What is a WordPress theme ? What is a WordPress theme for ? How to use a WordPress theme? The WordPress CMS has become the most popular tool for creating dynamic blogs and websites thanks to its community of developers and designers. Indeed, one of the main advantages of WordPress is its management system for graphic themes. Find out what a WordPress theme is and how to use a theme to change the look of your WP site .
Definition of a WordPress theme
A WordPress theme is a set of files that will have the role of modifying and customizing the overall appearance of the site but also the layout of the content. Thus, a theme impacts the entire visual part of the website. However, a WordPress theme will in no way modify the content created such as articles, site titles and descriptions, etc. It is therefore necessary to separate the graphic appearance of a site and its content.
A WordPress theme is made up of a set of files: PHP templates, CSS style sheets, default images, scripts and functions in JS,… These are all the resources allowing the WordPress engine to display your website to Internet users. The optimization of a theme is judged by the quality of the code present in its files. The more a theme is optimized, the faster it will load, for example.
The objective of the theme being to easily customize the design of a website, this resource is known by different names: skin, template, style or of course WordPress theme. A theme is in the form of an archive to upload via the administration panel of his blog or WP site.
Benefits of WordPress themes
The advantages of themes on WordPress are numerous. Indeed, themes largely explain the success of the WordPress CMS: the choice between thousands of free or paid themes. However, here is a list of the main advantages that are given by WordPress themes:
- A wide choice of free or paid themes.
- Themes that adapt to all website themes: one-page theme to promote an application, theme on work and home, theme on cars or motorcycles, etc.
- An ultra simple installation of themes on WordPress.
- Extensive, easy-to-access customization options.
- No technical knowledge is required to use a WordPress theme.
- Responsive themes and compatible with all browsers for the most part.
However, WordPress themes also have some flaws such as the too high number of themes on the internet which makes finding a design very complicated or the complexity of updating a WordPress theme . Indeed, if you have made changes to the theme files, an update of the latter will overwrite your customizations.
Using a WordPress theme
With a theme, you get a ready-to-use site in seconds. Time to download the theme and install it on your blog. In addition to customizing the look of your site, a WP theme allows you to not modify CSS, HTML, or templates yourself. This saves you a lot of time and you don’t need any computer language knowledge.
In addition, developers working on WordPress made it easier to use themes by creating WordPress web designers. However, we do not recommend the use of builders such as Page Builder or Visual Composer. The automatically generated code as well as the size of the files represent a real brake on the performance of WordPress sites.
In summary, a WordPress theme acts directly on the visual rendering of a site. It is advisable to choose a WordPress theme adapted to your theme and your Internet users. It is very important that your visitors like this theme, but that you like it too. If you are a beginner on WordPress, the very high number of themes on the internet will quickly complicate your task. Nevertheless, there are catalogs of paid or free themes of quality!
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