Tips for Selecting a WordPress Theme

I am experiencing a bit of Stockholm Syndrome with my blog theme.

Most of you know that I have a tendency to get into these blog redesign rabbit holes. I am on the verge of falling into another one. Maybe.

This blog has been around in one form or another for about 12 years. It started life on Diaryland (because I am ancient) and then moved to LiveJournal before eventually moving to WordPress in 2008.

There have been so many themes since I started.

First there were the freebies on WordPress.com. Then I graduated to Atahualpa, a clunky sandbox theme that I customized the hell out of. I had Atahualpa throughout law school, but then shifted to Solopine designs in 2013.

Most blog readers know Solopine designs. It’s the IKEA of the blog world – most of the moderately successful bloggers use a modified Solopine theme.

And like an IKEA poster hanging on the wall, my Solopine theme began to feel a bit tacky after I kept seeing it on other peoples’ blogs.

So I decided it was time for a change, and I found this gorgeousness:

I promptly handed over my $60, installed the theme, and my saga began.

Kloe is the most difficult WordPress theme that I have ever used. Unlike Solopine themes, which were “plug-and-play,” Kloe requires custom CSS coding to even look like the damn preview site. I have wasted hours of my life manually customizing posts for functionality which is built into most other themes, and the theme essentially “breaks” with every WordPress update.

In short – this theme sucks.

But I have put so much time into customizing this theme that I feel stuck. It’s like feeling obligated to keep the used car that you dumped $20k into fixing.

And this theme does allow me to do cool things. Like fancy blockquotes. But this custom styling is actually very dangerous to use because it will break the formatting on my blog posts if/when I change themes. 

So to help you avoid similar heartache in the future, here are my tips for choosing a WordPress theme:

1. Pick a theme designed specifically for your intended use

Make sure that the functionality you need isn’t an afterthought for the developer.

If you have a food blog, then don’t buy a theme geared toward text-heavy blogs. If you run a text-heavy blog, then don’t buy a theme designed for a shopping website.

The problem with my current theme is that it is really a commercial website theme that happens to include a blog element. The styling for the blog element was sloppy and required a lot of reworking.

2. Avoid blog themes that rely on custom shortcodes

Again, these may look cool at the time, but will absolutely break when you change themes in the future.

3. Beware of great stock photos

I got suckered into purchasing Kloe because I was distracted by the beautiful high-quality stock photos used on the demo site.

This means that I didn’t fully think out how my content would look using the same template. My photography is alright, but not great enough to compensate for the design and functionality flaws of the theme.

4. Beware of custom photos

In addition to stock photos dressing up the site, make sure that your theme is flexible enough to handle different types of content. For example, a big problem with Solopine themes is that they do not automatically darken your featured blog post images.

This means that you have to select an unnaturally dark image for your blogs or your homepage text will be illegible.

5. Look at real-life examples

This is the most important thing: Don’t buy a theme if you can’t find real people using the theme successfully.

I didn’t do my research before buying Kloe, so I didn’t realize that the demo site has custom coding that doesn’t come with the theme. If the real-life examples of the theme look like shit, then you know that the theme is either A) hard to use, or B) not what the demo site advertises.

Let me know if I left any tips out in the comments!

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Update: I have switched back to my old WordPress theme.