I understand – when you’re just starting a blog or website for a small business, you might not want to spend too much on the ‘look’ of your website, particularly the theme.

You might lean towards the thought that it’s the content that matters. Sure, that’s a valid point. No one can refute that.

However, choosing a theme for your blog or website is not just about creating a certain look. Rather, having a good WordPress theme can contribute to your audience experience and in a longer term, build trust with your audience.

Best Free WordPress Themes (Business)

If you choose not to spend too much on your website, one of the first things you might want to cut back on is the theme for your website.

A quarter of websites these days are powered by WordPress so I’m going to focus on choosing themes for a WordPress website.

As far as WordPress is concerned, you would certainly be spolit for choice, with the many options of paid and premium themes to choose from.

Building your website through WordPress.org, enables you to incorporate themes from third parties to suit the niche and the kind of website that you create such as a blog or an e-commerce site.

Note : If you are building a WordPress site for your business, you might want to build it using WordPress.org rather than WordPress.com due to limitations in the latter.

How to Choose WordPress Theme?

Within WordPress.org alone, there is a huge number of themes to choose from and it can get overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have any inkling of how your website should look like.

I usually based my search on some basic criteria, regardless of whether I’m looking for free or premium themes.

After using Premium themes, however, I’ve never used free themes in my websites for reasons I explain below.

Some of the issues I would consider in my selection include :

• Simplicity (in terms of navigation) and reader-friendliness
• Besides content, would my website include ads from network like Adsense or Infolinks?
• Will I be directly selling from this website?
• Will I be able to make changes on my own without having to deal with techie languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript?

Then I move on to weigh on other criteria that would contribute to the audience experience of my website, such as :

• The website’s loading speed
• Mobile-readiness
• Ability to be customized
• Support and updates of the chosen theme

 

Free vs Premium

Before narrowing down your options, you must understand that choosing a free theme comes with limitations. While you pay for premium themes, it does not necessary mean you need to burn a hole in your pocket.

Coding

While I’m not a techie person, I’m also not one to spend too much time on coding for theme updates. This is a reason why I prefer to work with premium themes so that my theme updates is just a matter of point and click.

SEO-ready

Having a website with SEO-ready theme also helps so that you  can focus more on your content rather than worry about the next Google algorithm updates.

Support

Having reliable, speedy support for my website’s theme is important to me as a contingency because in running a website, sometimes you just don’t know what you’ll run into. You might have new ideas on your website and for people like me who knows little about coding, having great support for the theme I use goes a long way in maintaining, if not growing the website.

MyThemeShop 

My Favorite So Far

I started using MyThemeShop about a year ago with the free themes.

I came across many options but one of the things that got me attracted to MyThemeShop is the design of the themes that offers distinctively clean look, whether the themes are free or premium. As I mentioned above, one of my criteria in selecting a theme is having a user-friendly experience for my audience, with a clean-looking design that offers easy navigation.

Whether you are building a blog or running an e-commerce website, MyThemeShop offers various themes to suit your needs.

It’s always good to try out the free themes and get your feet wet before you decide if any of the themes is what would work for you. That’s what I did.

MyThemeShop has worked well for me in increasing visitors to my website. And I have gone back there not only for the the selection of themes, but also plugins and exceptional support that I get as a premium member.

Takeaway

I understand that some people are not willing to fork out more than $40 yearly for a theme, knowing that they can get less expensive options or free themes.

But let me emphasize that I don’t pay more than $20 for the premium themes that I’m using right now for my websites.

MyThemeShop put up offers for example, Black Friday Deals, with irresistably discounted prices on their Premium themes and plugins.

The bottomline is if you are serious about growing your website for your business, my advice is : Don’t settle for free.

You got to put in money to make money. And one of the things you want to be spending on is a great website theme that you can easily work with and get value for your money from.