Choosing the best WooCommerce theme is one of the most important tasks before opening an online store. WooCommerce provides you multiple options in this regard, both free and paid. Themes are important because they help you visualize your brand to your audience, add products to your site, receive payments, add widgets, and much more, all in an attractive manner that is relevant to your business style.
But there is a lot more to focus on besides how attractive your site looks. A theme affects the performance and speed of your website and thus it’s important to make a list of features you want and choose the best theme for your business.
With so many theme options from WooCommerce, we have made a list of necessary features to help you pick out the best from the rest.
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Where to Find a Suitable WooCommerce Theme
There are many websites and forums that provide WooCommerce themes, both free and paid. But to be 100% sure of your purchase or downloads, we recommend using the WooCommerce theme library or the WordPress Directory to find your business theme. Moreover, you can also check out external marketplaces such as Themeforest.net to purchase themes.
Choosing a good WooCommerce theme is crucial as it impacts your visitors’ first impression and indirectly affects the conversion rate. Moreover, using an outdated theme with no features is bound to slow down search and navigation and lead to poor traffic. Although you will find many articles stating the best themes, it depends on your required features to choose the best for your business. Let’s see what these must-have features are.
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What to Look for While Picking a Theme
1. It Should Reflect the Personality of Your Store
Just because they all look good, doesn’t mean they are all perfect for your store. If you have a brand, you need to look for a theme that is similar in style. As the layout of the store is the first impression your customers would have, it needs to reflect your personality. Here you need to understand your audience, how you want to display your products, what features you want to highlight, etc.
So even though it’s not all about the design, it is still a very important factor to consider.
2. Responsiveness
More than 50% of the sales account to mobile eCommerce and if your theme is not optimized for it, that is a huge chunk of sales you are missing out on. In this era, it has become evident how important mobiles are and how they have become a forefront for marketing and promotion. Choosing a WooCommerce theme that is mobile responsive results in easy navigation, optimized and resized images, optimum speed, and good performance. Overall, it improves the user experience no matter what device they are using.
Mobile optimization is also important for SEO. Google will penalize all websites that are not responsive, thus affecting search engine rankings and traffic.
3. Search Engine Friendly
Find a theme that is SEO-optimized to increase traffic on your website. Now, when we talk about SEO optimization, there are several things you can do to make it happen. Such as making your site mobile responsive, adding meta descriptions and headings, checking site speed and performance, and much more. There are various tools you can find for this purpose, or some themes even have these features built-in.
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4. User-Friendly Cart And Checkout
By default, WooCommerce provides a simple and boring cart and checkout page. Your checkout page greatly affects the cart abandonment rate, which many eCommerce stores fall victims to. Did you know that if your checkout page is too lengthy or confusing, it could lead to around 70% of the consumers abandoning their cart at the last minute? Having a cart and checkout page that is optimized and built according to your business style will not only reduce cart abandonment but will end the shopping journey on a professional and positive note.
How to choose the best WooCommerce theme? Look for customizable cart and checkout pages, so you can add marketing and promotional elements and customize it however you want.
5. Responsive Customer Support
You need to choose a theme that is updated regularly and compatible with WordPress and WooCommerce. Now, why is that important? Because WordPress and WooCommerce are constantly releasing new versions and if your theme is not compatible with them, it will result in slow page loads, performance issues, and much more.
Choose a WooCommerce theme with active customer support and regular updates, so you don’t have to deal with these issues. You can easily find such information on the theme page.
6. Advanced Features without Theme Bloat
Many website owners fill their sites with unnecessary features to make them more attractive or provide convenience. But all of these advanced features end up bloating your theme and affecting speed and performance. Thus, when choosing a WooCommerce theme, it is important to find a theme that has the required features, rather than purchasing one that could potentially harm your site and increase bounce rate.
Adding unnecessary content like videos, graphics, sliders, pop-ups, etc when there is no need is only bad for your site health and raises the chances of a security breach.
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7. Social Sharing Buttons
Social media is all the rage right now and if you are not utilizing social media platforms, you are losing a huge chunk of customers. Many themes have social sharing buttons and follow features that enable you to add them on individual product and category pages. For example, if a customer buys a product, they can share it on their social media. This helps in increasing engagement and also increasing followers. And you get to utilize the hottest marketing platforms.
8. Page Speed
If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, more than 50% of the visitors will leave, never to come again. That’s how impactful site speed can be and it’s all dependent on the WooCommerce theme you choose. Depending on how fast and lightweight your theme is, if it is compatible with the latest version of WordPress/WooCommerce, and can handle a huge amount of data, your site speed will be affected accordingly.
Thus, before choosing your theme, check page speed with the help of plugins and extensions to make sure it can handle the load.
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Choose The Best
And that’s it! I hope you all are now well-versed on how to choose the best WooCommerce theme for your store. Make sure to purchase themes from authentic marketplaces, look for the desired features, and make sure page load speed is optimized. Besides this, design your theme according to your business style, because it is the first impression on your visitors and if it doesn’t portray the correct message, your customers are bound to get confused.
