What are Best Free Themes for WordPress?
WordPress is a free content management system that is widely used for publishing websites. It was originally designed for blogging, but it is not limited to that use case. The software was originally created by Matt Mullenweg and hosted on his server until 2006, when it was forked and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is a highly flexible and customizable platform that is used by many bloggers, journalists, and other online content creators.
Despite its popularity, WordPress lacks a vibrant community around it; it does not come with many features, and the few that it does have can be complicated to work with. Because of this, many people are looking to premium themes to enhance the functionality of their WordPress sites. However, while it is tempting to spend money on more functionality, doing so can be expensive and is not necessary.
This is why it is best to look for free themes, as they tend to have more features than their premium counterparts. But what features do free themes have that are worth using? Let’s take a quick look.
Responsive Design
The number of people using mobile devices to access the Internet has grown exponentially in recent years and will continue to do so. WordPress themes need to adapt to fit the various screen sizes that users may have, so that the content is displayed in a way that is easy for the reader to find and navigate. With responsive design, the WordPress theme is flexible enough to look good on any device.
Custom Scroll Bars
Custom scroll bars are extremely useful when browsing long pages on a WordPress site. When using an existing theme, you will not get this feature for free. However, there are many free WordPress themes that offer it as an option. This way, when a user scrolls down a long page, the scroll bar will appear at the bottom of the browser window and give the user a way to navigate back up the page. It is an easy way to implement a professional-looking and functional scroll bar into your site without having to pay for one.
Built-in Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing your website for search engines is an essential part of being relevant to your audience. In most cases, your site will need to be seeded with at least a few keywords in order to appear in the search results for relevant content. Alternatively, you can hire a professional firm to help you with SEO on an ongoing basis.
Form Submission
WordPress allows you to integrate forms on your website through the use of shortcodes. They are extremely easy to implement and are a great way to get a contact or payment info from a user. However, in order to use forms on a site built with WordPress, a separate package is needed, namely Contact Form 7. This is another good reason to go with a free theme, as they will usually come with all the necessary features built-in.
Social Media Integration
Being relevant to your audience on social media is an important aspect of content marketing. Some brands will pay you to advertise their products on social media channels such as Twitter and YouTube. But in many cases, you will need to do it yourself. The easiest way to do this is through social media integrations, which allow you to connect your accounts on various channels and have content automatically posted to all of them. In order to use these features, you need to have a premium theme with the corresponding widget installed on your site. For example, if you want to integrate with Twitter, you will need to have the Twitter widget installed on your site along with the theme.
Mobile Access
Most people use mobile devices to access the Internet. As a result, it is important that your site looks good on mobile devices and that the content is easily accessible. Most smartphone browsers do not have the same horizontal scrolling restrictions that a computer browser does, so your content will need to be displayed in a way that is optimized for vertical scrolling. A great way to do this is through a mobile-first approach, which involves creating a desktop version of your site and testing it on various mobile devices before deploying it to your users on mobile. With a responsive design, your content will be sized to fit different devices, so it will always appear well-formatted on any screen size.
As you can see, there are many features that you can get for free with a WordPress theme, as opposed to having to purchase them separately as in the case of a premium theme. This is why it is best to go with the free option, as you will usually get much more for free than what you would pay in a premium category.