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10 WordPress Themes That Have the Most Traffic Potential

 

Part of the power of WordPress comes from the near absolute customization available to use, while still running on the same powerful backend CMS. You’re never going to compromise your design just to use WordPress.

On one hand, it’s entirely possible, viable and even profitable to create your own custom theme. It makes sure you stand out from the rest of the pack, and you’re different from all those bog-standard WordPress blogs. On the other hand, some themes are very customizable themselves, or they don’t need to be. They get the job done, and they don’t keep people away from your content. No barriers; just business.

Which themes are the best?

Skeleton

Sometimes, you don’t need a lot of fancy graphics, parallax scrolling, slideshow imagery or odd details. All you need is a place to showcase your text, maybe a single large image, a couple of CTA spaces and a bit for further reading. That’s what you get with Skeleton, a theme designed to give you the bare minimum necessary to support a robust site without overloading you with details to bend your content to fit. It’s a great little responsive theme that works for blogs, affiliate sites or app developers equally well.

WP Coda

Coda is a theme designed with sliders, jQuery and WordPress all merged into a beautiful, dark and synergistic whole. It’s excellent for a page selling a piece of software, with multiple tabs of information allowing you to give system requirements, use tutorials, knowledge base access and contact information all in sequestered tabs without disrupting your primary sales pitch. The one unfortunate negative is the lack of responsive design, which every other theme on this list has.

Folder

Folder is a design that’s specifically created to be the portfolio site for an artist, designer, graphical expert or writer. It’s a heavily graphical theme, so it works best for artists with a lot to showcase, but anyone with content can use it to great effect. It’s responsive, it’s elegant, it’s very well coded and best of all, it’s free. It uses the unique service “pay with a tweet” to garner some social media influence rather than direct sales profits.

Appliance

This is a very unique theme when it comes to blogs online, because it does away with the typical homepage and instead becomes a Pinterest-style set of cards for every post you want to showcase. Think of it like a personal off-site pinboard for your content. You’ve got graphical previews, titles, snippets, read more links, categories and comments all in one easy location. Scroll down and you have more space for homepage links. With a little creative customization, you can add a top header and some additional navigation to make the theme as close to perfect as you could want, for a few industries anyway.

Hot News

This theme is designed with one thing in mind; Google AdSense integration with a news site. If you’re establishing a site where you can publish 2-6 posts a day, with a solid stream of timely content, this is a great way to deliver that content. It’s also already set up with a number of different AdSense integration locations, including both sidebars in a fixed-width design. It’s also a fairly cheap theme, all things considered.

Avada

To me, Avada is just about the perfect theme for a niche affiliate, particularly in the health or nutrition fields. It just strikes me as perfect, with the ability to use huge pictures of healthy people in a clean, comfortable design. Your top navigation is perfectly robust, your design is responsive, and you have plenty of room to add information and links to your affiliate products. You would be hard pressed to go wrong with this theme.

Noteworthy

Noteworthy is a theme designed specifically in reference to USA Today, and if you were ever curious about ways you can use it to post blogs and news articles, look no further than the model itself. It’s responsive, of course, and full of options for adding and removing previewed posts, categories, archives and anything else. Use as few or as many panes as you need to create the design you’ve always wanted. Personally, I recommend having enough available on screen to showcase the newest posts on your blog without stretching too far into the distant past.

Arcade

This is a very basic theme, but it’s also very reminiscent of two very modern, popular designs; Ello and Twitter. The huge graphical top banner takes up most of the page until you scroll, and it scrolls off with typical HTML5 smoothness. Below, you have plenty of space for an About section, followed by sequential snippets of blog posts and space for widgets at the bottom. It’s all very simple, very elegant and surprisingly robust.

Interstellar

This theme is great for a blog with a central graphic and a lot of distributed information. It has a set of header links complete with sub-menus at the fingertips of your users. Just below it is a huge space for a customized piece of art, or a slideshow of images to fit your theme. Below that, information and about sections, completely customizable. It’s all responsive design, as you’ve come to expect from the best themes, and it’s designed specifically for portfolios and blogs.

The Genesis Framework

Last but far from least, the Genesis Framework isn’t a theme so much as it is a modular platform for creating your own customized layout. You can use one to three columns, you can use sidebars, you can have a fixed or variable width, you can customize backgrounds and headers, and so much more. The best part is, it’s designed from the ground up to be mobile, responsive and extremely fast. Plus, other themes can be layered on top of it, for a completely unique and robust blog.

Of course, these are just ten out of the hundreds of thousands of skins and themes available for WordPress. It’s impossible to tell which are the best for monetization or traffic support; the best you can do is pick the one that fits with your business better than the rest.

 

One of the primary benefits of WordPress is the freedom of the platform, in more ways than one. On one hand, you have the software itself, which is completely free to use. You have all of the various plugins and themes, which can be expensive for premium versions, but can often be simulated or replaced by combinations of free versions. For some people, the only expense when running a WordPress website is the hosting, and with WordPress.com, even that can be free.

