The best WooCommerce Theme is a combination of highlights: from strong download volumes and reviews to a collection of valuable features and reliable support.
There are many WooCommerce Themes that could look appealing for your WordPress-based business—but your long-term success depends on picking the right WooCommerce Theme right from the get-go: and it’s not just about design and apparent usability.
1. Map Your Requirements, Choose What’s Essential
It may seem obvious, but it often isn’t. It’s so easy to be distracted or feel overwhelmed by so many options, so you want to avoid that. How can you do it? The most effective strategy is to actually create a list of essential features you know you want the right WooCommerce theme to have.
Ok, so let’s strategize. Are you creating a blog or building an e-commerce website? Are you selling one product or using large menus? How many products do you want to display per row? What would you want your users to find on your website? And how can you make it easy for them to find it?
Remember: it all comes down to making your customers happy, right? So stick to what you really need. Choose a WooCommerce theme that aligns with your goals and that has the features that support their realization.
Make sure it’s responsive and mobile-friendly—two absolutely crucial characteristics your website can’t afford to miss. Users are increasingly buying on mobile and responsiveness is an essential feature of a rewarding user experience that makes visitors complete checkouts and come back for more.
In general terms, don’t make it too simple if poor features won’t help it perform—and don’t add needless complexity that no one will see value in. Ultimately, map your requirements and stick to the plan. If you do that, you can’t fail!
2. The Simpler (And Lighter), The Better
WooCommerce Themes that offer too many options basically increase complexity that you don’t really need or want to deal with. Also, they’ll likely affect your page load times, and you don’t want that. Let’s be honest: what’s the value in having loads of flashy animations available if that’s only making things difficult for you?
We suggest that you take a leaner and more efficient approach. Be honest about your requirements and align your WooCommerce theme choice with your website goals. Choose a great design that is matched with great usability and don’t fall in love with extra features that your users won’t value. You want results, not distractions.
In a nutshell, you want to keep it simple because your users aren’t looking for something complicated. The rule of thumb here is: think about what your target audience is really looking for, and make sure your selected WooCommerce theme reflects it.
3. Choose a Theme that You can Easily Personalize
You may feel love at first sight for a WooCommerce theme that you come across and think it’s perfect the way it is. If this happens, you’re lucky—but this is not a likely scenario.
That’s why it’s so important to choose a theme that you can easily personalize. You’re not a coder and you don’t want to go through the steep learning curve of becoming one.
So go with a WooCommerce theme that uses the WordPress Customizer or another popular builder that is used by a large community and works with any theme. This way, you can make changes to colors, layouts, and even change the theme later.
4. Choose Page Builder Popularity, Not Exclusivity
Let’s get a question out of the way first. You want a WordPress page builder plugin that you can use and that most people know how to use. Proprietary theme builders may sound alluring because they offer exclusivity, but, if they only work with one theme, you may find your website and content locked in that theme.
You won’t be able to make any significant changes to it or even eliminate it. On the other hand, if you’re using a page builder that works with any theme, you can change the theme at any point while keeping your content and layouts untouched. This type of freedom is extremely important—because you can’t enjoy it with a proprietary page builder.
Now that we cleared that point, what are you looking for? Basically, popularity. Given that page builders are critical WordPress plugins that allow you to create page layouts using a simple drag and drop user interface, and considering you don’t want to get held back by code you don’t understand and can’t change, just cut through the noise and choose a popular builder with proven quality and that supports your freedom.
5. Is It Truly SEO-Friendly? Here’s How to Know
We don’t need to tell you how important it is for a website to be SEO-friendly. That’s why you shouldn’t just fall for the looks of a WooCommerce theme: looking good but having poor HTML coding behind it will be a problem. Search engines won’t like it, so your website won’t perform well.
Don’t intimidated, though. You don’t need to be a coder to choose the right WooCommerce theme for your website—so here’s what you can do. First of all, check what the developer of the theme that caught your attention has to say about having it SEO-optimized.
