Which is the best WordPress Theme?
I often get asked for recommendations on WordPress themes — which WP themes do I use and recommend myself?
As you know, I’m a big fan of Thrive Themes for their excellent Listbuilding Plugin amongst other things, but I don’t tend to use their actual themes for many of my sites.
That’s not for any particular reason — there’s nothing wrong with their themes (and I do use them on some of my sites), but there is a HUGE amount of choice out there, and I think there are some better products around.
Particularly, if like me, you’re a little fussy about how things look…
Best WordPress Theme for blogs
For heavy duty WordPress blogs I like the Genesis theme from StudioPress:
(That’s the theme I use to run timfelmingham.com btw, together with the Dynamik child theme.)
It’s technically sophisticated, very fast, great for SEO, and it’s very customisable.
BUT, to get the best out of it you really need some coding and CSS knowledge 🙁
To be fair, you don’t need to know a huge amount — you could easily learn enough in a weekend, but you would have to be able to deal with something like this without falling off your chair if you want to get the best out of the Genesis theme:
It’s not actually that difficult, but it is getting involved in a level of detail that may not be productive for you.
Unless you’re a bit of a geek, with OCD tendencies… (guilty!).
There are better (and more profitable) ways for you to spend your time, than fiddling about customising your WordPress theme.
The best theme for non-technical users
If you want to build really great looking sites WITHOUT having to learn coding and CSS to make them look the way you want, then there is only one product I would choose:
That’s the Divi Theme from Elegant Themes.
Divi is the easiest way I’ve found to make a beautiful mobile-responsive website, that looks exactly the way you want, without ANY coding.
Everything in Divi is drag-and-drop, and unlike the rest of WordPress you can actually see exactly what you are creating on the screen in front of you.
It’s just so easy!
But at the same time it’s incredibly powerful, and lets you use all sorts of sophisticated functions like email optins, countdown timers, videos, pricing tables, testimonials etc, by just dragging them onto your pages.
It’s particularly good if your website is not really suited to a blog format.
Maybe you don’t have lots of posts, or need to organise them by category, topic or author etc (something WordPress is particularly good at).
Perhaps you just want a one or 5 page website, with a home page, a sales page, and a few other pages — not really a blog at all.
If that’s what you want, you’ll have to spend a lot of time wrestling with most WordPress themes because they are blog orientated, not website orientated.
With Divi, it’s not a problem.
You don’t have to have a blog at all (but you still get all the power and flexibility of WordPress), OR you can have a website that includes a blog section, but may not look like a blog at first glance.
OR you can have a full-on blog (that happens to look beautiful too).
So if you’ve got a new site to build, or if you want to refresh your site with a better design and some new advanced features, I’d recommend you take a look at Divi now.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Tim
PS
There’s a great demo page for Divi where you can try out their drag-and-drop interface yourself and see how easy it is. You can customise and alter the demo page live on the web to see how it all works, without having to buy the product. It all happens right in front of you — no signup required!
Disclosure: Holy smokes — this post contains some affiliate links! Please read my full disclosure to find out what this means, and how it benefits you.
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save
Save