Today with WordPress you can choose from thousands of free and paid templates (also called premium templates).
What is a wordpress template?
After registering a domain and buying a wordpress hosting space (the advantage of buying a wordpress hosting is to have pre-installed wordpress ready to use) you can connect directly to the domain name just registered for example site and view the homepage of your new website.
The graphic aspect corresponds to the wordpress template installed and activated by default which usually gets its name from the year you installed wordpress.
Homepage wordpress twenty nineteen
The static website templates provide us with a basic structure that we will subsequently customize with our text, images and logo contents.
The WordPress template manages the look and feel of the website. Changing the template will change the appearance of the site without changing the contents. The template is very important because it is what visitors to your site will see and how they will interact with your content.
Features to consider before choosing a wordpress template
Today almost all templates offer demo versions to show you the look and feel as in this example of a wordpress template for bed and breakfasts.
Template-wordpres bed and breakfast
Design is not everything, there are some features that are not visible but of enormous importance when choosing. We have listed the 8 features in our opinion most important to consider before choosing a free and paid template (If you do not find this information in the template documentation it is useful, if possible, to ask the author of the template directly).
Responsive design
With the use of smartphone phones, tablets, desktops and TV the screen size varies and it is of fundamental importance that the wordpress template fits. With the google test optimization mobile tool you can check if the wordpress template demo page is optimized for mobile devices.
Mobile optimization test
Possibility to modify the template
Check for customization options (for example, change the copyright, change the colors and font size, add a logo or insert an image in the header). And check if it is compatible with the new gutenberg editor and with the most used wordpress page builders as elementors that allow you to modify the contents of the pages without using complicated programming languages.
Compatibility with the most important Plugs
WordPress templates interact with wordpress plugins so it is important to check if the template is compatible with the main plug-ins like Contact Form 7 (free plug-in for creating contact forms), Yoast SEO (free plug-in to optimize sites for search engines and improve their positioning), W3 Total Cache (plugin to improve the speed of the site) and woocommerce if you intend to create an ecommmer.