Secondly, run your own simple check by using the W3C Markup Validation service to determine that the WooCommerce theme you’re considering generates proper HTML5. Pay attention only to the main warnings so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by all the warnings it returns. You’re looking for HTML5 quality code, so that’s where you should focus.
6. If It’s Not Well Coded, It’s Not For You
You want a WooCommerce theme that performs well and that is aligned with the latest coding standards and best practices. Your website visitors will want a page that they feel safe about using and that will make them happy as to how it delivers.
These are the criteria you’re looking for when picking a WooCommerce theme with a well-built code that will be there to perform strongly and reliably for you and your users. There are two special tips to find a theme that matches this requirement: 1) WooCommerce themes from providers with solid reputations and thousands of downloads will surely be well-coded; and 2) running the WooCommerce theme you’re looking at through the Theme Check plugin will clear any doubts about its quality.
7. It’s All About the Plugins
A WordPress website is only as good as the WordPress plugins it uses. WordPress is an ecosystem composed of a large universe of plugins that offer multiple features and support multiple functionalities. However, there are certain essential plugins that any quality WordPress website should have, such as Yoast SEO, a cache plugin, and other essentials.
When you choose the right WooCommerce theme for your website, you want to know for sure that it supports all the essential and even several of the most popular plugins. Build your website for the long-tem: choose a WooCommerce theme that lets it grow and perform well for years to come.
By the way, take no chances: if you’re unsure about whether a certain theme supports the plugins that your website can’t do without, ask its developer about it before choosing it or discarding it. Assumptions never make strategies!
8. Choose a Translation-Friendly Theme
Your WordPress website may or may not be in English. That’s an important circumstance that you may want to change in the future. Since you may want to make it multilingual at some point, be sure to choose a WooCommerce theme that can be translated and that supports multilingual WordPress plugins if and when you decide to use them.
9. Is It Really Updated?
Is the developer of the WooCommerce Theme you’re looking into taking the time to keep it updated? That’s a really important sign.
Remember that the core WordPress software keeps evolving, so you want to choose a WooCommerce Theme that is kept fresh and updated. So what should be worthy of your attention here? Let’s just say that, if the theme that is getting your attention has been updated in the last six months, you’re on safe ground.
10. Make Sure The Support is There
A truly great premium WooCommerce Theme will give you the peace of mind of being backed by a good support service when you need it. After all, there’s no point in choosing a theme that looks amazing but that will leave you stranded when you suddenly need help.
In a nutshell, you want a WooCommerce Theme that showcases detailed documentation and gives you the guarantee of enjoying one-year of email support.
11. Solid Ratings Expressed Through Thoughtful Reviews
A strong track record of user satisfaction is one of the best indicators that you should consider. You need to choose a WooCommerce theme that has solid ratings that leave no room for doubt. How do you find them and know they are to be trusted?
Well, third-party marketplaces will display customer reviews, but don’t just fall for the shiny 5-stars. Make sure you look for ratings that are expressed with thoughtful reviews where users say why they liked a particular theme so much. Any technical references are especially worthy of your attention.
Congrats for Using a Formula to Choose the Best WooCommerce Theme for a Successful Website
A lot of people will just follow their intuition and impressions when looking for the best WooCommerce theme—and that’s why they end up struggling.
By following this formula, you are using a tried and tested approach to make sure that the WooCommerce theme that you use is aligned with your requirements—and will help ensure your website will help you succeed in the long run.
- Want to use the kind of theme that over 32,000+ online businesses have used since 2014 to significantly grow their sales?
- Would you like to use a premium WooCommerce theme that almost always gets 5-star reviews from users?
- Over 1,300 happy users can’t be wrong: Shopkeeper is our highlighted premium WooCommerce theme that is proven to help online shops consistently close sales.
Try Shopkeeper today – the WooCommerce theme that ticks all the boxes and helps you boost your sales!
