If someone asked you to choose one from two variances, choosing would be so easy from that two. It would still be easier to choose one from five, six or ten variances. But selecting or choosing one from thousands of variances or products would be the toughest job on the planet. So, you need to be careful and exact about what you are buying and if the product fulfills your demands or not.
There are few things you should consider when buying a premium theme or selecting a free one. Like
- Design
- Responsiveness
- Compatibility
- Customization
- Pricing
- User ratings and reviews
Let’s talk about them briefly for better understanding.
Design
design is the most important thing to think about when purchasing or selecting a them. The expression or outlook of your website is solely depending on it. Design is the reflection of your taste. If you install a theme with a superior, outstanding outlook, it is highly likely that a unique visitor of your website wouldn’t close that tab for a while. Rather, he will stay and look forward to your website. A unique design can attract your visitor like bees to the flower.
When you choose your theme, make sure that your theme doesn’t contain too much color variation, complex layouts or animation. Try to keep things simple because
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
-Leonardo de Vinci
Responsiveness
People uses several types of devices and the variation of devices are increasing day by day. Like- smartphone, laptops, desktops, iPads, tabs etc. Different kind of device has different types of screen. So, the theme you are buying or selecting must be responsive or fit with every types of screen size. Unless you want to drop your market value to zero.
Compatibility
Compatibility in WordPress theme can mean many things like browser compatibility, plugins compatibility etc. Different users use different browsers. Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, safari, Opera are the popular ones. You really need to check that if your themes run smoothly in all the browsers. So, your user doesn’t have to claim that some image or links are broken on their browser.
On the hand, WordPress plugins are the special features which executes the functionality of your WordPress site. So, you really need to make sure that the plugins work properly with your browser.
Customization
Customization lets you change the color, fonts, layouts etc. You have to make sure that your plugins let you do that all kind of customization you prefer. There is a plugin named ‘Page Builder’. You can create new layout using drag and drop. Some premium theme comes with ‘page builder’ pre-installed. That will definitely help you a lot.
Pricing
There are so many free themes existed in the market. You can buy premium theme for premium features. But make sure that it doesn’t cross your budget or the theme is worthy of your money. Let’s say, you bought a theme which didn’t fulfill your demand at last, you should ask for refund. Most of the theme developers offers money back guarantee. Even some theme comes with a bundle of themes along with hosting, domain etc. So, you be careful about what you really want.
User rating and reviews
The best way to decide what themes to choose or select is to see or read the comments, reviews and rating of that themes. You can be over 90% sure whether it is good or fake by checking the ratings and reviews. And can also purchase a theme according to their popularity or how many times it was downloaded.
In my opinion, these are the usual things to consider when to buy a theme. There are several minor things like multi-language support, built in social media plugins, SEO friendly etc. You can consider them too if you think them necessary.