What Type of WordPress Theme and Hosting to Choose When Creating a Modern Site?

What Type of WordPress Theme and Hosting to Choose When Creating a Modern Site?

Visual communication is how you interact with visitors who access your website and how you attract them. Of course, everything isn’t black and white when it comes to traffic coming to your website. There are many more factors that affect visits and keeping visitors on your website. If someone has found exactly what they were looking for, they won’t leave your blog simply because they don’t like the WordPress theme that you’ve chosen or the font. In addition, you shouldn’t ignore people who don’t stay long on the website or are just reading or scanning a topic you’re covering. All people who access the website in this way are your potential followers and should also be fought for. Someone might not need your article today but might want to read it tomorrow or recommend it to someone.

You shouldn’t ignore one more thing and it’s related to hosting of your website – a possibility of being reported for copyright infringement because of content on your WordPress site. Either you deliberately stole content that belongs to the rights holder protected by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) or someone arbitrarily reported your website, you need protection. This is the protection you can get if someone sends a takedown notice. We’re talking about DMCA ignored hosting, which is located offshore in countries where DMCA can’t be applied. These providers will do a good job protecting you against copyright issues and, in this way, you won’t risk losing all the hard and work and money you invested in creating a website.

Basic Instructions for Choosing a WordPress Theme

WordPress themes allow users to easily create modern websites. However, in an abundance of free and premium themes, it isn’t easy to choose the right one that best suits the needs of your business, blog, e-commerce… There’s a suitable theme to choose for a particular type of website, but we’ll stick in the article to explaining the various themes and their options, to make it easier for you to choose a type of theme that’s right for your website. Also, we’ll clarify what key requirements you should seek when choosing a hosting for your WordPress site.

There’s a big number of free themes on the WordPress site itself. In addition to the main WordPress site, you have many more themes that are offered and websites that have a collection of free themes. Be aware that the themes you download from non-certified WordPress sites may have been modified to some extent and thus, have a security leak that hackers can use to take over your website as a whole after you insert personal or business information.

Free WordPress Themes: Pros and Cons

Free themes can be really great and the only choice for WordPress users with no budget and those who are looking for some simple solutions. Still, no matter how tempting and ideally it may be, free themes have disadvantages. Among the first one is that they are a major security glitch. This means that the authors of these themes simply have no obligation to update and patch any of the drawbacks. Free themes don’t come with many customizable options. Usually, these are some basic functions that are very limited. For some additional things, you’d have to install plugins. Also, if something goes wrong with a free theme, there’s no support. The author isn’t obliged and, in most cases, doesn’t want to spend time helping you for free.

Premium WordPress Themes: Pros and Cons

Unlike free themes, premium themes have one big disadvantage – you need to pay for them. Apart from this, there are many benefits that you actually get from premium themes for that money. In addition to the handful of options you get for customizing and improving the visual appeal of your website, you also get free support and theme updates for some period of time, which is very important when it comes to website security.

Single Property Themes and Multi-Purpose Themes

After deciding which theme you want, free or premium, there’s another classification. In order to choose one of these 2 options, you need to plan for the long run. Of course, it’s possible to change the theme over time, but it takes a lot more time and effort than it’ll take you to plan the right choice of the theme at the start.

Single Property Themes

With specialized, single property themes, you have many options that are exclusive to the niche you want. Let’s say you want a real estate website – you’ll find a theme that has all the possible options regarding real estate that you’ll imagine. You’ll get the design and a handful of options accordingly. The design itself is tailored to the niche for which the theme is intended and thus, the website loads faster. However, if you want to include other types of ads or services later, it will be very difficult to fit this into the design and the website itself.

Multi-Purpose Themes

For multi-purpose themes, you’ll get numerous options for various services. Let’s say again that your business is real estate – you can easily extend these themes to various other services from sales to presentations. So, you can easily move from one area to another or add new services or activities. The downside is that these themes are large and heavy, and have a lot of plugins that slow down your website’s loading.

Most Important Factors to Look for When Choosing Hosting for WordPress Site

All the brainstorming and decision making when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme would be in vain if they are followed with opting for a bad hosting. This is because you did nothing by selecting an awesome theme, visually appealing, and have good traffic if your website is crashing. That’s why choosing the right hosting provider for your WordPress site is very important. Ads for web hosts and blogs that promote them can be easily found on the Internet. But, how can you know which one best suits your website? Put aside their rating and focus on some functions that every hosting has to have:

Hardware Requirements – every hosting must meet the recommended server and hardware requirements for running a WordPress site. These are the disk space of 1GB+, Apache or NGINX web server, MySQL version 5.0.15 or greater (or any version of MariaDB) for database, RAM of 512MB+, PHP version 7.3 or greater, and processor of 1.0GHz+.

Speed – Logically, you need your website to load fast. Under 2 seconds is what’s considered a good page load time. So, if your WordPress site loads slower than that, change a hosting provider.

High Availability – If a hosting provider can’t maintain uptime of your website, what’s considered an optimal value, which is 99.95%, change it. This factor is maybe the most important in choosing a web host. One thing is when your website loads slowly, but completely another thing is when it isn’t visible at all.

Technical Support – Visitors of your website don’t care if it is day or night when they have some problem or a question related to your WordPress site. So, pick a hosting provider that offers 24/7 tech support.

Affordability – As the owner of a WordPress website, you’d want to save as much money as possible when choosing a hosting. But opting for a cheap provider must not affect performance. Uptime and speed must not suffer. Keep that in mind.

Important note: There are various websites that offer downloading of premium themes for free. Avoid these themes as they are usually already infected with a virus, and it may lead to terminating your hosting account. If this doesn’t happen, some other negative consequences may occur. If the theme is free of viruses, you probably won’t be able to upgrade it to a newer version, thus, won’t be able to fix the flaws and problems that accompany it. So, a tip is to either get the original free theme or purchase premium. There’s no option No.3.