As a small business one of the most important things your website should help you to do is get found by potential customers interested in your product or service.

That means that SEO will play a crucial role in the choices that you make for your website.

If you are using WordPress, you’ll find that there are literally thousands upon thousands of themes to choose from. At first glance, it may seem like they are all the same, but it is important to note that not every theme is built the same.

In this post, I’ll break down some of the most important factors you’ll need to consider when selecting a WordPress theme for your small business.

1. Mobile Friendly

According to research done by ComScore, desktop usage has been on the decline since March of 2015. More and more people are using their phones to do the things they used to do on computers, like shop and browse the web.

With all these technological shifts taking place, Google has started to include mobile responsiveness as one of the factors it uses to determine which websites rank higher in search results.

Basically, what it all boils down to, is this – if 2 identical websites exist, but one is mobile friendly and the other is not, the one that is responsive and mobile friendly will ultimately rank higher.

So now armed with this knowledge, it will be more beneficial to your small business to select a WordPress theme that is mobile friendly.

Quick Tip – Look For Mobile Friendly Themes

  1. When viewing a demo of the theme, if you are on a desktop try resizing the browser window and see if the theme adjusts to your screen.
  2. If you are on a mobile device, check that the entire theme fits into your screen and that there is no pinching and zooming in required.

2. Page Speed

If you’ve ever searched for a WordPress theme for your small business, you might have noticed that many of the premium themes include a long list of extra features built in – things like sliders and page builders.

Which if you look at from a short-term perspective – getting all those additional features sounds like a total win-win – you pay once and get all those extras for free.

But step back and take a look at it from a long-term perspective, you will see that once installed, all those extras extend the time it takes for your page to load and ultimately have a negative impact on how your small business website ranks.

That is because Google uses speed as a factor in its search ranking algorithm – every second count and the faster your page loads, the higher it will rank.

Quick Tip – Look For Fast Loading Themes

  1. Avoid any theme that includes a lot of unnecessary elements that you don’t need.
  2. Focus on themes that are fast, lightweight and minimal.

3. On Page SEO

Did you know that when search engines crawl a website they look for specific SEO tags – like Title, Description, Keywords, etc?

These important SEO tags, help the search engines determine what the website is about and what keywords to rank it for.

If the website is missing these tags, it will be very difficult for search engines to index the site properly.

Quick Tip – Look For Themes Optimized For Search Engines

  1. Make sure the theme includes the Title tag and the Meta Description.
  2. Look for themes that only use one Header 1 tag per page and use the Header 2s sparingly.

4. Easy To Update

In the WordPress world, security is a hot topic, there have been numerous reports all over the web of sites getting hacked and infected with malware.

One way to avoid these dangers is by keeping your WordPress site, themes and plugins up-to-date.

Which is usually done by keeping an eye out for update notices in your WordPress dashboard, but that is not always the case for plugins bundled in with your theme.

You see, these plugins are technically considered part of the theme and so you must rely on the theme developer for updates – and when they don’t provide updates, it could lead to disaster.

As in the incident with the Slider Revolution plugin in 2014, where a security vulnerability led to over 100,000 sites getting infected with malware – because many theme developers bundled the plugin in their themes and the update to fix the problem was not readily available.

Quick Tip – Look For Themes That Are Easy To Update

  1. Avoid any themes with bundled in plugins.
  2. Instead look for themes that keep the design separate from the functionality.
  3. If you need sliders or page builder plugins it is smarter to install them as stand-alone plugins. That way you are able to keep them up-to-date and if you ever decide to change your theme, you won’t lose any of the functionality they provide.

5. Layout

The final thing to look at is the layout of the theme. Don’t worry about color, that can be changed, instead, focus on structure and how elements are positioned throughout the page.

As a theme developer, I can tell you that it is much easier to change a color than it is to move an entire element. I’m not going to go into too much detail about it in this post, but I can say that there is a lot of math involved and a wrong calculation could lead to the entire theme breaking.

What you want to do instead is look at the position of the header, the footer, and the sidebars. How the site logo and navigation menus are placed. Look at all the additional small details like borders and the shape of buttons and forms.

Quick Tip – Look For Themes With A Layout You Like

  1. Take some time and browse web design galleries, look for designs that you want your website to look like.
  2. Figure out what the common elements are and use that information when searching for a WordPress theme for your small business.

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In summary, when looking for a WordPress theme, look for themes built to help your small business rank higher.

That means you should avoid any themes that are slow to load or come with a lot of extras you don’t need.

Instead look for themes that are fast loading, optimize for search engines and mobile friendly.

Finally, if you want to know more about the themes I recommend visit my resources page.