WordPress Themes: How to Make Your Site Stand Out

If you’re serious about starting a website, WordPress is one of the most efficient and simplest ways to do it. Here at Verpex, we can help you set up your website in a few simple steps, as we offer WordPress hosting through our Cloud Hosting packages. WordPress is great because it gives you a lot of control over the content of your website, without you having to know anything about web design.

One area with abundant options when it comes to user selection is the theme for the site. It is so important that you get this right when you build your site because the theme is going to be an ambassador for your brand and industry. It will also help to make customers remember you. Here are some useful tips on how to make the most of the themes on offer.

In the online world, there is a tendency for markets to become saturated in every industry. There is so much competition and you need to stand out from the crowd. One of the best ways to do this is to have a distinctive theme on your website, something which can easily be done on WordPress. Your theme will reflect your brand and the product or service that you are offering. This is part of why WordPress is the best CMS and why WordPress is the best for SEO: it can offer themes that are exclusive to a particular business and help it rank higher in search results.

WordPress is home to tens of thousands of templates and themes, meaning that you should be able to find something original that will be made to look unique to your site. Some of the options are free to use, while others come at a price. The free selections are good, but if you want to decrease the likelihood that your theme has been used elsewhere, it may be better to opt for one of the more advanced paid themes. There are lots of customization options; however, if they are not coded properly, they can lead the site to become clunky. Sometimes, they can prevent plugins from working as well. This is why a lot of experts’ advice is to go for simplicity when it comes to choosing a winning theme.

Along with themes, you can consider which plugins are going to make your site stand out and improve its SEO rankings. Some of the most used plugins in WordPress include Hummingbird, HubSpot, and Defender. Hummingbird helps optimize the site and reduces screen loading times. This is handy because if the pages take too long to load, you will lose a large number of visitors. HubSpot allows you to collect user information easily, so you can develop customized emails and enhance the targeting of your marketing. Defender searches the site for vulnerabilities to keep you safe from cybercrime.

Before you choose your desired WordPress theme, it is imperative that you conduct some extensive research in your industry. The last thing you want is for your site to look identical to one of your main rivals. However, you may find benefits to making your theme somewhat similar to that of a major competitor, always depending on your industry.

You can use this research time to see what the most common design ideas are in your sector. This will help your site fit in with the industry and help consumers instantly recognize what your product is upon landing on the page. For example, it is easy to immediately identify a fashion-focused e-shop or a news site, because both industries have certain styles of theme which have become associated with them.

If you already have a logo design, you should try to match the WordPress theme colors to the ones found on your logo. This will reinforce familiarity with your brand and help customers recognize your page easily.

Take Amazon as a famous example. The website theme on every page reflects the colors and the font used in the iconic logo. Facebook is another website where the theme perfectly fits the brand logo and color scheme. Emulating the strategy of these successful businesses when thinking of a theme for your own site is a great place to start.

After researching the competition and thinking about how to match the theme to your brand logo, you will have been able to narrow down your search somewhat. Yet, with the vast array of themes to choose from, you will need to think of a few other ways to refine your results too. Luckily, when choosing a WordPress theme, you are able to filter your selections. You can choose things like the layout, features, and subject matter to get better results – and this is something you should definitely aim to do.

There are plenty of things to avoid when choosing a theme. For instance, don’t go over the top and make it too complicated as it will cause the website to run slowly, which directly undermines both the user experience and your SEO efforts. You should eschew using fonts which are too difficult to read as well. It is wise to look to use a responsive design that can be used on multiple devices.

Selecting a WordPress theme is something that definitely shouldn’t be rushed. It requires careful and rigorous researching and planning, and then you need to test it out thoroughly before you settle on it and allow the site to go live. With the staggering amount of themes to choose from, you need to know how to refine your search. And on top of everything else, the theme you settle on needs to reflect the industry you are in – as well as your brand's value.