[With Recommendations] How to Choose a WordPress Theme You Won't Regret [Paid, Highly Versatile]

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who have websites.

I tried building a site or blog with WordPress, but the overall design isn't great and it doesn't feel easy to read.

Is there a way to renew it so it feels closer to an acquaintance's site?

This article answers that kind of question.

Changing your WordPress theme solves it in one go

When you put this kind of question to a web production company, the reply is often "Why don't we just redo the whole thing! What sort of budget did you have in mind...", but in fact that isn't necessary.

That's because websites for business use (especially at small businesses) don't need to be rebuilt from scratch; in the extreme, switching to a new template is enough to solve it.

Let me explain why.

Iron rules to keep in mind for web design operations

Roughly, there are three:

What you need is not novelty or originality but "trustworthiness"

Since you're building it anyway, you might want a site with originality... but wait a moment!

In fact, users aren't looking for that; they feel reassured by "a familiar design they've seen somewhere before".

The usability that comes with the design is also important. The reason is simply that if it isn't easy to use, people won't want to visit again.

Getting people to visit again is what matters.

To dip briefly into psychology, there is something called the "Zajonc effect (also called the mere-exposure effect)," and it is said that the more often you come into contact with a person or thing, the more your liking for it and impression of it grow.

Liking leads to trust, and trust is powerful for getting the other person to act.

When templates are widely available, there is no need to build from scratch

So it is important for the design to convey "trustworthiness," and by using a template you can minimize the work.

And in WordPress, the equivalent of a template is a "theme."

Updates and tests can be done easily, quickly, and cheaply

Also, compared with a design built from scratch, a WordPress theme is not only easier to set up but also easy, fast, and cheap (in some cases 0 yen) to revise and test.

This is an understated but very important point: for "what on the site resonated with customers and got a response (or the opposite)," there is know-how (measures likely to be effective), but there is no correct answer.

If web updates and tests are slow or costly, the project or the company will be finished.
In that sense too, it is an important point.

How to choose a WordPress theme

A great many WordPress themes are distributed today, so here are some guidelines for choosing one.

Let's look at each in detail.

A fair number of people use it

This is the same as what you consider when choosing a computer, a mobile phone, or software.

Updates are reasonably frequent and constant

Just as with software, it is important that updates come reasonably often and consistently, to improve "usability," "functionality," and "security".

Technical information is easy to find outside the official site

It is also important that, outside the official site, volunteers share plenty of technical information, such as how to configure the theme and its shortcodes (theme-specific tags).

That's because you are more likely to find information clearer than official support, in-depth configuration methods (customizations), and troubleshooting faster than the official one.

You can expect results in customer acquisition and sales

With a theme that has many users, or a growing number of users, things like updates to the theme itself and opportunities for sharing know-how become more active.

Conversely, with a theme whose user numbers stay small, you probably can't expect much in the way of customer acquisition or sales results.

*Of course, this doesn't apply if you test aggressively and make use of it yourself without waiting for updates or someone else's know-how.

The design fits the attributes of your prospects

To use an extreme example, trying to sell clothes or colored contact lenses to girls who shop at Shibuya 109 with a site designed for businesspeople working in Marunouchi is just too much of a stretch.

In other words, it is important to pick from "designs within your prospects' territory".

In the earlier example:

Something like that (by the way, you don't incorporate all of them; these are just candidates to pick from).

When you're not sure, or when your customers are a broad range of people rather than a specific group, it's good to base the design on sites used by many users across a broad range (YouTube, Google, LINE), etc.

It is paid

Not only the quality but also whether changing themes will pay off depends on whether the theme is paid.

This is a bit of a digression, but

Paying for something that, the moment you pay, promises big gains in usability and productivity is not consumption but investment, so I recommend investing actively.

Recommended WordPress themes

So I can't say in general which theme is best for which attributes, and whether you can call one "the best!" varies from person to person, but this time I'll introduce several themes that can be used across the board without leaning toward any particular group.

Customization and perfectionism for your website come "after you've made money"

To be honest, a template is a template, so sometimes it can't scratch every itch, and sometimes "I want it to feel a little different!" is possible and sometimes it isn't.

In those cases, think of it this way:

Small businesses don't have the abundant funds of large corporations.

You can grow your business by executing with the resources you can obtain and use as efficiently and quickly as possible.

I hope that even with just a single WordPress theme, you will lead your business to growth with a strategy befitting a small business.