When making a website with WordPress, even if you can not write a single line of code, you can make a successful website. For the most part, this success largely depends on the WordPress theme you choose.
While many themes may look appealing at first glance, what you need to do is check if the theme offers all the features you are looking for and if it will be supported by the maker in the long run.
WordPress is a platform that is ever-evolving and changing. The theme may become outdated and unusable after a period of time if the maker is not producing regular updates.
A modern WordPress theme must offer responsive design, so your website looks good on desktop PC as well as on a smartphone or a tablet. Some themes are specifically designed to cater to a certain audience or industry, depending on the type of website you want to develop you may choose:
- Blog website theme – personal or company blog that will help your business grow.
- eCommerce theme – built for a webshop, streamlined for use with WooCommerce or Magneto.
- Professional service theme – sleek looking website theme for the specific type of professional service you can offer (legal services, business consulting, health services … etc.).
- Business/Industry theme – niche website theme made exclusively for real estate, restaurants, cafe or another industry.
We can all agree that a repair service website theme cannot be a good match for a restaurant or a webshop.
Since there are thousands of themes available even for the niche business, I am sure you will have at least a few favorites, but you can only choose one. Choose on that suits your needs but compliments your company or brand in the best way.
Additionally, many of these themes have a free version, with a paid version that offers a broad range of additional website building features that are not available for free.
The difference between a paid and free theme may not be huge, and for a small business, the free one may be enough.
The main negative side of a free theme is that you are not eligible to get support from the maker if ever you would need some theme tweaking or help.
Other business owners may also be using the free theme so your website may end-up looking very similar to other companies website in the business. Paid themes may offer features that will enable you to produce a unique look for your website enabling it to stand out from the competition.
So yes, the paid theme offers more features, higher customization, support but it also may possess some negative sides. Some paid themes are very bloated. For example, many paid themes are built as a multi-theme meaning it has a very large amount of code and may run your website slow.
The additional functionality of the paid WordPress theme may make your plugins crash as they start crossing over one another. Having said that, this does not mean all paid themes are bad.
So, to be able to make a choice between a free and paid theme you must give yourself an answer to a few questions:
- Do you need a theme with a high number of features (visual and administrative)?
- Do you need help to troubleshoot the issues that may arise with a theme?
- Does your website need a truly unique looking theme?
If the answer to all three or at least two is YES, then you will need a paid theme.
On the other hand, if your answer is NO, then check our other article for Top 5 free WordPress themes.
We hope this article helped you get some insight and make the right choice with choosing a WordPress theme.