There’s just one problem; if you want the best, unique design for your business, you’re probably not going to get away with free hosting, design and plugins. You want the best for your business, and the best doesn’t come cheap.

The focus of this piece will be on themes and design, but remember that they aren’t the only expenses. Your hosting needs to be powerful enough to support a commercial site. Your plugins will be a mixture of free and paid, but some of the best out there require basic fees.

Methods of Custom Design

There are a few ways you can get a custom design for your WordPress site. You can:

• Access the WordPress custom design store and create your own, using the application they created. You can choose custom fonts and colors, edit CSS directly, and so forth. However, this method is limited; you only have a few dozen fonts to pick through, and you sometimes need to beat CSS into submission to get a blog working just the way you want. This method costs $30 annually as a recurring fee.


• Put your own design skills to the test using templates and blank theme files presented by various groups. Lifehacker, here, has a good basic tutorial, complete with a zip file of basic theme files. This is about as bare-bones and self-sufficient a method as you can get. It’s completely free, but you need to have some design sense and coding ability to make something that looks professional enough to suit your business.


• You can buy a third party piece of software, such as Artisteer, which allows you to create a custom blog design using a WYSIWYG editor. You don’t actually need to know any code, though you do need a good sense of design. These tools are powerful, but you need to be aware of the risks of using templated code or their “suggestions,” which are often somewhat outdated. Artisteer specifically costs either $50 or $130, depending on the version you want.


• You can wireframe out a design and submit that to a service like PSD to WordPress, which takes Photoshop files and turns them into themes that function. Other than the design work, this is a hands-off solution; you send in the files, they send back a theme. Depending on the number of pages you need, and the type of theme you want – mostly involving extra compatibility testing – prices start at $335 and go up from there.


• You can visit a freelancer portal such as oDesk and hire people to do the jobs for you. You can specifically hire a freelance designer to create a wireframe template for you, and you can hire a developer to turn that design into a theme, in much the way a PSD to WordPress service works. Because oDesk is a freelance hub, prices can vary wildly, as will the quality of the service.


• You can specifically hire WordPress theme developers to do all of the work for you. You work closely with them to make sure the product is exactly to your specifications. This can run a very wide range of prices, from $200 for a simple site to thousands, even tens of thousands.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of options available to you. Pick the one that best suits your budget, do what you can to get a site that’s uniquely fit to your business, and consider putting aside cash later for a more professional upgrade.

Cost Considerations

Some of you might have had a bit of a double-take at the mention of prices in the tens of thousands. It’s a fact that some WordPress developers will charge exorbitant amounts, upwards of $30,000, for a single side design. Granted, this will include extra support, plenty of time for communication and design, as well as numerous pages for your site. Still, it’s a lot. So much so that entire posts have been written about how it’s probably too much.

You also have extra considerations. For example, one of the best commerce and blog-focused WordPress frameworks, Genesis, costs extra. The framework itself is just $60, but the specialized developers who work for Genesis-specific themes tend to charge extra. This is where your average prices run in the $2,500 range.

Thankfully, you can check the quality of a developer against community sites like WP Engine. Their maintained list of quality developers gives you a good list to go on when finding people who won’t over-charge or under-deliver on their promises.

The Hallmarks of a Good Design

How do you evaluate a theme or a designer to make sure they produce something of quality, that is worth their price? Here are some things to consider.

• Proper handling of scripts, to make sure they integrate with other plugins that expand WordPress functionality in critical ways.


• Segmenting unique functions into plugins, rather than hard-coding them into the theme, so that if you upgrade the theme you don’t lose that functionality.


• Code that validates and is W3C compliant at the end of the day. The last thing you need is bloated, buggy code that breaks for every fifth user.


• A good developer should also be able to provide references, so you can get a personal recommendation from a third party.


• A good developer will also have a good reputation. They may have some famous themes floating about, or they may have designed some powerful plugins people love, or maybe they’re just happy to dispense advice for free on WP forums.

Getting What You Pay For

Consider this. If you’re paying less than $500 for a theme, you’re probably buying a very basic theme. You might also just be modifying a different custom theme, or hiring people to do some of the work while you do more of it in-house.

When you reach the $500-$2,500 zone, you’re getting the most bang for your buck. You’re able to get custom work done, for a number of custom pages, possibly with some good custom functionality that makes your site stand out as unique.

When you’re getting into the $2,500 to $5,000 range, you’re going for the high end premium work, with a site build from the ground up with entirely custom code. This can be useful, but unless you want a completely unique site with heretofore unknown features on the Internet, you’re probably overpaying.

Anything more than $5,000 and you’re either requesting such unique work that it requires a team of developers working full time, or you’re paying for name recognition with a company known for over-charging.