2024 WordPress Theme Guide: Pick the Perfect One for Your Site (Still Works!)

Perfect WordPress Theme! Did you mean just the WordPress Theme or Perfect one?

If we think about anything in general, then we can choose whatever, but when words like Perfect, Best, Top, Great are added, then many of our expectations are also associated with them. It can be said that “We want something extraordinary, not just normal”.

If you’re one of them who want a Perfect WordPress Theme? Please, Stay Tuned!

Here, I’m sharing the tips that will help you to choose the Perfect WordPress Theme for your website.

Free vs. Premium WordPress Theme

Getting a Perfect WordPress theme that truly works for your site can be a daunting task. So, before deciding on whether to go for a free or a premium theme, you should know some important things that you need to consider while selecting a WordPress theme.

The WordPress theme you are going to choose should always be of high quality, such as-

• Worthy: It means it should work for you for at least 2-3 years
• It should be 100% SEO Ready
• Ultra-Responsive
• 24*7 and Prompt Technical Support
• The website should not crash every time you try to update the theme
• The theme should be adaptive
• Simple coding & clean approach

Now, gearing our attention to the main topic that is free Vs premium WordPress theme.

Free WordPress Themes: The themes that are available for free where users will get some features and low/zero support from the technical team. Users can get the free theme from the official WordPress themes directory or any other website. But it is recommended that you install the free theme from a trusted source.

Premium WordPress Themes: The WordPress themes that are available only when you make a payment for them. You can get the premium themes from third-party marketplaces like ThemeForest or MyThemeShop site or from the official theme websites.

After having a premium theme, a user will be able to get wonderful features like diverse layout choices, the drag-and-drop page builder, a one-click demo importer, beautiful templates, and unlimited colour options.

Should I select a free or paid WordPress theme?

Both free and premium themes have great options to choose from. But free themes often come with limitations that can restrict the website design. Here are some points that will help you choose between a free and premium theme:

Free or premium, whichever you choose is up to you. However, I would advise you to choose the premium over a free theme. Free themes lack so much in terms of customization and performance. Besides they do not get support like that of a premium theme.

How to select a Perfect WordPress theme?

WordPress can be used to create virtually any kind of website, and there are many themes that you can use design your website. However, not all themes offer the same functionality and features. A theme may have configuration options for any kind of website, but it may lack the functionality you need. If you want your theme to complement your site and business, consider the following points:

What kind of website do you want to build?

By asking some questions to yourself and by doing some homework you will be able to build the best website for yourself. But before choosing a theme, you should know what kind of website you will build. Do you want a responsive site for business? Or maybe a blog or even an eCommerce website. Here some questions that need answers for choosing a perfect WordPress theme:

What are you trying to achieve with your website?

Some want an audience to share their ideas and some want customers. This is your site, then you should know your target audience and your agenda. Write down everything that you want from your website and then check whether a WordPress theme will be able to deliver all of your needs or not?

What is your niche?

Yes, your niche. A niche can affect the selection of a perfect theme. If you are a blogger then you should choose a blog theme, not the business theme. If you want to create a site for your restaurant, hotel, or any foodie channel then you should choose a restaurant theme or eCommerce theme for an online selling site. Similarly, magazine and news portal sites should choose accordingly.

What is your end goal?

Is it a blog where you will do affiliate marketing or an online learning platform to offer memberships? Make sure you know what it is as not all themes provide the same functionality.

What functions does your website need?

Website functionality is essentially what your website can do and how it works. A website function holds everything whether its actions (performed by the user) or any dynamic content and interactivity. To build an interactive website you should have a great theme with great functions too. And you must decide on functions before choosing any theme.

Before your website is ever written, designed, or coded, you should have a crystal clear concept of the features it will offer. Getting halfway through a website building process just to realize that you are missing some essential functionality can quickly derail a project!

Do you know what features your website needs? If yes, great!

If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about! Here are some functions to give you an idea:

• Security
• Social Media Integration
• Clear Navigation
• A Mobile-Ready Version
• FAQ
• Images
• Live Chat
• Multilingual option
• Account management
• Memberships

What kind of design do you want?

Website design or layout is very important. Several studies have shown that 38% of visitors will leave a website if they find the layout unattractive. You should have a blueprint of website design you want to have for your site. If you have not yet thought the design for your site, then think immediately. Once done, you can shortlist the type of WordPress theme that best suits your needs.

How fast does the theme you want loads?

Nobody likes slow websites. If visitors find your web pages slow then they will never come back. Saying we crave fast websites is akin to saying we enjoy oxygen. While that may seem like an exaggeration, according to the latest industry data, the need for speed is alive and well in the hearts of internet users and search engine crawlers.

Is it good for SEO?

What is SEO Ready WordPress Theme? If our website is SEO friendly then how will it affect our website? Once your website is ready, you want your web pages to be found by the audience on the web. So, if you want your website to perform better in terms of attracting traffic then you need a search engine optimization (SEO) ready theme for your site.

The theme you choose for your WordPress site can significantly affect your SEO results, so you want to choose one that is ready for SEO. New site owners often make the same old mistake. They only think about the visual aspects of a site, completely ignoring technical ones. Even, if they begin to think about search engine optimization (SEO) after the website has been launched completely it’s too late to resolve the problem.

