It is a known fact that WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) to build a website. WordPress themes are popular and are loaded with plenty of features and stylesheets. Sometimes, a complex WordPress theme that is packed with more functionalities may result in bloating of your website. This eventually results in performance-related issues that may lead to degraded and unsatisfactory user experience. Hence they are needed to be constantly improved. Listed below are 10 creative ways using which you can boost your themes.
1. Make Use Of Custom Favicon
Some of the WordPress themes that have website templates for WordPress do not have a default favicon. The websites designed using such themes might look unprofessional. What you need to do is place the code inside the header.php that can be easily found inside the directory of the themes.
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Change the href attributes value so that it points to your favicon file’s location.
2. Minimize The Theme Image Size
Images play a crucial role in every WordPress theme. It is important that the developers pay full attention to optimizing the images. This will result in decreased bandwidth consumption. Ultimately, the page response time is improved. You can make use of image optimization tools that will help you in reducing the image size without any loss in the quality of the image.
3. Provide Enough Security To The Theme
Security of the website is an important issue and with the increasing threat of cyber-attacks, more focus is on how secure your website is. And for that, as a user, when you buy WordPress themes for making your website, those must be secure enough. One of the ways to protect the theme is by removing the generic WordPress generator code that is placed inside the theme’s <head> tags. It must be done for the reason that if any malefic user comes to know about the version of WordPress that you are using, it becomes extremely easy for that person to attack it using the vulnerabilities of that specific version.
4. Use Of Image Captions
Whenever an image is uploaded or posted on a blog post, that particular image should be given captions so that it should be properly described. For making your theme a good one, you must include the default style for image captions. For styling the caption, you can make use of .wp-caption class in the style.css
5. Avoid Asking Users For Installing Plugins
Let The Users Of The Theme Decide About The Requirements Of Plugins. It Should Not Depend Upon The Maker Of The Wordpress Theme That Has Website Templates For Wordpress. Your Theme Must Not Include Any Such Thing That Says It Will Work Only If A Particular Plugin Is Got Installed. Rather, You Should Use If Condition. Like, You Should Say That If You Need This Functionality, You Must Install That Plugin.
6. Focus On Displaying Trending Posts
For engaging your visitors on your website, you can opt for displaying posts on popular or trending topics. For this, you can include WP-PostViewsplugin in your theme.
7. Incorporate Social Media Links In Your Posts
While designing the theme, you must provide the options for including social media links in every post the user makes.
8. Design A Widgetised Footer
widgetizing the footer is often overlooked in WordPress themes. A nice footer can do a lot of good to your website. Now you might be wondering why it is important. Well, whenever visitors finish reading a post or comments on the page, what they do normally is to leave the page. But if you have a well-designed footer featuring interesting posts, it will ultimately grab their attention and they might continue reading that.
9. Include A Featured Content Gallery
It simply allows the user to create a gallery that is based on the WordPress posts and other several custom post types. User can show the products and services using this.
10. Smartly Use The Custom Fields
Custom field plays a key role as they have huge potential to make your theme stand out among the crowd provided you use them wisely. You need to be clever enough to create extraordinary things with them.
