The best DIY WordPress themes for my money have to be reasonably easy to use, look great and have a ton of functionality. Unless you are or want to be a website builder these really are the only criteria you need to concern yourself with. Your website is your online shop front so of course it needs to look good. Like a bricks and mortar shop though, its what’s inside that’s important. So the best DIY WordPress themes should really let you get on with that rather than driving you mad just getting simple things done. I’ve tried a few and have finally found the one for me.
Two questions might have arisen at this point: Why DIY? Why WordPress? Lets deal with those first. Why DIY? Building a website yourself isn’t as difficult as you might think especially with a great theme. It also saves you a fortune and is a very useful digital skill to have.
Best DIY WordPress Themes For Ease of Use
Why WordPress? Well, in the words of Tina Turner it’s simply the best. WordPress has been the go to open source content management system – the basic platform to build websites on – for many years. It’s used by some 60 million websites. Once you have Wordpress installed (free) you can choose from countless themes, plugins and ad-ons. Google loves WordPress so its also extremely good for SEO unlike many of the alternatives.
If you’re just getting started with websites WordPress itself offers many free and paid themes. There are also many third party theme developers so finding the best DIY WordPress themes for you can be daunting. The free themes are pretty good as a starting point. They are pretty rigid templates and because there’s no money in it plugins aren’t always updated quickly, which can cause problems. You’ll probably want more features, flexibility and ad-ons pretty soon.
When I got to that stage I spoke to a lot of friends in the SFM community and found that a lot of them were using a theme called Optimesepress (OP). I bought that and installed it on two of my sites. Personally I found OP a bit tricky. It’s definitely not quite as drag and drop simple as I’d hoped. Don’t get me wrong I’ve seen some amazing sites built with OP but I know that the site owners have a fair bit of experience. Some of the things you’d assume would be pretty simple – making custom headers, integrating autoresponders etc actually need a little coding know how to achieve. Not my bag I’m afraid.
It’s Elementary
If you search – best DIY WordPress themes – you’ll find Elegant themes pretty close to the top of page one. Coincidentally my partner on a new project related to dementia support uses Elegant themes’ Divi theme. When I started working on that site I was pleasantly surprised: It genuinely is drag and drop simple.
Adding headers, footers, text blocks, images, videos and other elements is very easy. Resizing elements, moving things around and arranging the pages happens in real time – you see what its going to look like as you work. Once published Elegant themes pages load extremely fast. In a world where a website has literally a few seconds to grab attention this is important. There are a couple of pricing options both of which are incredible considering how good these themes are. You can also take a free trial.
Rather than walking you through everything here, if this sounds good to you just hit the link below to visit Elegant themes Demo site. I think you might agree that these are probably the best DIY WordPress themes around.
