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From the moment your visitors land on your site, you have about three seconds to make them stay. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll leave and search for what they need elsewhere. Hence, it all comes down to your choice of site design. We want to help you make the right decision, so we wrote a guide on how to choose the best WordPress theme for your small business.
Of course, there are countless themes you can go for out there, and many of them look nice. However, as we mentioned in our guide for WordPress themes for blogs, not all of them will help you retain the visitors and turn them into customers. To get there, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper.
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How to choose the best WordPress theme for your small business?
But before we dive into the things you should focus on, let’s take a look at why the theme you decide to use is vital for your success.
Why are WordPress themes so important?
Themes are responsible for a lot more than just looks. If you go with the wrong one, you might end up with a slow site that’s hard to navigate through. Your SEO scores will drop, and your site will slide down on the SERPs. Therefore, a bad theme will harm your brand reputation and decrease your growth.
No one wants that to happen, so we’re offering you a solution. Read on and find out what are the things you can’t afford to compromise on.
If you want your company to grow, you must learn how to choose the best WordPress theme for your small business.
A simple design for small business websites.
The design is always the first thing you’re looking at when choosing a theme. You want your website to look as good as possible, and the theme determines how it will turn out.
Still, you have to be careful not to take it too far. Things like complex layouts, animations, and flashy colors will only harm your site in the long run. So, you want to go for something that looks sophisticated but is, in fact, simple.
If you pick a solution that’s too complex, your users will have a hard time navigating your site. They won’t be able to find what they’re searching for, rendering your website useless.
On the other hand, if you do want such a theme, you can always rely on WordPress maintenance experts for support. They can provide help when something goes wrong, and even supervise your website and its performance.
A responsive design for small business websites.
More than half of all traffic on Google comes from mobile devices, so a responsive design isn’t an option anymore. Your pages need to look as good on small screens as they do on the big ones.
The party trick of responsive themes is that they’re flexible. They’ll adapt to any screen size they’re loaded on, and they’ll offer an optimal browsing experience on any device. When you go for such a theme, you can be sure that your users will:
- Always see readable text and that they won’t have to zoom in or out to read it.
- Never have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page.
- Be able to easily navigate to any section of your site.
In essence, using a responsive design will bring your user experience way up. The visitors will have a much better time on your site, and Google cares about that a lot more than about meta descriptions in 2021.
You want people who access your website through mobile devices to have a great time on it.
SEO friendliness of wordpress themes for small business.
We can’t talk about how to choose the best WordPress theme for your small business and not mention SEO friendliness. The better your SEO is, the higher your website will appear on Google search results. And since more than 95% of searchers don’t go past the first page, we don’t have to explain why this is so important.
In the ideal scenario, you want your page for the keyword to appear among the top three results on the SERPs. Of course, many factors go into this, and it’s not easy for a beginner to figure out what theme will help them get there. If you can afford it, don’t hesitate to hire an expert to guide you through the process.
Still, if you want to do it yourself, we’d suggest you find a nice-looking, simple theme that loads quickly. And if you find yourself choosing between a couple of good WP themes, be sure to go for the one with the best loading time. Google always pushes websites that open quickly, so make this your top priority.
General compatibility of Themes to be tested for small businesses.
When testing out themes, always check how they look in different browsers. Not everyone will use the same browser as you. You might think that Chrome is all you need, but plenty of other people prefer Mozilla or Safari. Your site needs to be accessible to all of them, so be sure to check how your theme copes with it.
With that said, most modern themes will go through all the compatibility checks before they’re released, but you can’t be sure that they did. Do your own tests to ensure you’re choosing the right thing.
And while you’re at it, also check if the theme you’re considering supports all the popular plugins you’re likely to use. The theme is there to make your site look and feel nice, but plugins will give it all the power.
If you’re unsure about what plugins you’ll want to use, check out these three useful bbpress plugins. They can help you improve the style of your site and offer your visitors more features.
Make sure that the theme you choose works with all the plugins you want to use on your site.
Support options in WordPress theme for your small business.
The last thing we want to talk about is support. If you’re new to this game, going for a free theme might not be the best option, even if it looks good. The reason is simple — the developers of free themes often don’t offer support.
Hence, if you mess something up, you’ll be on your own to figure out how to fix it. If you can’t do it, you’ll have to go out of your way and call experts to handle it for you.
So, the last piece of advice on how to choose the best WordPress theme for your small business is to pick one that has plenty of documentation and support options. It’ll make your life easier, which is probably what you are trying to achieve.
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Photos Credits for Best wordpress plugins for small business owners.
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