The Qualities of Superior WordPress Themes and Design (2024)
Find out about the qualities of superior WordPress themes and web-design! Learn how to create a beautiful and blazing-fast website using the best themes and practices.
Importance of Themes & Design
WordPress is highly regarded as one of the best site-creation platforms because of many reasons. Two of those reasons are the insane amount of customizability and control. The WordPress platform allows you to nearly change everything about your website without knowing how to code. One of the main things you can change is the theme of your website.
Themes are the basis for your website’s appearance and can change everything about your website. They determine layout, style, tone, and much more besides appearance. Thus, choosing the best WordPress theme for your website is crucial. You need to make sure that your theme has all of the best qualities of the best themes.
Finding the best theme for your website can be difficult, but this article has the perfect solution. I will cover all of the qualities, features, and design principles that make the best WordPress theme. These include everything from margins and spacing to customizability tools and color choices. I will also show you my top picks for the best free and paid WordPress themes.
With this article, you will be able to find the best themes for your WordPress website. You won’t ever have to worry about searching for themes and finding no good results. You will be able to tell how to pick out a good theme and how to use a high-quality website design with it. In the next section, I will explain the basic principles of a good theme.
Qualities of the Best Themes
The elements of a well-made WordPress theme are simple yet vital. You should take each of these principles into consideration when choosing a theme for your website. If a theme is missing one of these primary elements and features, you should never use it. These elements include the following:
- Performance
- Responsiveness
- Ease-of-Use
- Simplicity
- Compatibility
- SEO-Capability
- Customization
- Pricing
The first principle for a well-built WordPress theme will always be optimization and performance. Your website should be loading in fractions of a second, so your theme shouldn’t be slowing it down. Your theme must be ready for the latest version of WordPress, PHP, and constantly updated. It should also be well-coded and bug-free without any issues.
Responsiveness is a crucial element because it heavily affects the user experience. The sliders, text, buttons, and layout on your theme should be readily accessible and snappy. If your theme passes this section, then you will have no problem using it. Furthermore, your WordPress theme needs to have quick and tactile feedback without being intrusive.
Ease-of-use is similar to responsiveness because they both impact a theme’s user experience. The general layout and menus for your theme should be easy to access and navigate. It can also help if your theme has sidebars and extra menus to make the navigation process quicker. However, you must ensure that your theme is not too bloated.
The third thing that your theme must master is simplicity. Any theme that is too bulky, complicated, or bloated with too many features is an instant turn-off for all users. Simple themes that give users a clean interface with enough features are perfect. The right amount of simplicity can help bring a theme to a whole new level.
Nowadays, compatibility is not as much of a luxury as it is a necessity. In the modern age of smartphones and wifi, your site needs to be compatible with most browsers and devices. Compatibility is a simple but underlooked feature that can help your website in the long-run. Your theme should be able to pass several compatibility tests.
Compatibility with site builders and plugins allows for easy customizability, while compatibility with different browsers, devices, and languages allows anyone to access your page. AMP-friendliness is crucial when choosing a theme because it decides the mobile capability. Support for page-builders can also help when editing your theme.
Another make or break characteristic is SEO-capability. An SEO-friendly theme will make your site rank higher on search engines. The SEO capabilities and features are vital for driving more traffic to your site. Your website will acquire more visitors and keep them for longer as well. Thus, SEO is crucial to choosing the perfect theme for your website.
Furthermore, customizability also plays an immense role in creating a worthy theme. Your theme should be fully customizable right out of the box. It should also have extra options for page-builders and the WordPress Customizer for easier editing. These features can greatly help with tweaking your theme to make it distinct.
Last but not least, I have to talk about the pricing for a theme. Costs are significant because themes can come in many prices and costs, with some being completely free, others ranging from $50 to $500, and some even charge a subscription. The best themes are the ones that offer everything without cutting corners, even on a budget.
Now that I have covered all of the basics elements that make up the best themes, I can talk about design practices. Note that looking for these elements is pretty easy because you can tell most of them almost immediately. If you are still wary about finding a theme with all aspects, you should use our top picks from the end of the guide.
The Best Design Practices
The best design practices listed here are vital for creating a distinct and professional website. These practices are crucial when using a theme because your execution matters when it comes to building a website. Your page building is crucial because your theme cannot do all of the work on your website.
These are some basic guidelines to follow, though you can go even more in-depth with them with our guide on website design. By following these techniques and strategies, you can improve the appearance and usability of your website. You achieve the best high-quality website design using these principles in conjunction with your theme.
First, you need to choose the right color palette with colors that complement each other and work well together. You should also pick fonts and typography for your website. The fonts should be a simple but well-made selection. You should also determine the image and icon styles you want on your website.
