Building your website involves multiple tasks – you need to decide on the platform, plan the design, add content, chalk out a marketing strategy and much more. However, one of the most crucial aspects of any website is website design. Your website design is the first thing your customers will notice when they land on your website. A user-friendly and easy-to-navigate website helps improve the user experience, as well as boost conversion rates. One of the easiest ways to incorporate a user-friendly website design is to choose a good website theme.
In this guide to WordPress themes, we will cover what WordPress website themes are, how to choose a WordPress theme and why your website-building platform should support them. So, without further ado, let us begin!
Understanding what a WordPress theme is
A website is composed of menus, blog posts, pages, buttons, media, and much more. WordPress, being a Content Management System, has all these basic design functions and page layouts in place. However, the default design need not necessarily be something that you would have envisioned for your website. At a time like this, tweaking your website theme is the best way forward.
If you’re a developer, then making changes to your website’s theme can be a cakewalk. However, for the uninitiated or beginner with little or no technical knowledge, this can spell a roadblock. At such times, downloading and installing third-party or WordPress-powered free or paid WordPress themes are the best course of action.
WordPress themes as the name suggests are layouts or templates designed specifically for a WordPress website. Each theme is pre-made by developers and consists of different colour schemes, fonts, menu and widget layout, page style, header, and footer formatting, and much more. Depending on the type of website you have, you can choose a theme to fit it perfectly. Some themes emphasize photographs, so if you’re running a photo website or an online store with lots of images such a theme would work well. On the other hand, if you’re a content-heavy website then themes that make it easy for users to read the content are the best bet.
In the next section, we’ll take you through how you can choose the best WordPress theme for your website.
How to select a WordPress theme?
Choosing a theme basically depends on what your website is about, and what you are looking for. Nevertheless, there are certain things that you should always keep in mind when deciding on a theme for your website.
Your theme should be:
- Mobile responsive, user-friendly, and SEO-friendly
- Lightweight with fewer elements, as a heavy theme can lower the page load speed and impact user experience.
- Compatible with website builders, plugins, and the latest WordPress version.
- Good customer support (especially for paid themes) and/or user forums.
- Easy to tweak and make changes to the font and colour scheme.
There are several themes available both free and paid. You can easily browse themes on your WordPress backend dashboard or the official WordPress website. Apart from this, you can also browse themes on third-party marketplaces such as ThemeForest, Mojo Marketplace, Creative Market and more.
Some of the popular themes include Astra, OceanWP, Neve, Divi, and more. Most of these themes are supported by popular website builders. In fact, you should also make sure the theme you choose is also supported.
This brings us to a crucial question, why should your website builder support the theme you have chosen for your website?
Reasons Your Website Builder Should Support Themes
Building your website using a website builder is the fastest way of building your website. It is hassle-free and doesn’t require any coding knowledge, as all you need to do is drag and drop elements and design your website as per your needs.
However, you might run out of ideas and be confused about how to make your website user-friendly. At such times, directly integrating and customizing a WordPress theme can save you time and effort of recreating the look you envisioned.
Here are 3 reasons why your website builder should support themes:
- Themes help you incorporate enhanced design layout to your website easily without worrying about the hassle of coding everything from scratch.
- Themes make your website look professional and cater to different kinds of websites viz. online stores, photography websites, food and recipe blog, personal journal, professional portfolio, and more.
- Effortlessly integrate and improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and build a stunning visually appealing website within minutes.
How to Install a WordPress Theme
It is easy to install a WordPress theme for beginners. If you’re using the traditional WordPress backend with our WordPress Hosting, then:
- Log in to your Bluehost dashboard
- Click on ‘Log into WordPress’
- You’ll be redirected to the WordPress backend dashboard.
- Next, click on ‘Appearance’ -> ‘Themes’ to download and install a theme of your choice from the WordPress themes repository
On the contrary, if you’ve built your website using the Bluehost Website Builder, you may have chosen a theme at the start, from the expansive mobile-responsive theme bank. Nevertheless, you can still make changes to the colour, fonts, animations, as well as the layout and the background setting of your website manually by editing your chosen theme.
Follow these steps if you’ve used Bluehost Website Builder:
- Log in to your Bluehost dashboard
- Click on ‘Edit site in Builder’
- Website Builder opens, click on ‘Appearance’ and make required changes
- If you want to make changes to the background and layout of your website, go to ‘Menus & Pages’ and you can make changes on the pages you want
5. Once you’re done making changes to your WordPress theme, click on ‘Preview’
6. Once satisfied click on ‘Publish’ and all the changes will be live.
Your Website, Your Choice
Deciding a theme for your website can be tricky as it sets the tone of your website. A WordPress theme is a great way to integrate amazing design elements into your website without worrying about coding. Moreover, the right theme can modify your simple website to look like a professionally curated design.
In a nutshell, a theme adds to the look and feel of your website, along with adding additional functionalities to enhance the user experience. And with the Bluehost Website Builder, you can easily create, choose a theme, and launch your website with ease.
You can also explore our expert managed SEO services to improve your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines.
Furthermore, if your website attracts high traffic and is growing and you are currently using Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting, you can switch to Bluehost’s Dedicated Hosting to ensure optimal performance and reliability of your website.
We hope this WordPress theme guide was helpful to you. So, what are you waiting for? Create your stunning mobile responsive website and improve your user experience today!
For more information and tips, head to our WordPress Category page & WordPress Guide page. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop them below.
