Choosing the best WordPress Themes for Pest Control
Now you’ve made the (wise) decision to build your website on WordPress, you need the best WordPress themes for pest control. Why? A theme is the foundation for your website. It’s the basic template that sets the visual style and layout. It normally controls the type of fonts and screen colors. It may also have built-in functionality to make it easier to do certain things, such as displaying images about common pests or blogs.
Choosing the right theme can be confusing. There are literally thousands available. And, sadly, not all of the themes live up to their promised potential. Indeed, some are terrible.
How can you choose which theme is right for you? Before looking at the features, you should have a rough idea of what you are expecting from your website and how it will support your pest control business.
This article lists 5 ways to choose the theme best suited to your business needs.
Easy to Use
Whichever theme you choose, it should be user-friendly and easy to customize. Although most themes are designed that way, not all are. This is especially true of some developed by smaller companies, whose designers may be more focused on the technical ‘cleverness’ than user experience.
Look for themes that provide a good choice of fonts and colors. You want your website to be easy to read and look enticing. But keep things simple.
A good theme might include a site builder. These are visual editors that use a drag-and-drop approach to make changing your site simple and can be very useful.
Features
In addition to being easy to use, what features should you look for? These vary greatly between themes.
- Different menu options are normally available – and they should be easy to change. These might include having the menus at the top or side of the page, or providing links to key points on the first page.
- Front page formats vary considerably. Pest control websites rarely need a landing page and a single long front page is an unusual format for the type of business.
- Front pages may also have a variety of options for displaying images either in parallax (where the image floats off screen behind the text), large static images or sliders. Some even allow for videos. But do you need them and how will they affect the site’s loading speed and performance?
- The theme should support social icons in a way that suits your marketing plans. If not, you can use a plugin.
- A blog should be part of your pest control website and seamlessly incorporated into the theme.
There is a danger that some themes that look attractive are padded with unnecessary features. It’s worth noting that while many features look nice in a demo, they can severely affect the performance of your website. Pick a theme that suits your pest control business.
I was asked by a client this week to help with his website as he was having problems with load-speed. When I checked his theme it was heavily bloated with unused plugins, add-ons and even a massive demo of the theme that had loaded into his live site without him realizing.
Future-proof
The Internet is changing fast and your theme’s developers must be ready to react to those changes.
The biggest news of late revolves around responsive design, and Google has recently published additional guidelines about it. With more and more people using phones and tablets to browse the Internet, Google has made responsiveness a key factor in ranking. If your website is not responsive (which relates to giving phone users a good website experience) your page ranking is likely to suffer.
Not all themes are responsive, nor are all themes that say they are, so check carefully. Any theme that has not been updated in the last two or three years is less likely to be fully responsive.
SEO rules change regularly as Google updates its search algorithms. Check how often the developers have upgraded their theme in the past. It may give you an idea how well they will respond to new requirements.
Compatibility
Most WordPress sites use a variety of plugins to provide the extra customization and features needed to make a website look unique and fit for purpose.
Although theme developers normally claim their themes work well with all plugins, sadly this is not always true. If you choose a theme from a well-known developer you should be ok. But don’t discount small developers – some of their themes are awesome.
Compatibility extends outside of WordPress. Today, themes need to work on many different platforms. These may include iPads, iPhones, laptops, tablets or one of the huge variety of phones. It needs to perform just as well on different operating systems such as IOS, Firefox, Chrome, Linux, and others. The great majority of modern themes are quite capable of handling such variety.
How to check your decision
With so many variables, how can you be sure you get what is promised? One way is to check reviews and see what other people are saying about the theme.
Read the reviews carefully, noting the good comments as well as the bad. There will always be people who love to leave bad reviews but you can normally spot the doom-and-gloom merchants. More telling is the ratio of good versus bad.
Check how quickly the theme developer support team responds to queries. And look for what sort of questions get asked. If it’s the same thing time and again, it might indicate an issue with the theme.
Don’t just use the theme developer’s forum. Do a Google search for independent reviews.
To make the search a little easier if you have WordPress running, you can go to ‘Appearance’ – ‘Themes’ – ‘Add New’ and then select ‘Features Filter’. This will help narrow down your search to a certain extent.
Many themes have a demo site where you can try out the functions and features. Be aware these demo packages have been designed by professionals to make them look as good as possible. It may not be straightforward to get your site to look as good. And, as always, ask yourself how valuable these extras will be to your pest control business.
And now the hard part…
Choosing a theme can be daunting. The good news is that once your basic WordPress website has been built and some content added, you can normally change your theme without too much effort (unless you have incorporated some fancy gadgets and image handling).
And the really good news is a good theme will enhance the visual impact of your website, draw visitors and increase your business.
Don’t be fooled into thinking you need to spend money on a theme. There are some excellent free themes on the market, every bit as good as their expensive cousins. There are also some appalling ones – both free and premium.
If the decision proves too hard or you need help in setting up your site after you have made your decision, you are welcome to contact us at PestWriters. We have years of WordPress experience and have worked on numerous free and premium themes. We’re here to help.