In this episode, we look at giving you some advice how you choose the right premium WordPress theme for your website project.
We go through about 11 key points that you need to consider when looking at different themes before you decided to get out your credit card and buy.

The big daddy of theme marketplaces is Themeforest and a lot of people in the WordPress community do like to have a regular go at attacking some of the most popular topics on Themeforrest. These attacks are mostly justified because a lot of the best sellers on Themeforest are what I call “Swiss Amy Knife” Themes the offer a significant amount of flexibility and choices connected to layout and homepage sliders.

However, these themes tend to be tough to set-up and can be slow to load on shared hosting accounts. Then we go on to one of my pet-hates themes that have inbuilt page building plugins that are very directly linked to the Them. One of the leading theme shops that doing this is Elegant Themes and their Divi Builder plugin which works with latest Elegant Themes however with their older themes from either Elegant Themes or other theme-shops you were going to have problems.

Also, most consumers who are not directly part of the WordPress community only by search see either Themeforest or Elegant Themes. However there a whole large group of excellent WordPress theme shops out there. We list some of the best WordPress theme shops on our WordPress resources page.

1 –  Strive for Simplicity

2 – No Short Codes All Over the Home-Page

3 – Responsive is Not Optional Anymore

4 – Browser Compatibility

5 – Translation + Multilingual Ready

6 – Page Builders ( I don’t like page builder built into the theme.)

7 – Support Options for When You Need Help

8 – SEO Friendliness (check using Chrome developer tools or Firebug on Firefox or get somebody who understands code to look over a couple of themes, that you are thinking of buying for you)

9 – Ratings and Reviews

10 -Is the theme backed by a solid development team?

11 – Does it look close to what you want your site to look like, out of the box, or does it require major customization to get it looking decent?