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Picking the right WordPress theme can seem overwhelming. Make sure the theme you choose has these 10 features. Responsiveness Speed SEO Optimization Regular Updates & Active Development Installs Reviews Simple and User-Friendly! Customization Sticky post or feature post Style Training and Customer Support Keep reading and I'll share why these features are good for a theme, my top 5 free themes, and 2 paid themes that you may want to consider. Responsiveness The critical thing a WordPress theme must have is its responsiveness. This means it shows up well on mobile devices. As of February 2025, people using mobile devices contribute to 63.05% of all website traffic. Back in 2011, this figure sat at 6.1%. A big jump right? That number probably will continue to grow! If for some reason you don't have a responsive theme, then when 6.3 out of 10 people view your website it's going to look like a giant mess. This is one of those features your FREE theme needs to have. Speed The faster your theme is the better it's going to do to get traffic from Google and Bing. This impacts user experience, because do you want to wait around for a webpage to load? No You shouldn't expect your reader to as well. The faster the theme the BETTER! Any edge you can get to rank is going to help you and speed can help! When in doubt pick a FAST theme! SEO Optimization Your theme should be as optimized to rank in Google and the search engines as much as possible. One factor is speed, but the security of the theme can also impact this. Regular Updates & Active Development Wordpress changes, plugins change and a theme needs to have regular updates to keep up. If a theme was last updated 5 years ago, then you may run into some problems! One of the ways to know when a theme was last updated is to go to this site HERE. Then when you click on a theme, it will give you all kinds of info. on it such as when it was last updated. It also tells you how many people downloaded it. You are looking for a theme that was last updated recently! Installs The more people that have installed a theme the more feedback and improvement it has received. It's just not worth it to be the first few people to try out a new theme. It's risky! You just want to make sure the dang theme works, so you can focus on providing helpful content to your readers. This is also why the free and paid themes I recommend later are all very popular with lots of people using them! Reviews Reviews matter! If a theme has a lot of terrible reviews then like the saying goes if there is smoke maybe there is a fire. You can find the reviews from this site HERE as well. Simple and User Friendly The more simple and user-friendly the theme is the better. Sometimes when a theme has "too many" options it's not good. You could end up spending too much time customizing and trying to figure it out, instead of creating content! Reminds me of "paralysis analysis" when there are too many choices and then no choice is made. via GIPHY Customization Customization is another thing to think about it. This can be both a positive and a negative. If the customization is simple and user friendly then it could be good. If it takes you 2 hours to change 1 feature then maybe not so good. Of course, many paid themes offer more customization, to justify you spending money! Sticky Post or Feature Post Being able to stick a post or clickable image at the top of your blog is a great feature. This is prime real estate and it's best to use this for a landing page (technically a squeeze page) to collect emails. If you want to learn more about how to create a great landing page (that converts) and how to do email marketing (that works) I highly recommend checking this page I created HERE. There is "a lot" of money to be made when you know what you're doing with emails! Style Let's be honest, at the end of the day you're probably going to go with a theme where you like the style. In many ways picking the ideal WordPress theme is a personal choice. It's sort of like picking the right clothes to wear. Since I'm a VERY basic guy, my theme is basic. You may like something different and since you have to look at the theme a lot, go with a style you prefer! Training and Customer Support This is where paid themes may have an advantage. Free themes don't have an incentive to give you personal training and support! If you pay for a theme, they may be able to provide better support and step-by-step troubleshooting on an issue you may be having. Top 5 Free Themes Neve Neve is not a bad free theme, they do have a paid version as well. What I like about Neve is they give you options on different layouts that you can choose. Then you simply click the layout you like sort of like a menu at a restaurant. It's all customizable as well. For example, the blog layout can be changed as well. It's also fast and lots of people have used it! You can learn more by clicking on the link HERE. OceanWP This is an older theme, that still is a great option for a free choice. It works with Elementor, WooCommerce, and Gutenberg. It's mostly known for being lightweight and SEO-friendly. Since that is a key feature we are looking for, it's not a bad choice. You can view a demo of the theme by going to their site HERE. Rishi Theme This is also a free theme and there are upgrades to a paid theme. They brag about having a very fast speed and it loads in under half a second. Since speed is SO important, this is not a bad pick as well. They also have different starter site templates that you can view. The paid version also has some nice features such as the reader can pick different emojis to interact with your content. You can learn more from their website HERE. JNews This is an interesting theme where there are lots of different layouts. One for news, blogging, and affiliate marketing. They even have a layout that is similar to a YouTube channel for a blog. There are also lots of features for this theme, such as a like button on posts, your posts can show how many people have viewed them and even how many people have shared them. I'm not sure about showing how many people have shared my posts, because it's probably 0. Don't want to brag about that right? Each blog post can also be customized, where you can change the header and layout. So each post can look different than your other posts. You can view some of these layouts by clicking on the link HERE. GeneratePress This free theme is very lightweight and fast. It's also focused on being user-friendly. Another not bad choice! You can view a demo at this site HERE. Top 2 Paid Themes Authentic Theme This paid theme is nice because there are lots of different social share icons built into the theme. Plus you can showcase ALL the followers you have on different accounts if you want. There is also a lot of customization and options with it. You can also change how you want your posts to be displayed, similar to the NEVE theme. Also, it only can be used in Guttenburg! You can learn more about this theme from the website HERE. It also costs $69. Astra It's hard not to mention the Astra theme. There is a free version and a paid version. What makes this theme a great choice is the lightweight code, so it's very FAST. It supposibly loads in under 1 second, and this can help you rank in Google, Bing and helps you get web traffic to your site. It's also 1 of the pricier options at $199 for lifetime access to the paid theme. However, they do have a free option with fewer options that you may want to look at. You can view this theme by clicking on the link HERE. Conclusion I know there is a lot to picking a theme. Plus, I barely scratched the surface of what is available. You could easily go down a dark rabbit hole (that could last a long time) of picking the "perfect" theme and never creating any content. Sort of reminds me of a story of the person who helped me with blogging going to a conference where he met 1 person who has been to TONS of conferences. Turns out she never even had a website, because she was STILL looking for the "perfect" domain name. It happens! The more themes I looked at the more I prefer a simple one. Hopefully, this post somewhat pointed you in the right direction. Just remember your content (words) is the star of the show, not the theme. If you're stuck between 2 themes, you could always just flip a coin to narrow down the choice. You can view the complete 10-step process of starting a blog, including 20 benefits you can get from blogging at this post HERE.