The Best WordPress Free and Premium Themes

Good User Experience (UX) is crucial for the success of your website. No user ever said, “I have no idea what the website is about, and I love it.” So to begin with, a good WordPress theme should follow the best design practices, and it’s also well-structured with a modern look to it (unless your website is specifically made for people from the 1880s). And since we live in the age of smartphones, it should be responsive so that it adapts to any screen size. All of this ensures that your visitors don’t feel like they just parachuted into a dyslexic jungle.

Your theme’s compatibility with the latest CMS releases and plugins is almost the same as your compatibility with your partner. If you’re both compatible, life is great. If not, life is miserable. Hence, while choosing the best WordPress theme for your website, you have to make sure it’s compatible with the latest WordPress version, most popular plugins, and page builders, etc. This ensures that your website doesn’t run into any problems and you have to end up changing the whole theme at the wrong time.

The best WordPress themes have functionalities that help them stand apart and fulfill your crucial or specific needs in a crowd full of random themes in all niches. Hence, popular themes with thousands of installations and popularity meter on the high usually have unique features and address a broad spectrum of use-cases. And, of course, they are highly customizable as well so that they can adapt to your vision.

Ease of use is one of the primary attributes of the best WordPress themes. A theme may offer several features, but if it takes you 20 Google searches to change a font or if it requires a Ph.D. degree to customize a page, it’s a bad theme. No one likes to keep going to square one. In contrast, a good theme is easy to use, comes with support from theme developers or the community, and doesn’t give you a headache.

It is important for a WordPress theme to be SEO-friendly, firstly, because it helps with the SEO and secondly it helps even a beginner user to optimize the website for SEO without tweaking its files. The best WordPress theme is developed while keeping all the SEO best practices in mind and is frequently updated to accommodate the latest policies.

While this may not be a must-have for each website owner, a good WordPress theme should be multilingual regardless. Even if you don’t have a global dream, some do, and the theme should be ready to adapt to that challenge when the need arises. Hence, the ability to add a new language to your website and the availability of fonts and typefaces is another feature that makes a good theme just worth it.

Whether you decide to go for a free theme or you feel like money doesn’t belong in your wallet and decide to purchase a premium theme, it helps to read user reviews to make a final decision. User reviews not just tell you how good or bad a theme is, but they can inform you about the nitty gritty’s that you may personally care about. Hence, make sure that whatever theme you go for has enough user reviews to land it in your good books.

Everything on the internet is run by code and goes without saying but your WordPress theme was written with code as well. That means that when you tinker here and there and accidentally mess up the code, the theme can break down. So unless you’re a developer, you’d need expert support when things go south, and any theme worth its salt provides support to their users and helps them troubleshoot any problems that they might run into.

Licensing allows you to use a theme’s services like support, updates, discounts, and other tools that the creators provide. These licensing options can fall under both freemium and premium options, so you need to keep an eye on what the theme offers, because most popular themes may offer a lot of goodies within their freemium options.

The more documentation a theme offers, the easier it is for users to get started. The density of documentation of any theme reflects on its quality. This is because while most users can get started fairly easily, a lot of the time they need guidance or some sort of reference in the latter stages of a theme’s life when things can get complicated. And that’s where good or great themes shine because the documentation behind them contains all the information you need to troubleshoot or get through some configuration. So to say, a good theme will never leave you stranded when you need critical information.