Everyone throughout the world & across the seas loves the WordPress theme. This secret lies in the friendly interface & effective plugin tools WP offers to its users. The WordPress community makes sure that everyone whether newbie or pro, must have what they need to enter the digital world. Today WP powers up more than 39.5% of total active websites on the internet. (source) This clearly shows how great WP serves all people from all industries.
The best thing about WP is its themes. WP offers thousands of free & paid themes. You can buy paid themes or use free themes according to your requirement. But here is the catch. Being a beginner, you must understand that no theme can fully set up your business on the internet.
As they are created for a large number of people out there, you can’t expect a feeding spoon from the developers. You must optimize it to complement your business needs. This article will light on 10 of the best tips to improve your WordPress themes to suit your business.
1. Customise Your Theme’s Colour Scheme:
WordPress themes come with a visual editor tool. You can use this to design your color scheme according to your business nature. Remember that colors play a very important role in impressing your users. It works psychologically and convinces people of your authority & authenticity. They set the tone of the website and also create a cohesive look through its all pages. The motive of setting up a color scheme is simple- to make your content more engaging and eye-catching. WordPress offers you a Visual Editor tool. Many themes give you direct editing features or editing through custom CSS. Choose a color scheme that would enhance your business & purpose of your website.
2. Use High-Quality Images:
Images are not only for design. It is a kind of visual conversation that you do with your users. Images can amplify your design or destroy your website’s whole consistency. It depends on how smartly you use the images. Consider these tips before selecting an image for your website.
– Choose only high-quality images.
– Select images that would complement your website’s theme & overall brand identity.
– The images can carry information. So if your business demands numbers, show them on your website.
– Upload original photos as much as possible. If you don’t have a photographer, you can use stock photos from ‘Pexel’ or ‘Unsplash’.
3. Optimise Your Images:
Considering the need for high-quality images, you also must understand that several big-size images can slow your website. The loading speed is everything on the internet. Users move back if a website doesn’t open up in 3-5 seconds. That’s all you have. Although we try our best to reach that speed through coding & security, optimizing images plays a big role in that.
Optimization of images includes degrading your file sizes and inserting descriptions, Meta tags, and alt texts. Don’t forget to reduce the size of the file from any free image optimizer website. The WP also offers image optimizer plugins such as Smush.
4. Select a Responsive Design:
Not being responsive is one of the failures in today’s internet industry. The growth of technology has given supercomputers our bare hands. More than 60% of searches are done through mobile or pad. Not going with a responsive website will lead to failure.
Most WP themes today come with a responsive function. However, you must check your website’s presence on different devices to make sure everything is correct.
5. Select Better Typography:
Typography is another important visual feature that you must consider. Understanding every brand is different and requires a different visual & technical strategy. Typography improves your looks & readability alongside complimenting the overall feel of the website.
While choosing typography, remember what kind of professional persona you have. If you are an artist, you can go with stylish but diligent fonts. If you are a business owner, you must strictly stick with simple, professional, and easy-to-read fonts. Also use variations in weight, style, and font sizes to create a hierarchy among the whole content. (7 Custom Font Plugins WordPress to enhance Typography in 2023)
6. Use White Space Effectively:
Often people ignore whitespace but it is a smart move to optimize it. White Space is the space between your website’s elements. Used smartly, it can make your content more readable & improve your website’s design. Create a visual hierarchy by arranging the elements on web pages.
7. Customise Your Navigation Menu:
Navigation Menu has always been an integral part of any website business or blogging. It is a part of the header section that supports easy navigation through all your web pages. The good news is most WP themes come with a pre-designed navigation system. You can use them after a few customizations. Make sure to include page links, drop-down menus, and important updates. You can also set up a search bar on it.
8. Add Social Media Links:
After websites, social media is the next big thing. Adding your social media account’s links will improve your website traffic. Also, you have multiple presences throughout the internet which will improve your personal brand, making it versatile, professional & personal as well. Remember to add social media links to your header, footer, quick links section, and in your content as well.
9. Customise Widgets:
Widgets are an extra luxury to your website. WP gives you several widget options. Moreover, you can also add your custom widget buttons to it to showcase the most important things on your website. You can set a search bar, most recent blogs, most popular images/blogs, and anything you deem fair. The widget bar can be set anywhere on the website. However, the best place is to set them on the sidebars to gain the quick attention of users.
10. Improve Website Speed:
WordPress is a fantastic platform to build your website. However, your website will be of no use if it is slow. No matter what industry you are in, there is always one competitor ahead of you. When people have options to switch, they won’t stay on your website if you serve them badly. As per a report, most users wait only for 3-5 seconds for a webpage. Fail to do so, you will have a high bounce rate degrading your SERP results.
Conclusion:
WordPress is your one-stop solution for building a website. However, choosing a platform or a theme wouldn’t make it. You must optimize your theme with the best customization options. Here we have discussed 10 tips to improve your WP theme. Apply them all.
