documentation to ensure you’ll get reliable assistance if any problems appear.

• Is a theme customizable enough to suit your requirements?

No matter how beautiful the default layout of your chosen WordPress theme is, it will unlikely meet all your demands. That’s why it should be customizable enough to suit your brand identity and your requirements.

So, when choosing a theme, check if it’s possible to change its elements, update page components, and modify its layout one way or another.

A customizable WordPress theme is your chance to build a website that will be appealing and responsive for users. If you want to level up the theme’s options, you can use a page builder. WordPress website builders come up with pre-designed content sections and templates, and give certain themes drag and drop options. Take Kubio website builder for example. It works on top of the latest WordPress experience, and it allows a full-site block-based web design.

• Was it updated in the last six months?

As a webmaster, you’ll have to deal with your WordPress website theme’s updates and changes. So, when choosing it, check the date of its last update:

Therefore, you’ll know whether WordPress specialists continue working on this theme’s improvement and whether it’s free of bugs able to influence its overall performance.

Updates are critical for WordPress themes: Not only do they signal a theme’s security and stellar performance, but they also introduce new features you can use for a website’s improvement.

By choosing the up-to-date theme, you’ll ensure that your website is 100% compatible with the latest WordPress releases, all the major plugins, and the newest browser and mobile devices updates.

• Is it compatible with all the plugins you’re going to use? 

While the WordPress directory features thousands of different plugins (55,000+, in fact), you need to ensure your chosen theme supports the ones you’ll need for work.

Check if a theme’s codebase functions with plugins like contact forms, advanced SEO, social sharing, eCommerce functions, and so on; you’ll need them if planning to use WordPress for more than fundamental blogging.

It’s worth noting that all the most popular and regularly updating WordPress themes are compatible with those plugins. But if you decide to choose something lesser-known to stand out from the competitors, make sure it still supports all the plugins you’ll need.

Otherwise, you won’t be able to use it to the full.

For example, let’s say you want to create an online store for your hand-made crafts. Your theme needs to be Woo-Commerce ready. It needs to support WooCommerce, the WordPress plugin that gives you the eCommerce features you need. Also, it will need to allow customizations.

If you want to build an online courses website, you will need to be able to integrate a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Thinkific, Learn Dash, or others.

• Is it SEO-friendly? 

Please do your best to check the SEO aspects your chosen theme supports to decide whether it will be enough for your website’s promotion in search engines.

The thing is that some WordPress themes have no optimization for search engines like Google or Bing. If you choose such a theme, your efforts to promote the website online will be vain, and both users and the online rank tracker won’t see it.

The problem may be in a theme’s HTML coding, and the catch is that it’s challenging to analyze for SEO compliance on your own. And yet, WordPress theme developers can give you a brief checklist of its SEO aspects.

• Is it compatible with your browsers?

While most WordPress themes support all popular browsers, there’s still a slight difference in their compatibility.

For example, Google Chrome is the universal one to choose for work: Statcounter says it has more than 60% of the market share. With that in mind, WordPress themes designers may test new layouts on Chome but “forget” about the compatibility with other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge.

Source: Statcounter.com

When choosing a theme, make sure it’s compatible with all the most popular browsers, not Google Chrome only. As said, 40% of users still prefer other options, and the big chances are that your target audience is among them. So you risk losing visitors (read: traffic and conversions) if all those users can’t reach your website because of its incompatibility with their browsers.

You can find the information about the browsers your chosen theme supports on its page in the WordPress theme library. But even if it doesn’t state it, feel free to use automated tools for testing: They’ll help you verify if the theme works well.

To wrap things up, the WordPress theme’s design, with color palette, spaces, and fonts, do matter for user engagement and experience. And yet, when choosing a WordPress theme you need to look beyond the visual side. Frequent theme updates, plugin compatibility, SEO-friendliness should be challenged as well.