Such sites end up being built with many mistakes, which, in turn, makes it hard or even impossible for search engines to find and index the content of the site. As a result, internet users do not see the sites in search results and do not find them. Make sure you are using the theme that is completely SEO ready.

Features that an SEO-Friendly theme should have:

• Ultra-Responsive
• Easy & Valid Coding Approach
• Upload Speed
• Social Media integration
• Schema Markup
• Website Architecture

Look at reviews and ratings

Always look for online reviews and ratings that users gave them. When choosing a theme, do some research and read reviews about it, as the reviews say a lot. Make sure you are not reading just one or two reviews, read as much as possible to get a clear-cut idea. Come up with a list of 5 themes you like, then narrow down your choices from there. The subject of your website is the face of your online business, and it plays an important role for visitors and search engines to understand it.

Consider your budget

Your budget is also important. Before you figure out how to choose a perfect WordPress theme, you also need to look at your budget. You might find many people telling you that all expensive WordPress themes are good and advise you to buy only expensive ones – I don’t think it’s a good idea.

If you are getting a WordPress theme that comes under your budget and can fulfil your business need you can go for it. By just spending some dollars on a premium theme that ranges from $30 to $100, you can build a good website. Luckily there are so many themes with high-quality design and affordability.

Whether you are starting on a tight budget or are looking for a premium solution, rest assured as there’s a WordPress theme for your needs. It is possible to find high-quality WordPress themes by spending a little fortune. You’ll only need to invest a little time searching around to find your perfect WordPress theme.

Analyse your competitors’ websites

Competition is everywhere! We often talk about how important it is to focus on your own project and not get distracted by what others are doing. That’s true. However, a little friendly spying never hurts either, especially when it comes to your competitors’ websites.

Once you have your list of competitors, figure out which websites are the most successful so far. Know about their designs, and find out which themes are your competitors using? A competitors’ website is a tool to make your own site better, not anything to be scared of. These free methods will give you a basic picture of who your competitors are, what their traffic is like, and also give you benchmarks and ideas to apply to your own website. Even better, you’ll start seeing some opportunities and spaces for your own website to fill.

Ask your friends – Do they love it?

Reference is always a good idea and it works most of the time. You can ask your friend, relative, known, or anyone you think who can advise you for the best. Always make sure, all premium themes are not good, some of them may not be backed by good quality support or may have heavy code files. Are you thinking what you gonna ask? Here is the questions list you should ask for your perfect WordPress theme:

• Q. Do you like that Theme?
• Q. What are those features that you like most?
• Q. Did you find any difficulty while using that theme?
• Q. Is that SEO friendly?
• Q. Responsive, fast to load, or not?
• Q. Security level?
• Q. High-Quality images or not?
• Q. Check the all above qualities that I have mentioned till now.

Ask questions that you think will help you to find the perfect wordpress theme.

Some Perfect WordPress themes that I recommend

Now, it’s my turn to share some of my favourite WordPress themes. In this section, I have mentioned the most popular premium & free WordPress themes. I hope my recommendations will help you decide the perfect WordPress themes that best fit for you. Besides, these all are the themes that I have used many times.

Each of them has specific features that will be useful for the kind of site you want to run. They all are super friendly & easy to customize themes that are adaptive for any purpose. You will surely get your perfect WordPress theme for your site in this collection! Let’s have a look at the most popular and best WordPress themes you can install today.

Thrive Themes

Thrive Themes offer creative WordPress themes and plugins. These themes and plugins have been designed as a complete solution from designing your website to adding functionality. Anyone can use them easily, and they offer amazing features that can fulfil every user’s needs.

Thrive themes membership gives you access you the complete suite of conversion-focused plugins and tools like Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Optimize, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Apprentice, and many more. Here are the benefits of Thrive Themes.

Benefits

• All products at a single pricing plan with lifetime updates.
• In-built A/B testing mechanisms for all Thrive products.
• Their platform-based model let their products easily integrate with each other.
• A / B testing for landing pages.
• Really good documentation and support.
• Great compatibility with all the themes.
• Thrive Theme Builder lets you customize the theme completely.
• Frequent updates and new features.

Astra Theme

Astra is a highly responsive and lightweight WordPress Theme. Its super-fast performance makes it different from others. They also provide pre-made website demos that you can download from their one-click importer facility. Besides, this WordPress theme combines speed, style, and customizable options for a user’s website preferences.

You can use this theme for any niche website whether for business sites, blogs, portfolios, WooCommerce storefronts, restaurants, biographies, or any. It contains websites with pre-built pages that saves you time so you can put it towards other parts of your website. Demo designs can be customized easily without using code.

The customizable options in Astra are really incredible. It is a 100% SEO ready theme where you will get pre-built SEO components that will help to improve your online presence. They have amazing customization features, you can even manage the layout of the header, archives, pages, footer, sidebar, posts, blogs, etc. If you want to set the site colours, fonts, content, and even meta you are free to do that.

