Would you like to know what are the best WordPress themes for page speed and selling online courses because this will help you choose an awesome theme for your website from the start?
Astra WP Best WordPress Theme for Fast Page Speed and Selling Online Courses?
What are some of the best free and premium WordPress themes of 2020?
I'm taking this directly off of the Kinsta blog because after hosting my website there for years and testing some of these myself, I trust their information on it.
Kinsta has a huge blog post on this that goes through different options for themes. Why is a WordPress theme so important?
A theme provides the basic organization of your website. If you change themes, this can break a lot of different customization you've made on your website. Therefore, the most important choice when setting up your WordPress website is to pick a theme that you're very happy with and that you can stick with indefinitely.
I knew I was not happy with my last WordPress theme and I put off changing it for at least a year because I imagined there'd be a significant pain in switching. It took me six hours one day of going through my website and changing all kinds of details to go from one theme to another.
It took months more to figure out and get all those little details that broke from transferring one theme to another. For example, seeing the one page builder didn't work, fixing that particular page. It doesn't have to be that challenging.
That said, you want to make sure to pick a theme that looks like it's going to be a good option going forward. What's the most important consideration for a theme?
In my opinion, there are two key considerations with a WordPress theme.
Compatibility: Will this work with the other things I want to do on my website?
Speed: Will this theme load quickly on both mobile and desktop devices?
Google is obsessed with speed and most users are obsessed with speed to the point where if a website loads slow, they will leave. Assuming you've got your website hosted on something rapid like Kinsta that's on the Google cloud platform, you've married the most important first choice.
The second most important choice is to pick a theme out that won't add a bunch of extra data and complexity to loading the website because if you do, as I've seen lots of entrepreneurs with beautiful-looking websites that load slow, you will lose a lot of your potential search traffic, and all of the other efforts you make on your website will be less impactful because you've got a slow website and users abandon it before it even loads.
I recommend, if you're going to spend some money anywhere in your business, getting a premium theme is well worth it to get the full functionality out of the theme. With that introduction, let's go into the blog post, the key parts of the Kinsta information that they've put together here.
They've got some do's and don'ts.
To me, choosing a theme just because it looks pretty is a definite don't. Paying for a theme that's slow and bloated is a definite don't.
You need themes that work on any device, which is most themes.
Let's scroll down and see the themes themselves here.
First I'll show you the one I'm using. It's called Astra WP.
Astra is the theme I use. I've got the pro version of it. You can see it operating anytime you want to on my website. The best part is, this is a page designed by Elementor Pro.
If I take you over to specific pages, this is a page on my blog. This is the Astra blog. You can know that this theme works really good if you want to sell online courses.
Notice how rapid my website loads and changes between every page. You know that this is a good theme for all of the things I'm doing on my website. Therefore, this is my number one recommendation because I'm already using it.
After all the research I did, this is the one I chose because there are several themes that are very fast. However, this one has great compatibility with the things I'm using, which are online courses with LearnDash.
LearnDash is a plugin that puts all my courses directly to my website. WooCommerce is a plugin that allows you to buy anything I put up on my website with your credit card or many other payment sources.
I've got forums with bbPress. I've got custom landing pages designed like this, custom landing pages designed like this.
These are beautiful pages you can design with a page builder that eliminates the need to use anything else. These are all very compatible and move very quickly with the Astra WordPress theme. Everything loads super fast. It all works good in Google. It's got a very good functionality. At the same time, it's an easy user experience and it's fast.
Thus, my number one recommendation is to use the Astra WP theme. I researched this theme off of the Kinsta blog. You can see that it's responsive, it's Gutenberg ready, it's 5/5 for speed. It's also SEO friendly, it's got e-commerce integration and it has both the free and paid option. I'm using the paid option.
You also can choose some of these other fast themes.
GeneratePress is a good option.
This is one of the other themes I was considering. I chose Astra because it was clear the main things I wanted to use with it like WooCommerce and LearnDash were integrated well.
GeneratePress has integration, I imagine with Woocommerce and as you see it has e-commerce listed up here. It has both a free and paid option.
OceanWP is another good option according to Kinsta for a fast WordPress theme.
I did a lot of research on OceanWP, GeneratePress and Astra before I picked one, hours and hours of research looking through these to see if they were worth doing.
All of these are optimized, fast and have good e-commerce. This theme, unlike the others, is just free. Ocean WP is just a free theme.
