Choosing a WordPress theme for your website isn’t as easy as it seems. At a glance, it can appear to be simply a matter of finding a design you think looks good, buying the license, installing it, and building out your website. If your only goal is to publish a blog for friends and family, you can get away with selecting a theme based on looks alone. 

However, if you’re building a professional website or plan to make money with your website or blog, you’ll need to consider the following factors when choosing a WordPress theme.

1. Compatibility

Installing a WordPress theme is easy. If you don’t know how to do it, check out this guide to installing WordPress themes to see how it’s done in just a few steps. With that said, just because it’s easy to install a theme doesn’t mean you’ll be able to install and use your chosen theme. WordPress developers are constantly making updates to core files, which sometimes causes theme installations to fail because of a conflict.

Before purchasing a theme, verify compatibility with the version of WordPress you have installed and your web hosting’s PHP version. You may not have control over your PHP version, but you should be able to control your WordPress version. Ideally, you should be using the latest stable release, but you can downgrade if needed.

Checking compatibility with your plugins will take trial and error. If you install your new theme and lose functionality, it could be a plugin conflict. In that situation, you’ll need to deactivate your plugins one by one to find the culprit.

In a perfect world, all WordPress themes would be compatible with every plugin ever made and all versions of WordPress. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Compatibility is important to verify, and if you skip this step, you could end up with errors on your site that take hours to troubleshoot and fix. In the end, you may even need to buy a new WordPress theme.

2. The theme creator’s reputation 

There are many popular WordPress theme developers out there, but not all of them have a great reputation. Review a developer’s reputation before buying a theme from them. Read customer reviews wherever they sell their themes and look for complaints that get resolved quickly. There will always be bugs in software, but developers who fix problems quickly tend to create better, more secure software.

3. Disabled sidebars

WordPress developers do their best to create themes that serve a wide market. For example, not every business owner or blogger wants to use a sidebar. Most developers create themes with page layouts that look amazing with or without the sidebar in use. However, sometimes you’ll come across a theme that doesn’t allow you to create a sidebar at all. In this case, the developer has removed the code from the core files, and that can be a problem.

Although sidebars are quickly becoming a thing of the past, they still serve a purpose for some websites. If you rely on a sidebar, make sure the theme you’re about to purchase will allow you to create sidebar content.

4. Proper navigation menus

It’s important to scrutinize navigation menus. For example, some developers make themes that only have a hamburger menu, even on a desktop. Other developers create menus that stack on mobile and there is no hamburger menu at all.

To be effective, your theme should display a fully visible navigation menu on desktop and only utilize a hamburger menu on smaller viewports. While most desktop users know how to use a hamburger menu, they still expect to see a full menu at the top of each web page and might bounce if they don’t immediately see links to the content they want.

5. Price

While price should never be your single deciding factor, it is important. Most good WordPress themes can be purchased for $100 or less, with some exceptions for all-in-one marketing blog themes that come with sales page and squeeze page templates.

Unless you have a large budget, stay away from themes that require you to pay a monthly fee. If you get tired of paying, they go out of business, or their theme creates a conflict with a crucial plugin, you’ll have to rebuild your site from scratch. Besides, subscription-based WordPress themes are not a good investment.

Take your time choosing a WordPress theme

There are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, so take your time before making a purchase. Look for themes that will meet your needs, test all of your options, and buy the one you think will serve you best.