Building a WordPress website is easier than building a site from scratch because there are so many modular pieces that fit together to create whatever website design you might want. However, you don’t have to use all pre-made pieces to craft your perfect website. In fact, it’s often best to choose exactly the right pieces to develop custom that will weave all your other plugins and design features together. Nowhere is this more true than your WordPress theme.
Right now, there are thousands of WordPress themes available either for free or premium themes at a price. These can be attractive, high-quality themes with good features, or they can be tiny, basic themes for placeholder websites. But the one thing that all themes have in common is that they were made by someone else and used in a generic fashion by dozens to thousands of other brands. After you explore your first few free themes, it will soon become clear why so many businesses prefer to have a custom theme developed for them, even if every other aspect of the website is an integrated plugin.
Developing your own theme gives you far greater freedom and allows you to shape just about everything relating to your website. Let’s dive into the 13 most important reasons to commission a custom WordPress theme instead of choosing one off the market.
1) Never Be a Repeat-Act
You might find a great theme that does everything you need, that looks fantastic, and your brand colors look good in. But there’s just one problem. Your customers might see the exact same website design used by another brand, maybe even by a competitor. At worst. best, they will draw the conclusion that your brand is uncreative. At worst, customers can get the impression that your brand copied the website design of a competitor. Some will know a WordPress theme reused when they see one, some will not know the difference between a template and a copied design made from scratch.
When you make a custom WordPress theme designed specifically for your brand and needs, the design will mirror no other website. Your site will be unique not just to your brand, but for the entire internet. There will be no other site quite like it, and certainly no clones out there to confuse your customers.
2) Build Your Own Sitemap
One of the biggest limitations of off-the-shelf or free WordPress themes is your sitemap. Many of these themes are extremely limited in the way your pages link to each other. Navigation bar design and even the number and complexity of pages can be defined by the theme with very little leeway to make changes. Some themes are much more flexible than others, but it can be difficult to tell which themes will have the capability of a full-fledged sitemap and which will provide only the most basic support for site structure.
Custom WordPress themes can be designed exactly to your specifications for the sitemap, allowing for future expansion while also defining the things that should be concrete about your brand’s site. Expand into a blog, a web store, and organized help section, or a video library with clear navigation and no worries about theme-based limitations in your links or user interface.
3) Freedom of Element Arrangement
Just as your sitemap can be limited, so too can the user interfaces and the arrangement of those elements be limited by the theme. Even if you find an ideal theme for your current design, many themes are more concrete than you realize. If you want to make some UI changes and rearrange the visual or functional elements later, you may not be able to. With a unique and custom-build theme, you can arrange the user interface elements and make sure they are flexible for rearrangement in the future, should your website design needs change.
4) Customise to Perfectly Suit Your Brand
Of course, it goes almost without saying that designing a custom WordPress theme ensures that your website is uniquely suited to your brand, your brand’s style, and the services that your customers need. The theme is more than just the appearance of your website, it forms the face and the interface of your brand’s online presence. Your custom theme is the best way to represent your brand both visually and functionally. The theme will define how you serve your customers and the visual experience they enjoy interacting with your online features and services.
5) Site Integrates All APIs, Features, and Website Uses Perfectly
Another challenge of off-the-shelf themes is that they may not be prepared to handle all the features you want to add. Themes that are beautiful but limited often don’t have an interface ready for every plugin and modular addition you want to make. APIs that integrate non-WordPress software into a WordPress site can be even more challenging, as the theme may have no reference or even plugin data to create new pages that match the rest of your UI.
6) Hand-Tailor How Your Website is Mobile-Responsive
Mobile responsiveness is an essential part of modern websites. With Google enacting their Mobile-First policy for SEO (showing mobile-ready websites above non-mobile websites, even on computer search), your WordPress site must be mobile responsive. However. just being responsive isn’t enough. The way your website responds to mobile resolutions matters a great deal to your users.
With a custom theme, you can hand-tailor the method by which your website responds to mobile resolutions. The way your UI modules rearrange themselves and present in a mobile interface can enhance your mobile user experience and, therefore, enhance your website’s success with both desktop and mobile users.
7) Get Rid of Irrelevant Theme Features
One thing that many first-time WordPress website owners do not consider is a theme that has too much. Many themes that are otherwise well-designed come with widgets and tools that are unnecessary, that you won’t use, and that overlap with plugins that you already have. These are sometimes referred as plugin-like theme features. If you don’t need these features, or any additional features, then they will only slow down your website instead of helping. A custom theme won’t have anything extraneous and you can optimize the included features to perfectly suit your needs and accentuate your plugins.
8) Make Sure Code Meets Security and Best-Practices
Not all WordPress themes are written with programming best practices. For someone selecting only by appearance and function, it is impossible to tell which themes are designed with poor security measures or written in ways that will cause lag in the future. This is, in fact, one of the biggest risks of using off-the-shelf themes for your WordPress website. With a custom theme, you can ensure that your programmers use all the best practices necessary for a fast, efficient, and safe website at every level of development.
9) Remove Credit Links
Credit links are links added by the creator of the theme to give credit to themselves. Using a WordPress theme with a visible credit link footer is like using an image with another brand’s watermark or making a website through a hosted website in which your site is only a url addendum. In other words, it shows a company that is not ready to fly on its own. Paid WordPress themes can have the credit link removed, but a custom theme would not have any credit links, creator backlinks, or any third-party references at all.
10) Optimise for Performance
WordPress themes that you get pre-made can only be optimized to a limited extent without breaking into the code and making the theme your own. This is because the images and UI arrangement have a certain weight in the way they are written. They will use a certain amount of resources and in a predetermined order. To optimize the way your pages load at a basic level and optimize for performance, a custom theme is the only way to take full control and maintain that control with each following website update. You can optimize and re-optimize with your own theme in ways that are simply not possible with a pre-made theme.
11) Hone Your SEO Beyond Page Content
SEO has gone beyond well-written content. The metadata, load speed, and even the media composition of each page are now weighed to determine your SERP, how high the search results from your page appear. Not all WordPress themes are optimized for search engine positioning. In fact, as Google changes its requirements from year to year, older themes are inevitably not configured to be useful to you, no matter how good they look or how well they may function. A custom theme is the best way to ensure that your website is up-to-date on the latest SEO standards.
13) Create Your Own Admin Dashboard
If you have experience with past WordPress websites, you may have noticed that not all of them have ideal dashboards for administration, while some have fantastic back-end dashboards. Themes have the capacity to provide a dashboard for admins to manage the site more easily because a dashboard is simply another type of UI, directed at those with a different account type. If you want a better admin dashboard, ask your developers to design one for you in a custom theme.
13) Custom Employee Back-End
Finally, let’s not forget that even your employees can benefit from a well-designed WordPress website. While you have one access avenue for customers, you can build an entire back-end interface for employees to interact with the website data, the customers, and even use plugin features to do their jobs through the company website. This is something that is rarely possible with a single B2C or even B2C-designed theme. If you want your website to do double-duty for customers and employees, only a custom or customized theme will do.
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We can help you build that custom WordPress theme that your website, your company, and your customers deserve. Whatever your industry and brand, we’ll make sure your website perfectly suits your needs. Contact us today to consult on your WordPress website plans.