A theme is one of the many factors that affect your website’s appeal. Its appearance non-verbally dictates what the users will be getting in less than three seconds, enough time for a user to decide whether they want to stay or abandon your website.
Besides being the face, a WordPress theme influences the working of a site. A poorly coded theme may pose difficulty cooperating with other themes or plugins. Some options might even slow down your site and downgrade user experience, SEO, etc. Hence, it is vital to select a suitable alternative.
Selecting free options over WordPress premium themes seems beneficial. Other than it requires no investment, you can easily download them from the official WordPress.org directory for themes. The themes offer easier installation with minimal features for faster websites.
However, locating free WordPress themes can quickly become a quest among the sea of options. Therefore, this post will make it easier to discover a top free WordPress themes for your website.
Strategies to Find the Best WordPress Themes for Website
You neither want a poorly looking website nor an attractive site with hidden technical issues. So, to find the right option, there are a few strategies to follow and some things to do.
Understand Your Website’s Requirements:
Decision-making without any knowledge can be reckless. Not understanding your website’s future functions or aims, the group it will target, and the features you are looking for will lead you to an incompatible theme.
The very first strategy is to realize the content type your website will deliver. Is it an online store or a travel blog? Are you building a real estate site or an e-magazine? Since none of these sites will look the same, choosing a theme suitable to your content will make all the difference.
Whether you want a theme that focuses more on the reading content of your site or centers on the image content of the site will influence the theme you choose. You can either require a theme with a video embedding option or one that helps collect user data.
Further, a suitable theme can provide the features you want your website to offer. This factor also stands true for premium WordPress themes. These include forums, menus, multilingual, or any other special features. Having themes with suitable attributes can help you avoid the additional task of adding a plugin.
For this, you should also be aware of the features you want. The ‘Themes Repository’ offers a feature filter to help you find a solution based on your needs. These feature needs may also depend on your target audience.
All these requirements will help you sort out the best options from the innumerable choices. You can curate a shorter list of your favorites that match your needs.
Explore the WordPress Theme Directory:
Are you searching for free WordPress themes? The WordPress Theme Directory is your go-to option. Most themes are obtainable from this directory, making it a valuable theme resource. Themes from third-party developers may also be available here.
WordPress ensures that all the themes are up to date and cause no issues. For those that may be older and not up to the mark, WordPress will remove them. All the popular free as well as premium WordPress themes are available in one place. An experienced user community is also present to help with your queries.
You can head to the WordPress theme directory by searching for it on your search engine or visiting wordpress.org/themes/. Here, you will see the ‘Feature Filter’ option. It enables users to filter searches based on multiple layouts, available features, and subjects they are looking for.
You can select layouts like grid layout, one to four columns, left or right sidebar, and wide blocks. Based on your needs, you can choose from features like custom colors, flexible header, accessibility ready, editor styles, post formats, sticky post, theme options, translation ready, and multiple more.
You can also select from subject choices like blog, portfolio, education, photography, entertainment, food and drink, holiday, e-commerce, and news. Once you find a cool-looking website, you may check it out more by clicking on it.
Next, select the ‘Preview’ option to see its demo, or click the ‘Download’ option to add it to your PC. For theme installation, visit your WordPress site to select ‘Appearance’ > ‘Themes’ and click the ‘Install Theme’ option. Next, select ‘Upload Theme’ to upload your downloaded ZIP file. Once installed, you can ‘Activate’ it.
Consider Theme Ratings and Reviews:
Evaluating the quality of the WordPress themes can help you find a suitable option for your website. Like many things on the internet, you can rely on customer ratings and reviews from other users as a determining factor of the theme’s reputation.
If you like a theme, conduct online research regarding what people have to say about the theme, whether it offers good performance, is user-friendly, and if the developer provides good customer support.
Look for customer reviews on WordPress.org ‘s theme page when searching for a free WordPress theme. You can check how many stars rating the users have given the theme as well as the total reviews. Check various reviews for every star level for an in-depth evaluation.
In case a third-party marketplace provides a WordPress theme, look for testimonials or reviews from customers on the sales page for the theme. When making a choice, see if the theme has plenty of positive reviews, a five-star rating, and numerous active installations.
Although there is no right way to do it, trying themes with thousands of downloads and a good quantity of acceptable reviews sounds good. Whether free or premium WordPress themes, determining your choice based on the reviews can be extremely useful.
Check Theme Customization Options:
Most of the time, when you go on a theme hunt, even if a theme caters to your website’s purpose, offers the best features, and has top ratings and reviews, chances are you may not find its default layout fulfilling your needs. Hence, choosing a customizable theme becomes necessary.
Where most themes offer customization choices, look for one offering the maximum options for branding your WordPress site. Various themes also provide customizer demos. Using it will help you check whether you can incorporate numerous page elements to get desirable results.
