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The three best WordPress themes in 2021

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Today, we’ll be talking about the best WordPress themes, according to Gandi. So, for beginners, what’s a WordPress theme? A WordPress theme is a template that you can apply on your site using the content management system WordPress, which enables you to change the appearance of your site (within certain limits) without having to get nitty gritty into the actual code.

Themes, then, are extremely useful for users without any or with little knowledge of web design/development since they provide a simplified, ready-to-use solution.

The top 3 WordPress themes in 2021

Even though in reality, there’s no such thing as a theme that’s perfect for everyone, we wanted to provide our Top 3 favorite WordPress themes, basing our choices on 3 main criteria: user opinions, the adaptability of the theme, and how well it performs.

Best WordPress theme #1: Ocean WP

Ocean WP, is THE exemplar of WordPress themes. It has a 5/5 rating with 5,001 reviews on the official WordPress website.

Why is Ocean WP our favorite WordPress theme?

Above all, it’s one of the themes that adapts the best to different website structures in general. Also, this theme has a very complete free version that can be extended with the premium version if you want to take customization further. Ocean WP is an excellent theme with which to start your first website with WordPress since it’s easy to understand and nearly professional rendering. Add to this the fact that this theme is completely responsive, which means that it adapts to the size screen (smartphone, computer, tablet, etc.) it’s displayed on.

Its responsive design enables anyone to be able to navigate simply and easily on your website, whether on a mobile phone, a desktop, or a tablet. Your traffic statistics will thank you! Additionally, search engines favor sites with a responsive design in the results they display. This is a fundamental criteria to fill in order to improve your search engine results ranking and to be more visible on competitive keywords.

If you want to expand the features of this theme by opting for the premium version, you’ll need to pay $222 for the lifetime pack (one payment for lifetime use) or $54 per year for the standard pack.

Best WordPress theme #2: Astra

Another all-time classic WordPress theme is the Astra theme. This theme has 5,012 reviews with a 5/5 average rating on the WordPress website. This theme is known for its light weight — the file only “weighs” 50 KB. This enables your website to perform particularly well and your site will load in the blink of an eye.

Did you know the average internet user waits 3 seconds for a website to load? Beyond that, they’re likely to hit the back button and go to a competitor’s website. That’s why it’s extremely important to improve the load time of your website in order to avoid this type of situation, especially on mobile or with an unstable internet connection.

Beyond that, the Astra WordPress theme gives you the freedom to adjust pages according to your preferences. With the Astra WordPress theme, you’ll be able to easily edit your website, only keeping the content “blocks” that interest you, without coding anything. The free version gives you access to many features — all with you having to write a single line of code. The free version gives you access to tons of features for launching your website well.

For the paid version, the annual price is $59, and the lifetime version costs $249, making it very affordable for a WordPress theme for a professional website.

Best WordPress theme #3: Neve

We award the bronze medal in our Top 3 themes to Neve, a theme known for being very high performing, as its ranking of 5/5 on WordPress based on 845 reviews. This theme was conceived as a mobile-first theme, which is in alignment with the recommendations for optimizing SEO according to Google. Thanks to this theme, you’ll gain loading time on your pages. You’ll also be able to go much further since this theme is compatible with AMP, which further improves the load times on mobile. In its classic version, this theme provides several basic features for creating your website, while the degree of customization possible remains limited in comparison with the options we mentioned above. That’s why we’ve ranked it in third place.

Lastly, if you opt for the premium version (starting at $59 per year), you’ll get access to customizable headers and footers, and the option to add the WooCommerce add-on for your e-commerce site.

There are hundreds of WordPress themes out there, so feel free to also search for yourself. Who knows? You might end up finding one thats a better fit for you than any of these Top 3. And don’t be too intimidated — you can install and uninstall WordPress themes as you see fit. However, be careful not to over-customize a theme if you’re not sure you’ll keep it, since you’ll lose all your customizations when you change your theme.

Or last bit of advice is to try out and explore different themes to make your decision and choose the one that  works best for you.

How did we make our choices? How do you know what the best WordPress theme will be?

Lastly, as you probably were able to tell, all WordPress themes are different: their strengths may be in performance, practicality, or even the level of customization possible. That means in order to create a site the site that you want to put online, you should choose a theme that matches your objectives.

Which WordPress theme should you choose?

WordPress is the most popular tool out there for developing websites of all times: e-commerce, blog, showcase, etc. That’s why there is not a perfect theme for all types of website. The theme you choose will depend on the type of site you’re developing and your objectives for your users’ journey.

For example, for an e-commerce website, you would want a website that’s effective at pushing a user to navigate to your product pages. While for a showcase website, the goal is more informative and the user journey will be such that the user finds the information they’re looking for in a more intuitive way.

If you don’t know what type of site yours will be, take a look at this article.