Now, if you liked this article, and you want to learn more about how to design a WordPress website, make sure to subscribe to our Youtube channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

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The post 7 Elements to Check Before Choosing a WordPress Theme appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

You want to change your current WordPress theme, but you’re afraid you’ll lose your data? This article will show you how to change your theme the right way.

Why would you change your theme, first?

Multiple reasons for this: you might consider the current theme outdated, as you’ve used it for several years in a row, and it’s not up to par with modern design, features you need to enrich your website or blog, and compliant with current user experience guidelines.

That’s why, time has come that you need to change your WordPress theme.

Let’s see how to properly change the WordPress theme:

Pre-checks (before actually changing the WordPress theme)

You need to check the loading speed of your website before installation of the new theme. A tool such as Pingdom might be useful, to verify that the new theme won’t impede upon the loading speed of your website pages. It’s good to pre-check the speed both of your homepage and of your inner pages.

What you need to determine is that the new theme should be faster than your previous one.

Don’t lose custom HTML and custom CSS. You need to save the custom code you’ve introduced into your website pages, as you might need it later, for your new theme.

Don’t lose tracking code, such as Google Analytics tracking code. It might be useful to take the data from the current theme used for your website to the new theme you’ll install and activate. It is to be found in the header of the website, so here’s where to look for:

In the WordPress Admin dashboard, go to Appearance -> Theme Editor -> Theme Files -> Theme Header (header.php)

It’s best practice that you include the Google Analytics tracking code here, so you’ll need to search the code you’ve included for your website in the header.php file.

Make full backup of your website or blog. You need to stock your website data, before switching to a new theme and experimenting website pages display in a new format.

For a complete guide to backups, you can refer to this article. You can use one of the plugins listed in that post, to make a backup for your website before proceeding to the actual installation and activation of your new theme. UpdraftPlus will do a good job at creating the backup of your website, and keeping it safe from unwanted modifications that might appear after switching to a new theme.

Download plugin

During the installation of the new theme

Keep your website in maintenance mode while you make the transfer from one theme to a new one.

To do so, you can add a plugin that’s specially designed for this purpose, that is to display Maintenance Mode for a website that’s undergoing some changes.

The plugin is “Coming soon page, under construction & maintenance mode by SeedProd”.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you have the option to enable maintenance mode, like shown in the screenshot below:

Click Save All Changes, to keep the changes while the transfer is being done.

Here’s the message users will receive during the transfer:

Review the steps needed for installing your newly selected WordPress theme.

You need to:

• Upload the theme in .zip file format
• Install the theme
• Activate the theme

Test the theme before you install and activate it for the live site.

To do so, test with the live preview of your newly selected theme.

Once you’ve installed the theme, and before you activate it, you can press the button for Live Preview (the Live Preview button will appear when you hover with your mouse over the new theme):

The Live Preview will send you to the Customizer, where you can test the new theme:

Also, it’s recommended that you test the compatibility of your plugins with the new theme. Check if all plugins work as planned, and if there’s any of them that breaks your website.

Change the theme for the live site.

OK, you already have the theme installed, now it’s time to activate it. Clicking on Activate will make the switch from the older theme to the newly selected one.

Things to do after changing the theme

Test your website functionality.

Once you activated the new theme, you need to check if the website is running properly. You’ll have to test the installed plugins, whether the pages and posts display correctly, the comments section, the contact form, the images display.

Test the website in different browsers.

To make sure your website displays well in most of the browsers, you have to perform some verifications of how the website appears in Chrome, Mozilla, Safari, etc.

Turn off maintenance mode.

Once the changes have been done, and the previous tests, as well, you need to turn off maintenance mode. You can do so in the WordPress Admin dashboard, within the section dedicated to the SeedProd plugin:

Test loading time for the site after you switched to the new theme.

Loading speed is very important for your website, both in terms of usability and in terms of SEO. Thus, don’t forget to make a loading time test and see how your website performs.

That’s it. You’ve successfully changed the theme for your WordPress website. It’s easy, only it needs your attention, to make the transition smooth.

The post Change WordPress Theme the Right Way appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.