By all accounts, WordPress is the CMS most widely used by the webmaster community. It alone holds 65% of market share, leaving 35% to the competition. Whether you're a regular user of this CMS or a beginner, you've probably already asked yourself the question: how do you choose your WordPress theme? With this article, I hope to give you some useful advice to make your next theme choice a complete success. By choosing the wrong WordPress theme, you will leave your site vulnerable to certain attacks that hackers or simply the competition in your field of activity could initiate in order to damage your brand image or to gather information about your users and much more...
1. Theme security
As mentioned above, the security of your WordPress theme is undoubtedly the most important factor to take into account when making your choice. Victim of its own success, every day new WordPress themes are added to an already extensive catalogue. Although design is an important factor, as we'll see below, I strongly advise you not to make it the main criterion for choosing your WordPress theme.
2. Theme design
The beauty of a site is essential to make visitors want to stay, but don't forget that the information is the most important thing that led them to your website. The appearance of your site is no longer the only criterion to take into account when choosing the design. With more and more mobile users (browsing from a smartphone or tablet), you now need to make sure that the theme you choose is responsive design, i.e. that it is suitable for optimised display on a PC as well as on a tablet or phone. It would be a shame to offer France's 37.4 million mobile users a site that isn't optimised for their mobile device.
3. SEO friendly theme
Once you've created your site, you'll need to work on its SEO to improve its positioning in the search engine results. To do this, the theme you choose must be SEO friendly, i.e. optimised for search engines like Google, which alone has a market share of over 90% in France, far ahead of Bing. By choosing a theme like this, you'll have a lightweight site with a very short display time. In fact, display time is a very important factor, emphasised by Google to offer a better user experience.
Where can I download my theme?
As mentioned above, there are thousands of WordPress themes available today. To reduce the risk of stumbling across a bad one, it would be best to download your theme from a recognised platform such as WordPress, Themeforest or even ElegantThemes.
WordPress
The official WordPress site is undoubtedly the best place to download a theme that you want to be reliable and functional. There you'll find a plethora of free themes, as well as paid themes for those who don't mind breaking the bank. However, in the vast majority of cases this won't be necessary, as most of the free offers are of excellent quality.
Themeforest
When you visit this site, you'll need to get out your bank card, as you won't find any free themes there. If you're looking for a specific theme for a lawyer's site, a photographer's site, a doctor's site and much more, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find it on ThemeForest. All you have to do is download, install and configure it to get your site up and running.
ElegantThemes
On this shop, only a limited number of 87 themes of impeccable quality are available for sale. If you're looking for a high-quality theme for your site that you don't find anywhere else, you're sure to find what you're looking for.
Conclusion
By taking this information into account, you can choose the WordPress theme best suited to your project.
If you need help, you can contact me to help you or to take charge of the creation of your site.