When you create an online store with WordPress, you need to choose WooCommerce themes. It may be challenging because there are so many themes out there.
Of course, there are many very good templates you can buy on marketplaces with high performance but before you choose a theme for your online store, there are several things to pay attention to.
But first, let’s understand what a WooCoomerce theme is and how it differs from a regular WordPress theme.
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What Is A WooCommerce Theme
WooCommerce theme is a regular WordPress theme. It can be installed the same way and works the same way. You can add pages, posts, install and use plugins, and so on.
The only difference between regular WordPress and WooCoomerce themes is that it already comes with all the pages and functionality an eCommerce website needs.
When you install it already has pages like shop, products, customer account, checkout, etc. Also, it has payment functionality. So, a WooCommerce theme is a fully-featured and working eCommerce WordPress website.
Also, many WooCommerce themes come with pre-made templates that are optimized for WooCommerce. After installing the theme, you can import the template you like and you will have a ready online store. Just upload your products, change logos, text, and you are ready to start selling.
Choose WooCommerce Themes That Work
And because there are so many themes and templates for WooCommerce and WordPress in general, sometimes it’s overwhelming and hard to pick one. You may like a design of a specific theme but it may not good at all.
Because although the design is very important, there are other several things that are more important than design, especially for eCommerce websites.
Let’s dive in and see what to look for before buying a WooCoomerce theme.
1. Good WooCommerce Developers
Choose WooCommerce themes that were created by good developers. The most important one is to know who is the author of the theme, who is the developer. A good developer theme behind a theme means that it’s a good theme with good code and optimization.
Because WordPress is an open-source project, everyone can create themes and plugins for it. That’s good but also it can be a bad thing because not everyone can create clean and optimized themes for WordPress.
You buy a theme from an unknown company or a single person, it’s beautiful, well-designed, but as soon as you install it, problems start to appear. It may be slow, may not work properly, and there could be many issues with a bad theme.
So, just read and know more about the developer team behind the theme, are they well known, do they have other WordPress products, is it a new or established company, and so on.
An example of a good developer team with amazing products is Creative Themes and their amazing Blocksy theme, a premium WordPress theme that comes with 5+ pre-made templates, including WooCommerce templates.
Remember that you have to buy themes from established, professional developers and agencies.
2. Optimized Theme
Next what you have to look for in a theme is how well-optimized it is. Optimization is crucial for every WordPress theme. A bad optimized theme will have many issues and may break your website completely.
Choose WooCommerce themes that are well-built and optimized for WordPress and speed. Theme code must be clean, it must follow the WordPress theme development guidelines. Also, WordPress gets frequent updates, so a theme must be compatible with a new version.
If a theme is not optimized and has a bad script, it will have different issues. And that will cause bad performance. And WooCommerce needs additional optimization because it is much more complex than a regular WordPress blog theme.
Bad optimization can cause issues like breaking the design, performance issues, incompatibility with WordPress updates, and much more.
So, you need to make sure that your theme has clean code and is built according to WordPress guidelines. And that’s another reason why you need to choose a theme from a good agency and development team.
3. Theme Must Be Fast
Always choose WooCommerce themes that are fast. Speed is one of the most important things in ranking and user experience. It is part of general optimization but it needs more attention. Actually, one of the main problems with many WordPress or WooCommerce themes is speed.
And WooCommrece themes are the heaviest ones, so they require more optimization for speed. Because an eCommerce website has dynamic content-like products, it needs to complete more tasks than a normal theme.
Also, eCommerce websites include big, high-quality images that are one of the reasons for slow websites, it has products that must be fetched from databases, and so on. And slow websites are bad for user experience too.
You can use tools such as Google Insights that will test website speed for mobile and desktop and show you the issues that a theme has.
Actually, the statistics show that a slow website causes an increase in bounce rate which means that you lose potential clients and money because of slow-loading pages.
Of course, you need to host your website on a good hosting platform and also you can improve speed by caching plugin, but the theme itself must be fast and optimized. If not, hosting and cache plugins won’t make a big difference.
All this means that it’s crucial to choose a theme that is optimized not only for WordPress but also for speed. WooCommerce themes require more speed optimization because they are much heavier than other types of WordPress themes.
4. Plugin Compatibility
A very important thing in which many themes fail is the compatibility with third-party plugins. This is a very common problem with badly optimized themes and you must avoid it. Because it can cause serious problems and you may need a professional to solve the problem. Choose WooCommerce themes that work with plugins.
Sometimes a bad plugin can be a cause of the problem but many times it’s a theme that wasn’t built well. You may use well-known, premium WordPress plugins but it won’t work because of a poorly optimized theme.
And that’s very common in WooCommerce themes because they are more complex and one small thing can break it. And when you have a live site and it breaks, that’s very bad for business and user experience.
A theme not only is optimized for WordPress and speed but it must be built the way that it can work with other plugins too. And 99% of the time, you will need some third-party plugin whether it’s a utility or a feature plugin.
Some plugins you will definitely need for every website are caching, optimization, security, or maybe a newsletter or popup plugin. And if a theme is not optimized for third-party plugins, then there will definitely be problems.
Bad compatibility with plugins can cause serious problems and can break your entire website. So, see if a theme works with plugins, ask the developer team or test it yourself before launching your website.
5. Theme Customization
And the last but not least thing is to choose WooCommerce themes that have various customization options. Many premium themes don’t offer good customization options and that’s not good. Without customization, it’s hard to create custom websites.
Yes, you may like a theme or a template you are using but after some time you definitely need to change something whether it be a design or a feature change. But if a theme doesn’t offer options, then you are stuck with it.
A theme can have multiple customization options and some themes come with different elements or sections you can choose from. But not all of them. Be careful and always check what options a theme offers.
A theme must have at least minimum customization options such as changing header or footer, hero section, product list or single product page design, etc. Read everything about it when you choose WooCommerce themes.
Or if it doesn’t have it, then it should have different templates or sections you can choose from. Because if you want to change the design of your eCommerce website and the theme doesn’t allow it, then you have to buy another one which is not a good option.
This may not be the main deciding aspect when choosing the theme, but it’s better to have a few options than have only one.
Conclusion
Choose WooCommerce themes that meet all the requirements mentioned in this post. Pay attention to the creator of a theme, how well optimized it’s for WordPress and speed, how well it works with plugins, and it’s better to have some customization options. You will have fewer problems later.
Don’t be amazed by only the beautiful design you see on the theme preview because the design might be good, it might look professional but as soon as you install it, things go wrong. So, always choose themes carefully because a bad theme may cause serious problems that will have a bad impact on your business.
