Web development is a booming industry, and WordPress now powers 30% of the websites on the internet. There are a vast number of WordPress themes to choose from.
Does this sound familiar? You read an article titled
Top 10 WordPress Themes for 2018. You gave a great-looking theme a shot. You tinkered for a few hours and realized that you made a grave mistake. The theme turned out to be a difficult-to-customize piece of junk. So you went back to the article to try another theme, which also turned out to be difficult to use. More hours wasted.
Eventually you ended up on a theme marketplace, where you were flooded with even more options. It’s no wonder you’re having a hard time finding the right theme for your unique needs.
How do you separate the wheat from the chaff and know a truly great WordPress theme when you see one—one that looks fancy
and functions well?
Here’s how.
Social Validation
This should go without saying, but it’s important. If you’re on a theme marketplace, look for stellar ratings. With all the options out there, why settle for anything less?
If you’re on a theme developer’s website, look for stellar testimonials and reviews by reputable websites.
Recent and Regular Updates
These often-overlooked nuggets of information are invaluable. Web developers pay close attention to them, and for good reason. To help choose a good theme for your website, you should pay close attention too.
Theme marketplaces and developers typically provide “last updated” dates for the themes they sell. They also provide release notes which show the history of updates.
Generally speaking, you want a theme that’s been updated within the last few months. Also—while this may sound odd—you
want to see a bunch of bug fixes. Bugs are unavoidable. You want a theme developer that stays on top of bugs ruthlessly, which you’re not getting if you see just a few bug fixes here and there.
It’s Paid
You get what you pay for is true when it comes to dentists and WordPress themes.
But you know that already. You’ve been through the ringer with those free themes you found on that blog article.
To maintain an incredible theme requires a team of talented folks. They have to build it, stay on top of bug fixes, provide customer support, and add new features. Since top talent needs to be paid, the greatest themes are never free.
That is, unless we’re talking about BoldGrid’s theme. Our free Inspirations plugin gives you access to the same WordPress website builder experience you’d expect from the greatest paid themes. We’re able to provide this for free because our greater
BoldGrid plugin ecosystem includes various paid plugins. So you can get a theme on par with paid themes—for free.
Robust Set of Features
The greatest themes are typically a whole suite of features—from page and post builders, to backup plugins, to image galleries, to staging plugins—which provide you with far more customizability than a regular theme could.
We call these themes “superthemes.”
BoldGrid is a supertheme, too. It comes equipped with all the plugins you need to build secure and powerful WordPress websites. You don’t have to worry about digging through the massive WordPress repository to build a patchwork of questionable plugins that may not be compatible with each other. This is the primary benefit of paying for a supertheme versus installing a free, regular theme (and a bunch of third-party plugins).
If you found this article helpful and want to get started in BoldGrid, it’s really a piece of cake.
Start with the Inspirations plugin and get moving on your beautiful, functional website today.
