I use Themeforest to search, review and purchase all my WordPress themes. Why?
- Massive selection
- Category filters to help narrow #1
- Live previews for each theme
- Reviews that shed light on a theme’s functionality/support
- Reasonable pricing
Themeforest allows you to know exactly what you’re going to get when you go shopping for WordPress themes. In today’s video I show you my process of picking the perfect theme for your website.
Visiting Themeforest for the first time can be a daunting experience thanks to all the variety on the site. Obviously, for this post I’m going to start by hovering over WordPress on the navigation bar and viewing the options presented to me in the dropdown.
This is where it’s up to you to determine the type of category that will best suit your project. Everything is fairly straightforward so take your pick and let’s move on.
Clicking on any category results in a sorting that’s listed by date. Change this to sort by RATING.
You’re not going to want any theme with less than 4.5/5 stars. The reviews are truthful to the point of being harsh and developers on Themeforest are quick to update their themes and fix any issues so that their ratings don’t slip.
Future theme updates are 99% of the time free of charge and can really help clean up the random bugs that might crop up through the use of plug-ins or in the theme option settings. An excessive amount of customer support on behalf of the developers is a good thing as well — trust me.
Hovering over each thumbnail in the list will provide a brief preview. I generally like to present 3-4 quality templates to a client to choose from so I sort through upwards of 30+ themes and whittle the options down from there.
I open the live preview for each theme that interests me or that I feel could work and continue down the list. My browser usually suffers from an excessive amount of open tabs when I go theme fishing.
The one thing to remember is WordPress websites are capable of almost anything. The theme developers understand this and put everything and the kitchen sink in these polished ‘demos’ to entice you to purchase their product.
You must remember that you will either be stripping away much of the dummy content on their stock site or starting from a very base model of what you currently see.
The main things to look for will be different for everyone, but the more customizable a theme is and the more functionality it possesses is very important.
Responsive design should be mandatory and if it’s not offered then choose a different theme.
Mobile traffic is only going to keep increasing so you might as well choose a theme that will future-proof yourself as much as possible.
Once you and the client agree to a particular template and make the purchase you can download the file and start uploading the theme in your WordPress dashboard. You can always go back to Themeforest to download a theme again or retrieve the latest updates. Good luck and enjoy your new theme!
Have you used Themeforest before? Do you have a better system in place for choosing your perfect theme?