I recommend you look at any websites you can that are running on these themes to see what else is possible with them. GeneratePress, OceanWP and Astra, all have websites demos that you can look at and people like me who will tell you that you're using that theme to get an idea of what it looks like.
Zakra is also a free theme. I've not done any research on it.
It's not as fast as the first three they showed you. It is, however, free and has integrations.
There are other themes you can pick. For example, if you want something specific like a travel blog, there's WPVoyager.
Note, you want to see if it's ready for the Gutenberg builder.
You also want to always check if it has things like e-commerce integration and how fast it is.
You'll note some of these do not have Gutenberg editor. Some of these do not have e-commerce integration or multilingual support, and to me these are deal breakers for a theme I would want to have.
If you have a niche that demands a specific type of theme, for example, this is a food blog theme called Cookely and you do recipes, then it might make sense to deal with some of these hindrances.
I suggest that you get a theme that has a great combination of the things that are essential. In my opinion, the Gutenberg editor should be supported. If not, that shows the developer is not keeping up with things enough to support the latest editor, which does not indicate a very good long-term option.
You also want an eCommerce integration because you want to sell things on your own website. You have your website as the one place everybody can come to. You absolutely want to be able to sell directly on your website without having to send people somewhere else.
These themes that are listed on Kinsta have a lot of great options.
Here are some specific WooCommerce themes.
Note that Astra is listed first. One of the reasons I chose it, it's compatibility with WooCommerce and LearnDash. Astra is listed here, it works absolutely outstanding with Woocommerce.
There are other themes you can use, they have listed on the Kinsta blog Bazar Shop and Flatsome. If it's got all of these options and it's very fast, these could be good alternatives worth researching. One of the best research points you can put in when starting your website is which theme because once you pick the theme and start doing everything, it is a significant effort to make a change.
There are personal blog templates on here. There are just tons more themes on here. As you can see, this page just scrolls down for a long time.
I am grateful for the chance to talk to you about WordPress themes. You can look through if you want to on the Kinsta blog and find out if you need a specific type of website.
It can help if you've got a specific thing you do like if you're a gamer, it can help to pick a theme that is already set up for what you want to do because the more your theme is not set up for specifically what you want to do, the more time you need to spend customizing it.
For me, I've spent hours and hours, probably at least a hundred hours customizing my WordPress website that's on the Astra theme because I want to sell courses. So many of the different details on my website have been specific customization.
This is LearnDash. However, the course grid, I bought another plugin to make the course grid look organized instead of the way LearnDash has it by default.
I've got other plugins to make the website go even faster. I have Woocommerce to make sales. I've got more plugins for WooCommerce. I've got forums with bbPress.
The more I'm adding in, the more customization and time you're looking at. Therefore, it is worthwhile to go through and look at all of these different themes if you can find one that's almost exactly what you'd like your website to be.
I looked at BuddyPress themes. This is BuddyBoss. If you want to have a membership website, it might be ideal to just use the BuddyBoss theme instead of trying to do what I've done. I manually used the Astra theme to build out my own membership website.
Therefore, if you can save a lot of time and energy customizing by picking the right theme, just make sure you can test things as much as possible with the theme like the speed of it to make sure it will be a good long-term experience for you.
I also like going with something like Astra because it's so flexible. I can just customize it to my needs like what if I want to stop offering a membership or quit offering online courses in 10 years?
Astra is so flexible. I've got a good chance of doing that.
I hope this has been helpful for you to pick an outstanding WordPress theme that will give you a very satisfying experience as a user. I've picked two or three themes before I got to Astra. I'm hoping Astra will last longer than any of them did and I hope you find the very best theme.
Thanks for watching this video or reading the blog post.
Final Words
Yes, you watched all the way to the end. I appreciate the chance to help you master digital marketing today. The video you just watched is a free preview from my WordPress course available at Jerrybanfield.com/learn.
It is a course showing how I build my whole website the way I do. You can click on the course. It's only $9.99 and you can see all of the critical videos that show the plugins I use, that show how I set everything up that compared to other options.
When you click on "Take this course," you'll find a very simple and easy checkout. You put your name, email, and your card information here. As soon as you complete checkout, you'll get immediate access to lifetime answers from questions.
Anything you want to know, just ask me via email, via text or posted in the forums. I'll give you all my information as soon as you take the course on my website.
You'll find a lot of other courses that'll be really helpful for you to master digital marketing and to experience divine love, all at Jerrybanfield.com/learn.
I appreciate everything you do to help me have a business online and I'll see you soon.
I love you.
You’re awesome.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/best-wordpress-theme/