How to Choose a WordPress Theme that Attracts Visitors

Are you ready to learn how to choose a WordPress theme that attracts visitors (and keeps them coming back)?

Read on.

Now that you have started your blog from scratch, you may be wondering what the heck to do next. Maybe you’ve played around on your WordPress dashboard and got confused or you took one look at your blank website and realized you needed help right away.

Before you write your first blog post, you need to make sure your foundation is strong. the first step in establishing a strong foundation is making sure you choose the best WordPress theme you can. There are countless WordPress themes that are available, so it can be confusing to know which to choose.

But, don’t worry.

I’m going to show you exactly how to choose a WordPress theme for success (including many things other bloggers forget to mention).

Make sure you’re logged into your WordPress dashboard so that you’re ready to If you don’t know how to get there, or you haven’t started your blog yet, click this link for my easy tutorial.

Before we begin, let me explain exactly what a WordPress theme is.

What is a theme on WordPress?

In layman’s terms, the theme is the way your website looks to you and your visitors.  A WordPress theme includes, your menu, fonts, colors, functionality, style elements and overall layout.

Your theme is the first impression visitors will have of your blog and brand. An amazing theme can make the difference between having a profitable, successful blog and having a blog that unsuccessful. Therefore, it’s important to have the perfect theme for your blog.

The Types of WordPress Themes

There are two types of WordPress themes.

Free themes are themes that don’t cost any money to install or use. The drawback is that 99% of them look cheap and don’t have very many customization options. If you’re going to have a successful blog for the long term, you don’t want to have a theme that turns away visitors and doesn’t have optimal function.

Paid themes also referred to as premium themes are themes that require a one-time installation fee or monthly fee to use. They are much better than free themes for several reasons. You will find that paid themes tend to have more customization features, load faster, and look far more professional.

There are countless free and premium WordPress themes to choose from. Choosing a theme can feel kind of intimidating. It doesn’t have to be, however. One of the great things about WordPress is that you can always change your theme at the touch of a few buttons!

Plus, I’m going to show you exactly how to install your theme later in this article. Before that, I want to highlight for you the most important factor in choosing the best WordPress theme for your blog.

If you’re ready to start off with one of my recommended themes, you can scroll down to the “How to choose a WordPress theme for Success” section.

The most important factor in choosing the best WordPress theme for your blog

The number one thing you want your WordPress theme to provide is an excellent user experience for your visitors.

Think about it.

Do you ever go back to websites that are slow, hard to navigate or look cheap? Probably not. But, you certainly return to websites that are high functioning and provide value to you.

You want your visitors to be blown away by the user experience of your website. Plus, search engines like Google are putting increasing importance on user experience when determining who to rank highest in searches. Search engine traffic is the lifeblood for any blog’s long term success. So it’s not an area of blog strategy that you can ignore.

Further reading: If you’d like to learn a bit more why Search Engine Optimization aka SEO matters for your website, Optinmonster has an excellent article here, and you can also read my section on SEO here.

To provide an excellent user experience, your theme performance must be optimal.

Theme performance is comprised of three categories. These categories are Responsiveness, Speed, and Customization. Each of these categories will contribute to your blog’s SEO.

Website Speed

Speed refers to the amount of time it takes for your blog to finish loading. You may also see it referred to as page load time or page load speed.

There are many factors that contribute to website speed, and the theme you choose is a large contributor. For optimal user retention, the closer you get your website to load pages at 1-2 seconds the better your average user experience (and SEO) will be.

According to this study, once the load time reaches 5 seconds, 38% of users will bounce off your website (and it gets worse the slower your blog is). That’s a lot of people who’d never get a chance to read your blog posts! So, load time is one of the most important aspects of a blog’s theme to consider.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness simply means your website’s ability to be adjustable and functional on mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

When it comes to ranking websites, Google and other search engines are increasingly emphasizing the importance of responsiveness.

As more people each year browse the web on their mobile devices, a big chunk of your website visitors will be mobile users. To give you an example, 78% of the Luster Lexicon’s traffic for 2019 is from mobile users. If this website wasn’t responsive and you found this post from Pinterest or Google, you probably wouldn’t even be reading this article right now. Responsiveness is that important.

Customization

The customization of a WordPress blog refers to the theme features in your dashboard that you can adjust, modify, or change completely.

This can be anything from to the typography, image placement, page style, and the overall look and feel of your website. As a side note, there are pieces of code called “Plugins” that can enhance your ability to customize. You don’t need to worry too much about plugins right now, but if you’re a curious soul, feel free to skip ahead to my section on plugins here.

By having a theme that provides excellent user experience, you will already be ahead of the majority of bloggers out there. Since you’re just starting out, I recommend downloading a free theme and playing around with it so you can familiarize yourself with how WordPress themes work in general. Remember, you can change your theme anytime you want.