Astra WordPress theme uses Vanilla Javascript and has no jQuery. This means there is no render-blocking that inhibits performance optimization.

Benefits of astra theme

• Comes in both free and premium versions.
• Everyone gets the same theme which you can extend with Astra Pro addon.
• Lightning-fast loading speed.
• Custom page and post layouts.
• Easily customize the header and footer.
• No compatibility issues.
• One of the most frequently updated themes.
• Inbuilt Schema markups
• SEO-Friendly Theme

GeneratePress WordPress Theme

A simple multipurpose theme that mostly fits all kind of websites. It is made with a clean and secure approach. It is very fast to load and offers a lot of features even in its free version. Due to its multipurpose nature, it’s adaptive and can be used for any niche website.

GeneratePress is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to be able to customize and control exactly how their site looks. Because GeneratePress has a focus on performance. The site that you build will have a great foundation to make it load fast.

The free version of GeneratePress gives you decent options, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize pretty much everything about your site. Compatible with all popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML etc.

Authors of this theme offer great technical support and update the theme regularly. Users are allowed to add elements wherever they want to add on their site. GeneratePress offers great Typography, copyright section, hooks, import-export feature, and more.

Benefits of generatePress

• Optimized for performance and speed.
• A lot of customization options in live-customizer.
• Better control with page-level settings.
• Pre-made website templates.
• Translation ready.
• Tons of hooks and filters.
• Modular approach with premium extensions.

Genesis Framework

The Genesis framework is a popular WordPress theme that has been built using clean and efficient code for a fast loading website. When using the Genesis framework, the appearance of your WordPress website can be enhanced and transformed by installing a Genesis child theme alongside the framework.

There are many reasons why the Genesis Framework has claimed the position it has today in the WordPress ecosystem. Some of the good reasons are Lifetime expert support, unlimited usage, reliability, high-quality code, developer-friendly, value for money, and more.

The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Whether you’re a novice or advanced developer, Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to heights you never thought it could go.

The best thing about Genesis is that if you activate a WordPress SEO plugin such as SEOPress, Yoast or All in One SEO Pack, Genesis will completely remove its own SEO functionality. This theme is updated regularly to ensure it works with the latest version of WordPress and is bug-free.

Benefits of Genesis Framework

• Easy Customization
• Developer-Friendly
• SEO made easy.
• Fast loading speed and lightweight.
• State of the art security.
• So many child themes are available.
• Fantastic support.

Divi WordPress Theme

Divi is one of the perfect WordPress themes that is developed by Elegant Themes. It’s a multipurpose theme, so, anyone can use it to build their websites. Over the years, Divi has been regularly updated and improved. They offer 40+ Website Elements, 1000+ premade website layouts with one click demo importer.

Here, you can do customization easily and will get complete design control. Also, access to extra plugins Bloom & Monarch. They offer built-in lead generation and Email marketing features to their users.

Divi WordPress theme has seamless integration with WooCommerce. To be very frank, from my experience it’s a complete value for money with too many options.

Divi is more than just a WordPress theme, it’s a completely new website building platform that replaces the standard WordPress post editor with a vastly superior visual editor. It can be enjoyed by design professionals and newcomers alike, giving you the power to create spectacular designs with surprising ease and efficiency.

The Divi Builder allows you to create any type of layout with any style. They also offer lots of ready-made layouts and demo designs. The visual page builder supports live front-end editing. You will also get a fully-featured theme customizer section here with secure theme coding certified by Sucuri.

Features of Divi wordpress Theme

• Everything from theme and plugins to premade templates.
• Tons of free resources.
• Visual website builder.
• Secure and fast.
• Excellent support and documentation.
• Lifetime updates.
• Value for money.
• Email-Marketing Integration
• Woocommerce Integration

Ocean WP

Ocean WP is a lightweight and highly extendable WordPress theme. With this theme, you can create any kind of website. It is a fully Responsive & eCommerce Ready WordPress Theme. Besides, it seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce and supports popular page builders, including Beaver Builder, Elementor, etc. Here, you will get an advanced Mega Menu option and unlimited usage.

I must say they also have incredible customization options. It provides you with custom header layouts, unlimited colour options, custom widgets, image sliders, and a featured products section.OceanWP is a great theme that works with any page builder. Primarily it’s strength is with e-commerce websites and has all the features that you would normally expect to pay for. If you are new to WordPress this theme is really great for you.

OceanWP offers great support for third-party plugins and drag-and-drop page builders. What’s more? This theme also offers a pre-made demo importer that allows you to transform your website at the click of a button. The quality of the theme demos is so high. All designs can be used for a variety of website types, some designs for a specific purpose, such as an online shop or a corporate website.

Benefits

• Fast and optimized for performance.
• Clean code-base.
• Completely optimized for SEO.
• Helps save time and money.
• Widget and eCommerce enhancer.
• So many customization options.
• Best SEO practices.
• A lot of demo websites.

Generally Asked Questions about Perfect WordPress theme

I hope this article will help to choose your perfect WordPress theme. If you still have any doubts, please ask in the comment box. Please share your perfect WordPress theme too and let me know what are the benefits you are looking for in your perfect wordpress theme?

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