So you’ve found a beautiful WordPress theme. It has a fantastic style, and it seems just right for your project. But how do you know if it’s just as good under the hood?
In this video from my course, WordPress Themes: Things to Check Before You Buy, you’ll learn about nine key questions to ask when evaluating a theme.
How to Evaluate a WordPress Theme
Let’s start by talking about the overall way that you should look at evaluating a theme when you’re looking for something to go with a specific project, i.e. a website that you’re setting up for a specific type of application.
We’re going to go through nine different areas that you should check out for each one of your themes that you consider buying. Here’s the checklist to use:
- Is the theme responsive and mobile-friendly?
- Is it cross-browser compatible?
- Does it have well-crafted typography?
- Is it ready for the eventuality that a person is not using JavaScript in their browser?
- Does it have full support for WordPress templates and formatting?
- Is it using structured data?
- Does it support the plugins you’re going to need?
- Does it have good performance?
- Is it accessible?
Now, the first thing that you should be aware of is that the the likelihood of finding a theme that is perfect in every one of these categories is extremely low. So far, I have not found a single theme that is perfect across the board, but that’s okay.
What’s most important is that you have a really solid understanding of what your specific project is going to need, and then you can weight each one of these nine categories depending on how important they’re gonna be for your project.
So if you know that there’s one specific area that you really, really need your theme to be perfect in, you can evaluate the theme for that specific area. And then you can say, okay, well, it’s not as strong in this other area, but because it’s still going to fit what my project needs, this is overall the best theme for what I’m trying to achieve.
So don’t worry when you do start looking at themes and you find one that’s weak in this area or that area. Don’t throw your hands up in frustration because you can’t find the perfect theme. What it’s really about is finding the right theme for what you want to do.
Watch the Full Course
In the full course, WordPress Themes: Things to Check Before You Buy, we’ll go through each of these nine areas in a lot more detail. It doesn’t matter if you have no experience at all in web design; by the end of this course, you’ll know exactly what to look for before you buy your next WordPress theme.
You can take this course straight away with a subscription to Envato Elements. For a single low monthly fee, you get access not only to this course, but also to our growing library of over 1,000 video courses and industry-leading eBooks on Envato Tuts+.
Plus you now get unlimited downloads from the huge Envato Elements library of 580,000+ creative assets. Create with unique fonts, photos, graphics and templates, and deliver better projects faster.
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