WordPress is universally loved as a CMS, which is why it’s trusted by a whopping 59.5% of all websites. But, there are so many ways to go about adopting WordPress as your own CMS since it has numerous options available, all with its own pros and cons. If you’ve never used WordPress before, it can get overwhelming to zero in on the perfect theme for your needs.
WordPress is filled with two types of pre-built themes- Free and Premium. Choosing a free or inexpensive theme isn’t always a bad idea, provided that it stands the test of time for years to come. But to find the best theme, it’s important to know exactly what you want from a site, before you shell out money. Imagine paying for a pre-built theme and filling it up with fancy widgets and plug-ins, only to later find out that the theme cannot support the feature you really need on your website; what a loss that would be of both money and time!
A good WordPress theme is like a pillar for your digital presence to get built upon. If it wavers even a bit, it will affect the performance and ROI of your website. This is why doing your due diligence before signing a deal on a theme matters so much.
WordPress is filled with thousands of attractive themes. Some are free, while others require you to pay. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages, mainly in the realm of site speed, SEO performance, and features.
But designing a website from scratch does require you to have the technical and design knowledge it takes to populate a site with all the necessary features. If you do decide to hire a developer, know that this can be an expensive endeavor.
Even if what you need is a basic website, it most certainly will cost more than a $99 premium WordPress theme. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.
WordPress themes do have its advantages, which is why the site has over 75 million users.It’s a community filled with amazing themes that may need a little customization or polishing up here and there, but overall, the collection of WordPress themes available in their marketplace are so versatile that any user, from beginner to an advanced marketer, will find a theme that meets their needs.
The only caveat here is that many paid themes have too many unnecessary features that affect the site speed, and even after customizing the site with the available options, it may still not be up to your standards.
Regardless of what theme you choose to go with, there are a few things you should test to check a themes efficacy before purchasing or installing it. Below, I have tested 3 themes, one from each category- free, premium and custom. You can see the tools I used to check how good they are and how they fared against each other. You can also use this information to test your own theme before deciding on one:
This neat little tool by Google analyzes web page content and looks for page load speed issues. It also gives you tips to make your page even faster.
How to:
Go to Google page speed insight and paste the urls of the page you want to check.
What to check:
The global page speed based on the velocity and size of the resources. It also takes into consideration the mobile view.
This tool also looks at your site speed and gives you actionable tips to make it faster. Remember, if your site doesn’t load in under 2 seconds, your users will leave your website. So page load speed is a huge deal that you must perfect.
How to:
Just follow this link and paste the url you wan to check.
What to check:
GtMetrix also analyzes the server performance via the Yslow rate. But don’t worry about that score. Instead, focus on the page speed score, the number of requests, and the size of the page. Too many unnecessary resources will give you a bad score.
This tool helped website owners to check their HTML and XHTML docs for flaws or errors in their codes. This is important to assess the technical quality of a page, and to ensure that there are no errors affecting the readability or traffic to your site.
How to:
Just follow this link and paste the url you wan to check.
What to Check:
Having a valid page is important for SEO because the bad use of markup can affect your score.
This tool looks through the Metadata found inside web pages. If the data isn’t within a certain range, for example, if the description is too long or short, you will get alerts.
How to:
You have many simple SEO inspectors for Chrome, here is the one I use
What to check:
The Meta tags, and the proper use of HTML tags. A bad theme will use heading to style and miss the most important purpose: bringing hierarchy to the page. A page with a bad structure = bad natural ranking.
How to:
Right-click and inspect on chrome, then click on the console tab.
What to check:
Any errors related to resources and code.
Some premium themes offer a demo of their backend. Open a post and see how the page is built. Why? Because it’s important to see the quality of the code. Also, if you can avoid using a page builder, please do so because if you have no prior knowledge of coding or are a novice programmer, chances are you will do more harm than good. The freedom page builders provide to customize a theme comes at a cost. It can significantly impact SEO performance, and maintaining the site also becomes difficult
The points mentioned above are based on real data, but choosing a design can be subjective. Avoid fancy designs and think about your needs and your customer needs first. Second, think of your goal: if your goal is to monetize your website, don’t just choose a good-looking website, instead opt for a theme that loads fast and has clean codes. Do you really need a carousel for every section of your site? Keep in mind that some plug-ins are really poorly coded. Before you begin the search of finding a theme, make a list of what exactly you need from your site. Once you have that list, then go in and try to find a theme that will help you meet all of those goals on your list.
A website is like a car, you need help to choose the right one. The role of a designer is not just to focus on aesthetics; a designer will help you in building a site while keeping both performance, SEO, user experience and your goals in mind. If you don’t have the budget to pay for a complete tailored solution, you can still hire a professional who will help you find a free theme and customize it for you.
Page speed Insight
Mobile : 50/100
Desktop: 39/100
Mobile: 75/100
Desktop: 5/100
Mobile: 79/100
Desktop: 71/100
GtMetrix
Page time Load: 2.9s
Page size: 310Mb
Requests: 78
Page time load: 5.3s
Page size: 11.9Mb
Requests: 111
Page time load: 2.3s
Page size: 0.7Mb
Requests: 48
W3c Validation
49 Warnings
49 Warnings
23 Warnings
SEO
Too many h1 Tags
H2 missing
Alt attributes missing
Too many h1 tags
2 alt attributes missing
Source Code
2 Js errors
No error
No error
As an example, I’ve used one of the most popular free themes for 2018. At a quick glance, it may look sharp, which is also the name for the Premium Theme I chose, which was also present in the list of top 10 for Themeforest this year. And for the custom theme, I’ve taken the last theme I built for Simplyphp.
After putting them through the tools I mentioned above, I found that the Premium Theme suffered the most out of all three because it was inundated with scripts and all the different customization options. The free theme was better in terms of speed but it also suffered in terms of poor coding and structure.
As expected, custom built theme came out as the winner with flying colors. It isn’t surprising though because when you build something from scratch, you get to ensure that every little piece you place is the right and the best one.
Investing in a theme and then realizing that you can’t meet your goals with it can prove to be an expensive mistake, both in terms of time and money. Pre-built themes often come with restrictions and because of this many developers will ask for your permission to rebuild it from scratch anyway. It’s usually quicker and more valuable to rebuilt from scratch than to work on something that was not designed to fit your goals.
A custom build theme lays the groundwork for a successful website because it’s filled with optimized elements that can work together to not just improve your search engine rankings, but also help you surpass your targeted ROI. Pre-built themes are prone to breaking down with time but the ones built from scratch can be personalized and reshaped as your needs and business changes.
You don’t have to pay constantly to fixing bugs and glitches. At the end of the day, a custom theme is stronger and nimble, and an investment you make in your business.