How to Choose a WordPress Theme for a Small Business Website

There’s hardly a niche out there that is more in need of a good website than small business. Whatever the specific industry, each and every small business absolutely needs a proper site to showcase its products, services or whatever it is they’re about. WordPress is an excellent platform in that sense, but you have to make a smart choice regarding the theme you’re going to use.

Here are some of the things you should pay attention to when choosing a WordPress theme for your small business website.

Responsiveness

Everyone should know this by now but it won’t hurt to reiterate: a small business website has got to be responsive. Responsive design means a website that looks and works equally well on large and small screens alike. More and more people look up businesses and other websites using their smartphones or tablets. With such a rise of mobile, responsiveness should be your number one concern when choosing a theme for your small business.

Flexible Design

Your ideal WordPress theme should allow for a lot of customization. You need to fix your site to reflect your business. You can find a theme that comes close enough, but that final touch has got to come from you. So, your WordPress theme basically needs to come with an intuitive drag&drop builder, for one. Next, it should include a nice selection of predefined layouts that you can customize. Headers, footers, menus, skins and other elements also need to be customizable. If all this sounds scary, don’t worry. Customizing is actually very easy in WordPress.

Speed

You know how much you hate it when a site is slow to load? Well, your customers are going to hate it too if your site is slow. Choose a theme that is optimized for speed and has clean, light code, without too many add-ons, plugins and whatnots. Once you install it, you can check website at gmetrix.com for speed and performance issues.

Proper SEO

Without Search Engine Optimization, you can have the best-looking theme in the world and still get nowhere in terms of traffic. SEO is vital for ranking on search engine pages. You want your website to shine high up there when a user types in your particular industry or niche. We won’t get into what exactly constitutes an SEO-ready theme, as it would require a separate article. WPKlik has an excellent list of WordPress themes for small business featuring themes that meet the requirements in terms of SEO-readiness, both out of the box, and via plugins.

Good Support

This one doesn’t really require any particular explanation. Whether you’re an experienced WordPress user or a novice just trying to make it in the world of small business, you need good support. This means not just customer service that’s there for you at all times, but also good tutorials, proper theme documentation, support forums and so on.

Plugins

A good WordPress theme for small business has to be compatible with a wide selection of plugins. Ideally, some functionalities, such as contact forms, event managers etc. should already be there. Still, look for a theme that can work with calendar plugins, MailChimp, WooCommerce, plugins for adding customer testimonials, custom maps so your clients can find you easily, etc.

Conclusion

These were just some of the important factors to consider when picking the right WordPress theme for your small business. Committing to one ideal theme may seem like an impossible task, but sneak a peek at Themeforest, there are some really excellent themes for this purpose on there. And good luck in all your online endeavors!