Nearly two decades since its initial launch, WordPress (WP) continues to be the leading content management system (CMS) worldwide. WP is incredibly versatile and used for a wide range of websites from personal blogs and nonprofits to online stores. It’s the CMS of choice for globally recognized companies like Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Bloomberg. But what makes it so universally adored?

WP is an open-source platform that’s simple to install and manage, with a vast community backing it. It boasts thousands of pre-made plugins to support virtually any business function, alongside a plethora of themes to select from.

While a WP site’s features are crucial, a visually appealing and functional theme can significantly influence a business’s success. In this article, we’ll discuss why a custom WordPress theme is preferable to WordPress theme customization.

What exactly is a Theme? What Kinds of Themes Exist?

 A WP theme is a collection of files that determine a website’s appearance and layout. These files include CSS stylesheets, templates, images, JavaScript files, PHP files, among others.

In basic terms, a theme is a container waiting to be filled with your content.

Three options are available when it comes to acquiring themes.

• You can download a free WP theme from the official site https://wordpress.org/. 
• You can buy a premium theme on various platforms. 
• You can employ a professional designer and developer to craft a custom theme tailored to your specifications. 

Although you can customize a free or paid theme by adjusting its code, creating a theme from scratch offers more benefits for your business. Here’s why.

Benefits of Opting for a Custom WordPress Theme for Your Project 

#1: A Custom WordPress Theme Will Perfectly Align With Your Company’s Goals, Vision, and Content 

While there are countless attractive themes, particularly premium ones, modifying their look and layout may not reflect your business goals or vision. This delicate task is best left to seasoned WordPress development experts.

Choosing the right colors or fonts isn’t sufficient. There’s a series of questions that need answers before touching a single HTML or PHP tag, such as:

What are your website’s business objectives? Is it for representation, lead generation, or selling products/services? 

• What content will your main page contain? 
• Who is your target audience? 
• What do you know about them? 
• Why would they visit your site?

Only after thorough research, analyzing your business data, and understanding your primary business needs can a custom WordPress theme developer start coding. Customizing an existing theme to the required extent may take considerable time with no guarantee of the desired result.

#2: A Custom WordPress Theme Will Set You Apart from Your Competitors 

If you use the same theme as another business, even with color and content changes, potential customers may not remember you or revisit your website.

You might believe that buying a premium theme and tweaking it to your liking will distinguish you from other businesses in your field. Unfortunately, nearly 15% of the market uses just three premium themes. 

This means that even after extensive modifications to your purchased theme, its layout and features will resemble many others in the market.

In contrast, a custom WordPress theme will stand out from your competitors, as it sports a unique design that you’ve crafted. This leads to improved brand recognition, customer engagement, and ultimately, better sales.

#3: A Custom WordPress Theme Will Enhance Your Security

Security should be a top priority for any business, especially in the digital landscape, where cybercriminals constantly look for opportunities to exploit website vulnerabilities. WordPress (WP), despite its popularity, has been a frequent target for hackers, with 90% of all hacked sites a few years back being WP-powered.

Cybercriminals typically gain access to a WP site by downloading a free or premium theme and dissecting its code to identify weaknesses. Once they locate these, they search the web for sites using the same theme and infiltrate through the discovered security gaps.

However, a custom theme’s code is not accessible to hackers. While it doesn’t ensure absolute protection against cyber attacks, it certainly offers greater security than if you were using a free or premium theme.

For some valuable insights on the main reasons why WordPress websites get hacked, visit this post.

#4: Custom WordPress Themes Are SEO-Friendly 

Want your website to appear on the first page of Google’s search results? Then, you need an SEO-friendly website. While most pre-made WP themes, especially premium ones, come with SEO features, you’ll still need to put substantial effort into customizing them to meet SEO standards.

Alongside keywords, a website’s structure greatly influences its search engine visibility. With a custom WordPress theme, you can design its structure from scratch, ensuring crawlers can easily index your content.

#5: A WordPress Custom Theme Ensures Optimal Performance 

Many premium themes are packed with unnecessary features that can slow down your site. For a business website, loading speed is critical. If your site takes more than two seconds to load, you risk losing visitors, which can hurt your sales and SEO rankings due to increased bounce rates.

A custom theme only contains features specific to your business, making it lighter and faster, resulting in improved user experience. Plus, you can trust that your custom theme’s code has undergone thorough testing to remove any bugs, something not always guaranteed with premium or free themes.

#6: Access to Direct Support from the Theme’s Developer 

Issues can arise with pre-made themes, whether free or paid. For instance, the theme might be incompatible with certain plugins, causing your site to malfunction. In such cases, you’ll need professional support.

However, if thousands or even millions of websites are using the same theme, their owners might be experiencing similar issues and also requiring technical assistance. As a result, you may have to wait for a long time to get your issue resolved.