If you’re ready to jump right into a paid theme, scroll down to the “How to choose a WordPress theme for Success” section.

How to install a free theme on WordPress

Installing a free theme on WordPress is incredibly easy. Not to mention, there are countless themes you can choose from right from your WordPress admin dashboard.

Here’s what you do.

On the left side of your WordPress admin dashboard, locate “Appearance” and click it. You should now see more options pop up, one of which is “Themes.” Click Themes.

On the Themes page, you should see a box that says “Add New,” or “Add New Theme.” Click it.

You should now be on the Add Themes page which has a menu that says, Featured, Popular, Latest, Favorites, Feature Filter, and to the right of those a search bar. Beneath the menu, you will see boxes that represent individual themes that are available for install. Don’t worry about those for now. Instead, you’re going to want to use the search bar.

The four free themes I recommend in descending order are Astra, Onepress, Glow and Twenty Nineteen. Type any of those names into the search bar.

Next, hover your mouse on the theme box to reveal the Install and Preview buttons. Click Install.

Once the theme finishes installing, click “activate.”

You now have an active WordPress theme! If you want to see how your theme looks like, click your website name on the top left corner of the page (next to the house icon) to be taken to your homepage. To start customizing your theme’s features, click “Customize” under the Appearance section of your admin panel.

After you feel comfortable enough with your free theme or you want to dive straight into choosing the best WordPress theme, move on to the next section.

How to choose a WordPress Theme for Success

The number one quality that will define your success for your theme is the extent to which it gives your visitors an excellent user experience. I’m restating this again because I can’t stress the importance of this enough. If you stick with a theme that doesn’t put the user first, your blog won’t be profitable or successful in the long run.

Unfortunately, most if not all free themes aren’t going to cut it long term. For a while, I stuck with a free theme to save money, but I ended up wasting so much time trying to make it work to no avail. All of this without having a website theme I was truly happy with.

So, how do you choose a WordPress blog theme that will give your users an amazing experience?  Take the following criteria into consideration:

• Your WordPress theme must be fast. Nobody likes a slow website. This way your visitors will have a great user experience. Plus, Google will rank you higher in their search engine, increasing organic passive traffic to your website.
• Your WordPress theme must be responsive. As I mentioned earlier, the number of users browsing websites on their mobile devices is only increasing year-by-year. If you don’t have a theme that is responsive, your user retention will suffer and search engines won’t rank you well.
• Look for a WordPress theme that has plenty of customization and features but not too much. There are a lot of free and paid themes out there that have a lot of features but those features come at a price. Themes that have a lot of customization options and features tend to load slowly and be more susceptible to getting hacked.
• Avoid themes that are poorly coded.  Themes that are poorly coded are more susceptible to hackers and have more scripts that can slow down your blog.
• Choose themes that are highly reviewed by tech experts and normal users alike.

Only paid themes will satisfy the above criteria and set you up to become a profitable blogger. You can find paid themes from websites like Themeforest, and Elegant Themes.

The Best Paid WordPress themes for bloggers

To save you a bit of time, there’s a couple paid themes that fit all of these criteria and are highly reviewed. These themes are Avada and Astra Pro + Elementor. I’ve personally used both of these pro themes and recommend them both. Let me go into a little more detail with you about them both.

Currently, the Luster Lexicon uses the Avada theme. Avada has a lot of customization options. However, I would only use Avada if you’re willing to commit the time and effort to making it run fast. There is a learning curve, but Avada has incredible customer support and an abundance of tutorials that are ready to solve any issue you may run into. Avada currently costs $60, which is a pretty standard price for paid themes. If you’d like to go to their purchase page and learn more about Avada, click here.

Another top choice is Astra Pro + Elementor free or paid (depending on your needs). With this combination, you will be able to create highly responsive themes with plenty of features and customization without the bloat and lag of other themes. Since you’re starting a blog, this combination will have all you need for optimal theme performance. Here is the link for Astra Pro.

I’ve also heard great things about Divi, GeneratePress, and OceanWP. However, I’ve never used these themes, so I can’t give you my personal recommendation for them.

Downloading and activating any of these paid themes is a sinch. Upon purchase, you will receive instructions on how to do it. The whole process usually takes a couple of minutes

Quick WordPress theme tips

As you make changes to your blog’s theme, make sure you test your website by entering your URL on Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights to make sure your theme is running fast.

One quick note about themes. Make sure you keep your themes up to date and delete any themes you don’t use. Otherwise, they could slow down your blog and leave you slightly more susceptible to hackers.

 

Alright!

Now that you’ve downloaded your free or paid theme, you’ve taken a big step on your journey to having a successful blog. But, we’re not done yet. In the next section of my successful blogger series, we will cover plugins. You will learn how they can enhance your WordPress theme and website overall.

Click here to be taken to the plugins section.