8 Top Tips for Building a WordPress Theme 2023
Introduction to Building a WordPress Theme
WordPress is one of the easiest sites to use for building a website that is beautiful and effective. Their website building themes and tools are easy for beginners to use but powerful and effective enough for experienced web design agencies. WordPress offers thousands of themes that deliver unique and effective web design with drag and drop functionality.
If you have been wanting to build a website or have been struggling to make your current one looks its best, WordPress can help! This is one of the best options out there for easy and effective web design that delivers reliable results. There are some ways that you can make your WordPress theme work its hardest for your website and we will go over them in this article.
If you are ready to learn more about building a WordPress theme, you need to read on!
Top Tips for Building a WordPress Theme
1. Explore Some Themes First
Many people will just grab the first theme that stands out to them and go with that one for their needs. This is particularly true for beginners who tend to just look at images and fonts in the theme and disregard more important details that are embedded in each theme.
You should always look at what each theme will offer you as far as plug-and-play add-ons and custom features. Themes like Deep Theme offer far more than just what you can see on the surface of the theme. While the appearance matters, the formatting, and flexibility of the theme are far more important. This is the information that people often neglect to look into when they are shopping for themes.
2. Consider Your Goal
The factor that should drive all of your planning for your website theme from WordPress is your end goal for your site. If you sell things, then you need to be sure that the theme that you pick will help you with this goal. Likewise, if you are operating a travel blog, you need to be sure that you will be delivering content that is automatically connected with this kind of site.
The goal of your site’s function needs to be clear and present in all of your decisions. You should not pick a theme that you personally like but that does not make an impact with the right consumers or site visitors. Some of the features and functions of your new theme might not actually be the right ones for your needs so you have to be careful to keep this in mind when shopping for a theme.
3. Use Quality Images
You should never use spammy-looking or poor-quality images for your site build. This will instantly make people less likely to trust your site. Poor quality images will also often look quite shoddy when they are made bigger to fit some of the boxes in a theme. You should consider taking your own images if that is something that will fit with your business design and style or you can easily buy an affordable license for some nice images that have been professionally taken.
Image quality says a lot about a site and WordPress already makes the use of good images easy by helping you format and set up the images within certain blocks and widgets in your site. Make sure that you pick nice photos to offer your theme a really polished and finished look when it is complete. If you are using stock images, be sure that you make the proper attributions when you post.
4. Think Ahead About Plug-Ins
There are some really effective plug-ins that you might want to add to your site to get the most out of it and offer a really superior user experience at the same time. Things like SEO tools can help you generate better content that is more targeted for Google searches and there are plug-ins that can be used to help fight spam or to improve web traffic. There are so many plug-ins out there that you will never end up using them all, but you should look at these options before you pick and build a WordPress theme.
Some themes might not allow you to use the plug-in that you want to add so this can impact your choice of theme for your site. Planning ahead as far as plug-in use can be critical to a smooth website build. Many people are not aware that they can use so many plug-ins for their chosen theme’s performance and you will want to have this decision process at least partially sorted before you start building your site.
5. Leave Core Code Alone
While it can be tempting to change code in your site if you have some experience with this kind of work, WordPress themes work best if you do not alter the core code that makes them function. This might not even be what you are attempting to do, but it can be easy to stumble into a core code file when you are trying to make some changes to your site.
Altering core code can be a big mess and you might find that trying to get the core code restored will require that you wipe your whole site and start from scratch. You do not want to have to build your entire site all over again just because you were trying to insert some kind of function that was not that critical to the use of your site. Be sure that you think about what you are altering when changing code before you save the changes that you have made.
6. Consider a Custom Favicon
The Favicon is the little image that shows up next to your website address in the browser search bar when someone is looking at your site. You might want to have a custom Favicon added to your site using a Favicon generator. This small change can make all the difference in the appearance of your site when someone is looking at it and it helps with consumer confidence.
Being able to take the time to craft these little additional finishing and polishing items to your site makes it look nicer and more professional. This might seem like a small thing to undertake and not that valuable overall, but consumers have been shown to gravitate toward sites that have a Favicon in the search bar when they look it up.
7. Consider Brand Personality
While it is possible to customize a large portion of the colors, text, and images in your theme, you will save yourself time if you start out with a theme that accurately reflects the personality and representation that you want for your brand. If you pick a theme that is gray and dark and then needs to change it to include lots of bright colors, it might end up looking strange and disconnected.
Many WordPress themes can be looked at and searched using keywords that help define the mood and colors used in the theme. This will save you time overall and also generate a better end result for your efforts. Trying to create a website for a flower shop with a moody theme that was intended for a personal blog will probably not work well in the long run.
8. Consider Built-In SEO in Your Theme
Some themes will offer some built-in SEO that comes with the theme itself. This can be very helpful for beginners in the WordPress theme world, but more experienced users might not want to choose themes that use this SEO function. You might have your own SEO tools that you are already familiar with that you want to apply and the existing SEO might not get along with them.
SEO is important to the success of any website and if you are not familiar with its use or the way that it can help your site to be ranked better in searches, themes that include this benefit might be your best bet. Being able to make your site visible and easy to locate is important if you are trying to build a WordPress theme for your website for a brand or to help you sell products and services. Built-in SEO can offer a good platform for this need for true beginners to WordPress theme use.
Building a WordPress Theme Can be Easy
If you have been dreading picking out and building a WordPress theme, this guide will take the guesswork out of the process. When you use these tips, you will not have to worry about false starts or mistakes that will cost you a lot of valuable time setting up your site.
Getting your WordPress theme working perfectly is very easy in most cases and with a little research into the kinds of themes that you might want to try, you should have no issue getting the right one for your needs.
No matter if you are new at working with WordPress themes or are experienced and building yet another new site for your business, you will find value in these tips for building a great WordPress theme with ease.
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