Look for a theme that offers customization options for aspects you want to alter for your website. Most themes enable you to change the font, color palette, layout, widgets, header, logo, and more.
For a smoother customization process, look for a theme supportive of a well-known page builder or a plugin such as Elementor or SeedProd. Hence, you will not need to change your builder constantly with every theme. A page builder can help you craft custom pages from the ground up.
Ensure Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Designs:
Whether you are looking for free or premium WordPress themes, one thing that you absolutely cannot skip is responsiveness. A large segment of people all around the globe owns a mobile device. And more than sixty percent use these devices to visit a website.
With maximum traffic using smartphones, laptops, tablets, or others, having a website that only caters to one screen can be bad for your site. Without a mobile-friendly design, your content will look messy, sometimes even cutting off the crucial website content and making it difficult for the user to surf the site.
Therefore, selecting a responsive theme should be your priority. Such themes will readily fit your website’s layout to a particular screen. Excellent responsive theme works by identifying the browser’s window size and alters the layout of the page to provide your users with a worthwhile browsing experience.
While mobile users will get a layout that makes reading easy, it will also support your SEO efforts. Now, most themes state they are responsive when it concerns finding a responsive theme. However, this does not ensure highly responsive quality web pages.
Thus, before making a selection, testing if the theme’s design is frankly responsive is vital. To perform the test, use the demo of your selected theme. Test how the demo works on one mobile device. Then alter the browser window’s size to see the changes in the design.
Additionally, test how the theme performs in other search engines to check its cross-browser compatibility as well. In case you are using Chrome, use Developer Tools to imitate multiple devices, such as Moto G4, Galaxy S5, Pixel 2, iPad, iPhone, Galaxy Fold, etc.
A responsive website theme will result in a faster loading site, increased traffic with increased accessibility, and simplified navigation. The visitors will readily be able to find relevant information and have a better user experience.
Since search engines love mobile-friendly and faster-loading web pages, your SEO ranking will notice a visible increase. As a result, you will receive more user engagement, a better conversion rate, and risen sales.
Evaluate Theme Performance:
Performance translates as how quickly your website’s pages can load. And as you know, the speed of your website can influence the SEO of your site. Hence, a good performance ensures a higher ranking of your website to boost customer engagement and conversions.
The reason behind this is the lack of patience in users. It does not matter how well-written your content is or how stunning your images are, as a user will abandon your website if they realize it does not load quickly.
Hence, select a theme that will satisfy your customer’s page loading speed requirements and increase your website’s ranking on search engine pages. On average, today’s website must be able to load at least within three seconds. However, this number may change with the total size of the content on a single page.
Generally, when a theme has an increased number of integrated features and additional customization options, your website will most likely slow down. The unnecessary effects, animations, or sliders will only occupy the space in the files for your themes.
Hence, if you want your users to experience speedy browsing, prioritize a lightweight theme with limited and necessary features and effects. Further, the coding of a theme can also affect its performance. Hence, look for clean and well-coded themes to ensure fast-loading web pages.
To gauge a selected theme’s performance, you can conduct a speed test using speed testing tools like GTmetrix or WebPageTest on the demo website.
Check Theme Support and Updates:
As a user, you can perfect your skills and increase your knowledge about WordPress. However, there can be times when you do not know something as good as an expert. It is where customer support will come to your rescue.
The support options depend on your choice of the type of theme for your website, i.e., free and premium. Free themes may not offer regular support, while there is a possibility to find customer support. To check how engaging the customer support of a free theme is, you can visit its listing page on WordPress.org.
For premium WordPress themes, you get the support of six months to a year from purchase. Users can renew their purchase upon expiry. These theme types also deliver separate help desks or support on their website.
Checking the documentation for your theme is also essential other than customer support. These include tutorials to get proper guidance on how to install and set up a theme. The documentation will also answer the frequently asked questions.
Another integral aspect to consider is updates. WordPress constantly evolves with new features, bug fixes, better performance, and security patches. Hence, you will also need a theme that keeps up with these updates. The description for the theme will inform you when the theme was ‘Last Updated’.
If the theme is recently updated (a few months), you can try out the theme. However, it may not be as fulfilling if a theme has not seen any update for the past six months. Also, avoid any theme with a past update from two or more years ago. Most premium themes also offer regular updates.
Conclusion
An average user of the internet surfs through more than a hundred web pages from day to day. But do all these websites appeal to them? The obvious answer is no. Many users also stop browsing a website when they find it unattractive or slow loading.
Hence, choose a fitting theme to appeal to your users, increase loading speed, and boost SEO. To find a suitable theme, realize what your website demands. Accordingly, explore the WordPress directory for customizable, responsive, or high-performance themes.
Do not forget to consider the theme’s reviews, ratings, support, and updates. Find a top free WordPress theme to ensure better functionality, increased usability, and a higher quality customer experience.
Hence, before you choose a WordPress theme, incorporate all these strategies to find a better decision to match the needs of your website.
