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5 Things You Need To Know When Choosing a WordPress Theme for Your Site

A good WordPress theme can create everything from a personal blog to a business website. It’s very important to choose just the right theme that matches your purposes and intentions for your website. The theme, simply put, should match the content shown on your site. Read ahead to find out about five things that you must seek when choosing a new WordPress theme:

1. The Theme Should be Optimized for SEO

The WordPress theme you choose should be ready for SEO techniques. Without SEO, you will not drive much traffic to your website. SEO is affected by things such as HTML code. So, even if you choose a beautiful theme, if it is coded poorly, your SEO efforts may falter. On the one hand, it’s very difficult to go through a theme source code and know whether it’s flawed or not. The simple way to do this is to search for themes that are already optimized for SEO. Several premium WordPress themes are optimized for SEO.

2. The Theme MUST be Responsive

As you may well know by now, almost half, or more, of web traffic is generated by users on smartphones and tablets. So, it’s not much of achoice anymore to build a responsive website. Your site simply has to be responsive to drive traffic. Google only shows mobile friendly sites on the top ranks. On handheld devices, non-responsive sites are excluded from search results altogether. Therefore, it’s important now more than ever to get a responsive theme for your site. You should test the theme you choose for responsiveness by going to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page.

3. The Theme Should be Compatible with Multiple Browsers

Not everyone will be viewing your website using the same browser. So, it’s quite important to choose a theme that loads well on at least all the major web browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer. Some theme developers may claim right away which browsers the theme is compatible with. In any case, it’s recommended to test a theme in advance by loading it on different browsers. It should be done similarly on mobile browsers as well just to make sure the responsiveness is there.

4. The Theme Should Support Plugins

Pro WordPress users know that plugins are the tools that make the CMS work so well. Your theme will require plugins to perform optimally. Plugins are necessary to do things like collect traffic stats, improve SEO and keep cached versions of the site. So, the theme you choose should be able to support the most used plugins on WordPress.

5. Get a Theme with Customer Support

Sometimes the code in themes can go haywire, and only the developer can usually fix these issues. So, it’s advantageous in the long term to get a theme that comes with customer support. Premium themes usually come with support, but not all free themes do. Even if support is not provided, at least make sure the theme comes with user help documentation to fix problems in case they occur.

Next time you choose a WordPress theme, make sure all of the above criteria are met.

Content marketer during the day. Heavy sleeper at night. Dreams of non-existent brass rings. Writer by trade. Pro wrestling fan by choice (It's still real to me, damnit!). Family man all the time.

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