How to choose the best theme for your blog

When i first got into blogging, i didn’t really know much about WordPress blog themes and their respective impacts on a website. There was no such thing as knowing the best theme for a blog. All i ever focused on was a good user interface for the theme and that’s what drove me mostly when purchasing themes from Theme Forest and other theme stores. For that reason, i got caught up buying a number of WordPress blog templates but still stayed searching for the best WordPress templates for my blog. Some themes were slow, some were poorly coded and some couldn’t resize well. This is what pushed me to consider a lot of factors before buying a theme.

If you are thinking of starting up a blog, the theme you choose matters a lot especially when it comes to SEO. There has always been an argument about themes affecting SEO and from my own point of view, themes do affect SEO to a great extent. I will explain the reasons later on in the post. For starters, i recommend buying themes from Thrive Themes or alternatively you can make a deep search in Theme Forest.

What’s the Best Theme for a Blog

The best WordPress themes for a blog comes with so many qualities ranging from it’s size, design plus more important features that we are going to look at below. A theme that covers all the features below is definitely the perfect theme for your blog. Such themes will not only give your website a good look, but also get you good ranking on search engine. Before purchasing a theme, consider the factors below.

Proper Heading Tags

This is probably one of the most common mistakes people make. Flooding web pages or posts with H1 tags. The best theme always has a proper heading layout. A theme that has an in-proper heading layout will always find it hard to rank on search engine. A page should not exceed one H1 tag or H2 tag or even H3 tag. It’s usually recommended to use the H1 tag for the article heading and use H4, H5 or H6 tags for other headings. You should only add H1, H2 and H3 tags once in a web page. If possible create a class for a paragraph element that makes it look like a heading and use it in your posts.

Speed

Does your theme make your blog faster? the best theme has to make your blog fast. However, in most cases it’s very hard to tell whether the problem is with the theme or the web server you are hosting your blog on. I already listed down the Best Web Hosting Providers you should try for the best performance. These Web Hosting companies will give you the best resources that will improve your blog’s speed depending on the package you sign up for.

Responsiveness

The best theme has to be responsive. It should be able to resize to various media screens so that your readers can easily read a well laid out content from any device. If your theme is not responsive, only users who access your website using a desktop will see a good interface and besides, Google also added responsiveness as a ranking factor for search engine implicating responsive websites are given more priority. To check for responsiveness simply restore your browser’s window (change it’s size) and see if it has any effect to the theme. If the layout changes as you play around with the browser window size then that confirms the theme is responsive. Visitors who visit non-responsive websites usually never return implicating you need to get yourself a responsive theme for your blog. There are free responsive WordPress themes you can download.

HTML Standards

Almost all the best WP themes i have come across are coded in high standards. The best theme has to be coded using the best and latest HTML standards. Themes with a poor HTML layout are usually considered to be low quality themes. The best developers will always follow the HTML set standards to code their themes. You can check for HTML errors using the W3C Markup Validation Tool. This validation tools usually returns some errors but don’t risk buying a theme that has very many errors. You can settle for less than 3 and most importantly, make sure you validate every page of the theme to check for errors.

Size

The best theme has to be light in terms of size. Themes that occupy less disk space are usually simple and fast. Most of the themes i use on my blogs occupy a maximum of 3Mbs of disk space and i recommend you to adopt the same. As the market evolves, very many developers nowadays develop themes that occupy less disk space which wasn’t the case a few years ago. One other thing you should know is the size you see on the package doesn’t reflect the actual size of the theme since some themes come with PSDS and Videos on their respective zip packages. The actual theme might be extremely small meaning you have to first download the package and then check for the size of the theme.

Good User Interface and Design

As a matter of fact, a nice looking website will always attract and retain visitors. If you are looking for the best theme then you strongly have to consider buying an attractive theme that will give your website a good look. There are so many awesome WordPress themes on the internet today but there is no point of getting a nice looking theme that is poorly coded and likely to slow down your website.

Those are just some of the points to consider when choosing the best themes for WordPress but like said earlier, you can either try out Thrive Themes or buy themes from Theme Forest. Don’t risk buying or downloading themes from sources you don’t trust else you might face complications with your blog. There are a couple of free WordPress templates you can download from wordpress.org if you can’t purchase a premium theme.