Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

The WordPress theme is a form of skin that you install on your WordPress website. It modifies the way your blog looks, functions, and behaves on both, the front end and the back end. You can use readymade themes or use HTML to WordPress theme creation to devise one. There are over ten thousand variations of these themes, available as:

1. Child Theme

   You can create a sub-theme that inherits all of its outwards appearance and functions from the parent theme, but which allows you to update it whenever the theme developer releases new updates and patches.
   
   You can do so without letting go of the customizations that you have created along the way to the child theme. Changes made in the child theme are conserved even when the parent one is updated. It is a useful tool, but not necessarily for beginners. 

2. Parent Theme

   The parent theme is the one that will enable you to be the ‘parent’ to create the child theme. Any theme can be a parent theme as long as you can customize it as required as per your business specifics.
   
   This is the theme you choose to be the parent from which you create your child theme. Almost any theme can be a parent theme as long as highly scalable customizations are permitted.

The Free or Paid Version WordPress Theme?

Both of these options are favorable, as they have all kinds of themes you could choose from. But in the paid version, there are premium themes that are made by web designers or web design websites. These themes are continually updated with new styles, types, and features.

Things to look out for

1. Matching the Business Theme

   The theme needs to match the website’s purpose. Say the site is concerned with dealing with medical and health information. Thus you cannot choose themes that radiate gears, vehicles, and other technical imagery.
   
   Something muted and somewhat related to the health niche would be better. This is the reason why you can see how differently shopping sites; blogs, educational platforms, etc. are styled, respectively.
   
   Trust us, when you realize the specifics don’t suit your niche and you need to modify your theme in PSD and then perform PSD to WordPress conversion, you land up wasting plenty of valuable time.

2. The Licensing Options

   WordPress comes with a GPL Licence, and so do the themes and plugins under it. A GPL license can be used to modify the code of the theme to suit your requirements. It also permits you to use the theme you have purchased on multiple websites. Hence, according to your plans, you may want to go with either a liberal or a restrictive license.

3. Compatibility with Browsers

   While most WordPress theme developers already mention the browsers with which their themes are compatible, you should run some necessary tests on all the available browsers.
   
   Your viewers could be using various types of browsers, and they would be seeing something completely different than what you want to present them with. There might even be some broken links or connections in other browsers. Mobile browsers should be tested separately as well.

4. Plugin Compatibility

   It is highly improbable that your website would have extremely few to no plugins. Plugins in the forms of SEOs management, contact sharing, back-up, etc. should generally exist.
   
   The theme you choose to apply shouldn’t end up being the reason for conflicts with these standard plugins. Conflicts are caused when your theme defines or includes the same code as these standard plugins.
   

   Most good themes will also come with default styling for these plugins.

5. Simplicity is Key

   Themes can come in a wide variety of colors, styles, and sub-variations them. These can even include animated effects, header and footer variations, or multiple page layout options, but sometimes, limited customization options make it hard to manage your website.
   
   A theme that conveys the idea and message of your website clearly, and in the simplest way is central. Viewers come onto your website to find and consume information easily and quickly, not to get themselves lost in the depth of your site and eventually be left with more questions.

6. Responsiveness

   There are a wide variety of devices at the disposal of today’s consumers. From desktops, laptops, tablets, to phones, anyone would want to access information from anywhere they want to. Google even penalizes websites that do not have any response to mobile devices and pushes the sites that are mobile-friendly up the algorithm.

Conclusion

These are just some of the tips that may come in handy to you. It would be best if you planned out your wants and needs before deciding on your theme since they are one of the factors which determine whether your website is click-worthy or not. Also, it would be economical in case of time and money to avoid episodes of HTML to WordPress theme conversion.