Theme development may be thought of as part of the website development process, however it is actually a separate process. Themes can be changed from one to another for a different look or new functionality.
If you need to update your existing WordPress website, you may just need a new theme.
WordPress themes come in several varieties, from free themes to premium themes and custom themes. We’ll get into the differences in separate posts. However, they all have the capabilities of the following critical features listed below.
Ranking high in the search engine results pages or SERPs is a vital consideration in every step of the development process including theming.
7 Features Your Website Theme Must Have
1 scalability: Your business will undoubtedly be growing, and the functionality of your website will need to increase. Make sure your theme can scale from the beginning to prevent starting over, as this could be a costly mistake.
2 Security: Your theme is the first line of defense for the security of your website. You must build security features into your theme.
3 Privacy: Develop secure customer information privacy into the theme.
4 Professionalism: You must exhibit professionalism and orderliness in your business, your employees, and your website theme.
5 Best Practices: Maintain best practices in your website theme to rank high in searches. Therefore, keep visitors on your website longer.
6 Ease of use: Search engine algorithms will index and rank your website pages based on many features. Therefore, clarity of your content, navigation, and ease of use are vital.
7 Responsive: 60% of all searches are from mobile devices. Also, search engines index and rank websites by the mobile version of your website first.
7 Concepts You Must Understand To Develop WordPress Themes That Rank Higher
1 Functions: Functions are the code that does specific tasks in your theme and your WordPress Website. Some functions are specific to website functionality, and some are specific to theme functionality. It is vital to put functions in the correct place to mitigate problems in the performance of your website.
2 Template files: Template files are for creating specific types of content such as product descriptions, blog posts, sidebar content. Also, features that may be unique and specific to your business. There may be a few or many different post types on your website.
3 The Loop: The loop is a block of code that determines what content to use in a template file. You may have many blog posts or hundreds of products for sale.
4 Sanitization: Sanitization means preventing your website from malicious intent.
5 CSS: CSS is the code that defines how content looks on the webpage. Font size, font type, color, position, background, and how the website appears on different size screens are defined by CSS.
6 Internationalization: You must develop your website to be translated into different languages if you do business globally.
7 Child themes: You must put your customization into a child theme. Therefore, preventing losing your customization when your theme is updated.
Conclusion
Theming is a combination of many different components. Together these components create content that is beautiful, professional-looking, secure and easy to find, and easy to read.
Put a little planning into your theme to get your website to rank higher in the search engines.