Furthermore, you need to figure the right amount of line and margin spacing for your website. You need to have the right amount of white space on your website to avoid cluttering and bloating. You have to make sure there is enough breathing space for your content and readability. The choices here are all significant for creating a professional website.
Ensuring that your website has the right amount of content in one area is crucial. You should work towards simplicity and minimalism when creating a website. A clean design will always look more professional than a complex and cluttered one. You clear up any useless features and content to remove bloat and clutter from your website.
You should install a page-builder like Elementor to make the best out of your theme. Page-builders give you a large suite of features and tools to pick from when creating a WordPress website. They can speed up your workflow greatly and make editing very easy. They also let you access many more customization and optimization settings.
By making use of a page-builder and some plugins for WordPress, you can add some impressive features to your website. You can add parallax scrolling to your site in certain areas for a stunning visual experience. Different forms of sliders can also be helpful when creating a website. The themes we have selected provide some of these extra features.
Taking advantage of high-quality content and media is also a very important step. You need to make sure that your website features media of many different forms and varieties. Using a slew of GIFs along with plenty of images and video can especially improve your website. Just make sure to keep optimization and compression in mind when doing so.
Here are some more tips and tricks to make your site look better. Customize the navigation bar and footer of your site. Add a favicon to your profile and enable “Pretty Permalinks” on WordPress. Add easy-to-use social media and sharing options. Creating a contact form can especially help your website. I recommend using the one in our theme.
You need to make sure your site is fully optimized, updated, bug-free, and secured. One of the first things you should do is optimizing your site for better speeds. Optimization is an extensive process, so you should make sure to proceed with caution and preparation. There is already a more detailed ultimate guide on WordPress Optimization.
Some crucial optimization tweaks include installing a caching plugin and installing a CDN for your site. Images and site content optimization can also increase performance. Furthermore, choosing a good host and cleaning your database regularly is vital. If you want an all-inclusive guide to cleaning, I would recommend WordPress Cleaning Routine Guide.
Note that these are not the only tweaks you can make to your site. There is a lot of things you can do in WordPress to enhance your site’s aesthetic. Everything here is only the essentials to achieving high-quality website design. However, if you have followed all of these steps, by now you should have a stunning WordPress website.
The Best Free Theme
The theme I have picked out that fits all of those attributes while being free is NanoSpace by Labinator. NanoSpace offers a suite of stunning features, an SEO-friendly format, limitless customization, complete compatibility, and unmatched optimization for the low price of nothing. It also features multiple premium features and tools that you cannot find anywhere else.
This theme may not look like much at first, but once you see the astonishing suite of features this theme provides you will understand why hundreds of people are downloading it every week. It makes creating a good site easy for literally anyone, with a clean and simple aesthetic that anyone can mold into their unique website.
Its clean and professional aesthetic can fit almost every single type of page and niche, making it perfect for anything from a professional portfolio to an eCommerce store. The theme also offers support for all page-builders and several languages. Its WordPress Customizer settings and theme options allow you to mold it for any type of website or niche.
The main specialty of this theme is the lightweight, optimized, and responsive interface it offers. Nanospace is blazing fast while still being responsive and bloat-free. It provides a fast, snappy, and well-built experience without compromising anywhere else. They have some of the fastest loading times and most responsive feedback on WordPress.
Due to the lightweight nature of Nanospace, it allows for boundless customization, unlike any other theme. Their visual header/footer editor, Gutenberg-ready platform, and intuitive interface allow for customization that is far and few between when it comes to WordPress themes. The optimization helps the responsiveness of the website as well.
Another set of features this theme gives you is support for page-builders, RTL languages, mobile devices, and WooCommerce. The suite of compatibility and accessibility features that this theme offers are second to none when comparing free themes. This theme provides support for extensive scaling and tweaking when growing your website.
Furthermore, the team that made this theme offers live support along with lifetime updates. This means you won’t have to worry about any troubleshooting or technical difficulties. Nanospace is also constantly being updated to be ready for the newest WordPress version. The security features also ensure that your website performs perfectly.
The theme is constantly updated and ready for the latest release of WordPress. Their reviews are all 5-stars and they provide lifetime updates with their theme. NanoSpace does not cut any corners, unlike other free themes. If you want more on why to pick this theme, you can read this article. You can check it out through this link!
The Best WordPress Marketplace
If this ultimate guide helped you, then you check out more awesome ones here! If you want high-quality WordPress products and services, we have the perfect solution for you.
Labinator provides stunning themes, feature-rich plugins, expert services, and more, all for affordable prices. They also give you a 30-day money-back guarantee that comes with 24/7 customer support and lifetime updates.
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