With a custom theme, you can expect immediate, high-quality support if something goes wrong. The developer who created your theme is always available to make any necessary changes or fix bugs in your custom WP site.

#7: A Custom WordPress Theme Can Be Easily Updated 

Updates are crucial for all software, including WP themes. They ensure that your theme has the latest features and security patches, offering better protection against cyber threats.

However, over time, a premium theme provider may neglect updates, putting your website at risk. With a custom WordPress theme, you simply need to notify the developer when an update is required, ensuring a stable, secure, and up-to-date website.

To Sum Up

A custom WordPress theme offers significant advantages that could greatly enhance your website’s performance, security, and overall user experience. Custom themes are created to reflect your specific business vision and objectives, setting you apart from competitors and enhancing your brand recognition. 

They offer superior security as their code isn’t readily accessible for hackers to exploit. Custom themes are also SEO-friendly, contributing to improved visibility on search engine results. Importantly, they ensure optimal performance and provide direct developer support for any issues or updates needed. 

In essence, investing in a custom WordPress theme is investing in the long-term success of your business online.

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SEO is characterized by the following advantages:

1. High competitiveness. You can’t succeed in online business if you neglect SEO. If you do not care about search engine optimization, your potential customers will find goods and services on the websites of your competitors. Working with SEO allows you to bring your website to the top for certain queries.
2. Sustainable results. If the search engine promotion strategy is chosen correctly, you can achieve good results in maintaining high positions. Once your company is in the TOP, it will be able to get customers steadily for a long time.
3. Good return on investment. In the long run, high coverage of potential customers will allow your company to make an order of magnitude more sales with much less investment in SEO. It doesn’t take much time, effort, and money to maintain your position in the top rankings. For comparison, contextual advertising costs generally remain at the same level throughout the entire advertising campaign. If it is a competitive niche, you have to raise your bids to get the best results.
4. Increase the reach of potential users. To search for a particular product, a person usually needs to browse dozens of pages with results. As practice shows, users usually pay attention to the stores that are on the first and second pages of the search results. If your site is not there, then even if you offer high-quality and affordable goods, you will lose to your competitors.
5. Increase brand loyalty. Website promotion provides an influx of higher quality traffic from search engines compared to that provided by contextual advertising. People trust organic search results more. Recently, users are quickly getting tired of advertising because it often does not meet their expectations. If a person is looking for a certain product and finds it through search, it increases trust and loyalty to the store or company.

Search engine promotion increases conversion and brand awareness. A well-implemented strategy will attract steady traffic to your website.

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You can also promote your website through social networks, and in most cases it gives a good result. The first stage of promotion is free. To get started, it is enough to create an account and regularly post there with a direct link to the site. It should also be present in the account description.

If you create interesting, engaging content, the number of subscribers will gradually increase, and with them the number of potential customers. In this case, it is recommended to work for those who use social media as an auxiliary tool for developing and maintaining their brand.

Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs involve two parties:

• sponsor: a business that organizes an affiliate program to promote its products or services;
• partner (agent): a program participant who places promotional materials on his or her website.

The format of cooperation and payment model may vary. It all depends on the company’s business goals:

Increase brand awareness – the sponsor pays for the ad impressions;
traffic to the website – the partner earns on each click from the user’s resource to the advertiser’s website;
direct sales – an agent receives a reward if a person follows his or her referral link and places an order.

Display advertising

Display advertising campaigns provide advertisers with a great opportunity to announce their product to the target audience and thus significantly increase traffic to their websites. In practice, it looks like placing promotional content on side resources. Usually, popular online publications, news sites, movie trackers, and other frequently visited resources are used for this purpose.

Unlike contextual advertising, display advertising does not work to sell “here and now” but to increase brand awareness.

Types of display advertising:

• banners
• video clips;
• page branding.

Launching this type of advertising involves spending significant budgets: because this type of promotional materials should be placed on donor sites with big names and high popularity among Internet users.

Email marketing

Sending emails can be an unobtrusive reminder of the company’s product to the customer. However, there is one important condition: the recipient must first consent to the newsletter, otherwise it will be considered spam.

Price aggregators

Price aggregators are websites that collect offers from hundreds of online stores in the country, with the ability to filter products by popular criteria and choose the best option.

In order to increase the competitiveness of goods or services on similar resources, it is necessary to constantly monitor the level of declared prices compared to other offers, as well as to track the quality of customer reviews.

Successful website promotion is the result of the work of a whole team of specialists who work together to develop a promotional strategy and implement it correctly. At this stage, it is important to eliminate those methods that will definitely be unproductive and focus on the most promising options.

