SKT THEMES
Things to Remember when Dealing with WordPress Themes
WordPress Themes
Well the market is filled with free and premium WordPress themes and everyone is trying to outsell each other with bloated features and functionality and add more and more to outweigh their advantages over others.
However generally speaking they all should do some things common which is why we consider WordPress themes and which is what you should remember to check before purchasing any WordPress theme or even dealing with free WordPress themes.
Here are a few points you should check as a checklist for each and every theme:
Ability to change colors: Ability to customize the colors and the look and feel for any WordPress theme is desired because what is the use of it if you can’t change the look and feel and the color scheme of the theme as per your logo and as you desire.
Page loading time: Page loading time is important because no one likes to wait and same happens when you consider your Customers or visitors who want to visit your website and they won’t like to wait and wait and wait for the website to open and load. Ultimately they might end up closing your website. Hence it is important you have a fast loading website which keeps the interest of the visitor to read further info.
Not overuse of scripts and sliders: Many developers just because they want to add more features add too many fancy scripts like testimonials rotator, sliders of their own, client rotator, accordions and other fancy galleries and that is the problem of the theme ending with too many scripts which ultimately causes a lot of problems in future because in case you want to use a gallery plugin and if a script within your theme is conflicting with the plugin then you won’t be able to use it even though you like the gallery plugin. Hence always check for WordPress themes that are clean in this regard to cause lesser problems in future.
Current ratings and reviews: Ratings and reviews are important as honest user and customers mention their valuable feedback and at times it can help you understand if the theme is very good or has a few bugs. Sure all themes might have some or the other bad review but it also shows how the developer handled those reviews and gave answers to them. Whether the answers were satisfactory. Good reviews and nice way of handling bad reviews should be enough to understand that the theme developer cares for his customers.
Support questions and their answers: This is another way to judge whether a WordPress theme is better to use or not by checking the number of support questions asked and answers. And also to check how the answers were given and how fast they were given i.e. some developers take days to answer and while some others are quite fast.
Theme Authenticity Checker and theme check plugin: Theme authenticity checker checks whether all the scripts used with the WordPress theme are good to use or are they not and then you can decide whether to purchase that theme or not. Similarly theme check plugin checks for WordPress core features and whether the theme has been developed as per theme check or not. If it is completely zero you might want to reconsider purchase of that particular WordPress theme.
WordPress core functionality: Many developers tweak with the WordPress core functionality like showing of toolbar or custom post types or custom data entry into database using their theme which either slows down the whole experience or cause future problems while changing themes. And hence one should avoid such themes.
Too much of website page builder use: Nowadays it has become a fashion to show fancy content and that fancy content is set up unnaturally using some page builder which defies and adds too many items into the Core WordPress dashboard. While someone who doesn't understand code might want to use such a theme as it reduces the time and also increases the chances of self completing the website on their own however too much of use of anything is risky and dangerous as there can be consequences like breaking of that page builder plugin, conflict of that plugin with something of core WordPress or outdated page builder which hasn't been updated and thus broken with current version or WordPress and lastly security flaws and chances of your website getting hacked.
Too much of external third party plugin: Plugins are also useful for adding additional functionality and hence theme developers use a lot of slider and other plugins to enhance chances of their theme getting sold. However we should remember how many theme developers used Revolution slider and use of old plugin bundled with the theme got the users into problem and those sites were affected with malware. Hence its not a very good idea to buy themes which are bundled with plugins for this obvious reason that the plugins separately don't get updated. If a theme developer uses some plugin which is hosted by WordPress.org itself then its fine as the plugin also gets updated along with the WordPress version and theme version too.
Hope the above mentioned points help someone in deciding which WordPress themes are safer and better for use than the rest.