An important key to making your business grow online and offline is your website and to design a stunning website, you will need a stunning WP theme. This becomes even more important in the case of smaller and local businesses. Choose WordPress themes for local businesses that will always help you to get a functional and highly professional website that shows your business and brand in the best possible way.
How Can You Choose WordPress Themes For Local Businesses?
This is the obvious question that will come to your mind because getting the right appearance for your business is very important. And this can be easily done when you choose the right WP theme. An apt theme displays all your details, services, and products in an enticing manner that your potential clients will find interesting.
When your business is new and local, it is in the early stage of expansion and the first step to make it noticed is to get an online presence for it. It is your website that is going to speak volumes about your business and that is why you need to choose your WordPress theme wisely according to your business requirements.
This guide gives you a complete idea regarding the things that you need to consider while you choose WordPress themes for local businesses.
1. Stick To Your Needs
If it is your first website, then you should stick to a theme that has the basic functionalities and features that you want to include in your website. You don’t need to go for complex themes offering way too many functionalities and a design that can be suitable for multiple business purposes as it might unnecessarily complicate things. As you are just starting up or if you are designing a website by yourself, you surely don’t want this because such themes have a lot of complex technicalities.
2. Consider Future Requirements
This is in continuation with the first point we have discussed. While choosing a theme, along with the basic functionalities and requirements, you need to keep in mind the need of your business or website needs in near future. Suppose, if you wish to add a contact form to your site or a gallery or an event calendar, then you should be able to do all this with your current theme. You need to consider all these things when you make a list of your initial requirements when you start searching for a WordPress theme. It should not happen that you buy WordPress theme without considering these things and that theme is lacking the stuff. In that case, you will end up in purchasing another theme or you may have to pay a developer for adding all those things to your website.
3. Go For Simple And Catchy Design
The simple design, the elegant your website looks. You will see that many of the top professional websites have the least clutter on their web page and are quite sorted. I am not saying that it should not be creative. But at the same time, it should also display all your info properly. If it doesn’t do that then what’s the point of making your website. When I say a simple theme, I mean that it should be easy to navigate, show enough light to the important content and do not overpower the unnecessary elements. Cluttered and tedious design can result in higher bounce rates for your site.
4. Call To Actions Are Important
Call to Action buttons guide people in taking a certain action such as signing up a newsletter, or know more about the services, fill up a contact form, etc. When you choose WordPress themes for local businesses, do consider themes having a proper call to actions like the phone number on top which is clickable, or an email button, etc. In CTAs, there may also be social media links that prompt your visitors to click that link and follow you as this will greatly increase the interaction between you and your potential clients and customers.
5. User Friendliness
It is a fact that not all WP themes are easy to use. So the theme that you select should be easy to use. If it is not easy to set up and use, you might face problems while using it. There may be a time when you might feel the need to hire a developer which is something that you never wanted. Because if you wanted to have a customized website, you would have never consider using a WP theme. To avoid this from happening, you should check the documentation of the theme you are about to use as this will help you understand how easy that theme is.
6. SEO Optimized
There is no use in getting the best WP themes if it does not have SEO-optimized codes. This is because SEO-optimized codes make your website feature in the top ranks in search engine results so that people could easily notice you. Along with this, one would be able to easily find you just by typing in your local business name.
7. Responsive Is A Must
The WordPress theme you choose should support mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. As most people prefer mobile devices for browsing websites, it is important to go for a responsive theme so that you won’t miss traffic coming from mobile users.
8. Quick Loading
Visitors don’t seem to wait for more than a second or two for a website to load. A slow website can cause more users of your site to go to another site to get the information they are looking for. Users always prefer to use fast-loading websites that give a splendid user experience. Themes that have well-written codes and less fancy javascripts load quickly. That is why we have discussed earlier that simple WordPress themes that use lesser scripts and give fast loading pages.
9. Plugin Compatibility
Plugin compatibility is desired to increase the flexibility of your site. The scalability of your website increases when you use themes that are compatible with different plugins. Most of the WP themes come with eCommerce plugins, contact forms, and media plugins to provide you with the additional functionality if you wish to add it in near future.
10. Support And Updates
Receiving timely updates for your theme will make your website stay up to date as updates bring in bug fixes, new features, and a lot more. Along with that, support from the developer’s end is equally important. Whenever you get stuck, it is important to get a helping hand that guides you and comes up with a solution to all your website-related issues. So choose a theme that offers dedicated support and is updated regularly.
11. Security Is Vital
This is yet another important aspect to consider while choosing any WP theme. Most themes nowadays rely on plugins, and those plugins are never updated which can cause some security and other issues for your website. So while choosing a theme, you try to go for themes that do not rely much internally on plugins but externally. This alone can fix a lot of security-related issues.
12. Multi-Browser Support
Do ensure that the theme you are choosing looks good on all the popular web browsers and not limiting your users to a specific browser. You can ensure it by testing how the theme’s demo works on different web browsers available.