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Search advertising. The peculiarity of this type is that ads are shown based on queries. Search advertising is considered to be the most effective because the subject matter of the ads fully corresponds to the current interests of the user.

It looks similar to regular search results, and its effectiveness depends on the correct selection of keywords, i.e. queries for which ads will be displayed in the search. The number of ads will depend on the device used to access the Internet.

Today there are several options for placing search contextual advertising:

• Special placement unit: ads are placed above the search results and bring the largest number of clicks;
• guaranteed display unit: ads are placed below the search results or to the right of them;
• Dynamic display unit: usually located below the search results on the second and subsequent pages, and ads are displayed in rotation with ads of other users.

Thematic contextual advertising (display network). Ads that are relevant to the user’s interests are displayed on the page of a website that is a member of the Partner Network of advertising systems. These can be both thematic portals and news sites, blogs, and much more.

Ads are displayed both on the main and internal pages. As a rule, resources with higher daily traffic are chosen for this purpose.

For example, when a user is looking for information about landscape modeling software, they visit a website. And there he can see ads for the sale of garden plants, water pumps, and other products related to the topic.

Thematic contextual advertisingThematic advertising, unlike search advertising, is less user-focused because the user is not interested in immediate results. The user can click on a link, but he or she may skip it.

The following technologies have been developed to display thematic ads:

• Topical targeting: the system reads the content of website pages and displays ads that are most relevant to the content of the pages;
• behavioral targeting: relevant ads are selected based on the analysis of user search queries;
• remarketing/retargeting: ads will be seen by users who have already visited a particular website but have not made a purchase.

Contextual advertising is also distinguished depending on the format. It can be of the following types:

• Textual. Advertisements look like plain text with a hyperlink. They can be open or in the form of a text fragment.
• Banner. Users are shown graphic images of an advertising nature. It can be just a picture or a picture with text and a link. Images can be static, dynamic, interactive.

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The visitor can stay a while, familiarize himself with the offered products, place an order, or come back later. In any case, the potential client has learned about the site, and its owner has not paid for a click in vain. This means that one of the functions of contextual advertising is to notify users about a new brand (resource, product, etc.), i.e. to expand the potential clientele.

User loyalty, as well as their transition from potential to real customers, also depends on the quality of the landing page of the site to which the buyer lands. If it is easy to view, with a clear product catalog and relevant advertising, it will increase the chances of the visitor performing the targeted action.

Online business owners who have decided to use contextual advertising are primarily interested in its cost. It depends on several factors:

• the subject of placement (some of the most expensive, for example, are finance, tourism, real estate, construction, etc;)
• selection of keywords (contextual or non-contextual, high or low frequency);
• selection of the ad display position (special placement, 1st place, dynamic or guaranteed display);
• time of ad display (day and night), working days or weekends;
• setting up geotargeting (regional contextual advertising is usually cheaper);

You should also keep in mind that the cost of contextual advertising is determined on a promotional basis, i.e. in comparison with the prices at which competitors buy clicks. Of course, ads of advertisers who paid a higher CPC will be displayed in higher positions.

At the same time, high-quality ads, even if their CPC is set lower, can occupy a higher position in the SERP. This happens because the systems take into account the ad’s conversion rate (CTR).

Increasing sales and business development is the main goal of launching an advertising campaign. These are the results that are intended to justify all advertising costs. Of course, you should keep in mind that not every website visitor will place an order. After all, not everyone leaves a brick-and-mortar store with a purchase. But if you manage to get them interested, you will know where to look for the right product next time.

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Search engine optimization and website promotion: how does it work?
Website optimization includes different ways and algorithms of action. Let’s talk about the main ones.

Page load speed. This indicator is important for users and affects search engine results. It can be improved by optimizing image files and reducing page size.

Improving page structure and navigation. This helps users find what they are looking for and understand how the page is organized.

Optimize content. It should be attractive and useful to users. It’s worth making sure to use keyword promotion to better position the page.

Improving accessibility

There are many methods to promote the site in Google and other search engines. The most popular and effective are SEO and advertising.

Is it possible to independently promote the site in search engines?

Theoretically, with knowledge and effort, you can independently promote the site on search queries. This is especially true for small towns. However, in order to succeed, you need to master a whole algorithm of actions. The presence of a website does not promise an increase in sales and number of users. To attract potential customers, you need to:

• Create an attractive offer;
• stand out against the background of competitors;
• take care of a unique content;
• to keep the visitor’s attention.

These elements are the basis of effective positioning. If a site does not generate enough traffic and cannot be easily found, it is almost as if it does not exist at all. Given the importance of optimization and promotion, it is obvious that this work is better left to professionals and order services for the promotion of sites in a reliable company that can provide excellent results.

Effective Internet marketing can be seen with the naked eye – a real increase in profits, the number of customers, inquiries and sales.

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