How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your New CBD Business

Starting a new CBD business? Choosing the right WordPress theme is crucial for success. Learn how to pick the best WordPress theme for your new CBD business with this guide.

There can be many tasks on your to-do list when you launch a new cannabis product business. Alongside ensuring you abide by all FDA requirements with your products, you must also manage business licenses, tax obligations, daily operations, and product design.

If your business is operating in the online space, website development and security can also be high on your priority list. You want it to be a practical site where customers can make safe and well-informed purchasing decisions but also an aesthetically-pleasing site that stands out from other CBD and marijuana product sites for the right reasons.

A significant factor in achieving this goal is choosing the best WordPress theme. Here are a few considerations for how you might be able to do that.

Consider the Content

Before you choose what you believe will be the best theme for your new CBD website, consider your primary goal in developing it in the first place. Some CBD businesses want to focus strictly on product sales, ensuring customers can easily access the goods they want, like Delta-8 gummies, pre-rolls, and topicals, and enjoy a seamless checkout process.

Other business owners want to build more of a blog-style site with helpful information for customers to learn more about CBD, THC, and other cannabis cannabinoids. You might even be trying to achieve a combination of both.

When you have a goal in mind, you might be able to significantly narrow down the theme choices that fit into this category. Membership-style themes, creative-style themes, and business page-like themes will all be eliminated from your search, meaning finding the perfect theme could potentially be a far quicker process.

Think About Branding

A common mistake that new businesses make is not prioritizing brand consistency. You might create business cards using one set of colors and fonts and an entirely different palette for your marketing materials, social media, and website.

Thinking about branding can be important when choosing a WordPress theme for your website because you want to ensure that the available colors, fonts, and elements will match your branding. Fortunately, most WordPress themes are customizable, meaning you can alter most characteristics to suit your branding guide. This can allow you to maintain consistency across all marketing materials for brand recognition with your customers.

Prioritize Functionality

A particular WordPress theme might be more than suitable for your needs based on its customization options and style, but that doesn’t mean it will be entirely functional for your needs. You might need special features for your customers to perform specific functions, such as making orders for pick-up or signing up for company newsletters.

When you’re browsing through the many available themes, look out for any mention of seamless plug-in integration. The more plugins that are compatible with your chosen theme, the easier you may find it to create a functional and beautiful website that stands out for all the right reasons.

Calculate Your Budget

Sometimes, choosing the best theme for your WordPress website is easy because you know how much you want to spend. You can narrow down your options based on your budget, potentially eliminating hundreds, if not thousands, of options from your theme gallery.

However, it’s important to strike a balance between quality and price. You don’t want to end up with a website you don’t like because you chose to spend less. Some themes are free, while others come with a one-off purchase cost. The more complex themes with unique design elements may come with a monthly or yearly fee.

Think About Performance

Slow websites can be frustrating. If you’ve exited a website because it was slow to load, you can typically expect visitors to do the same thing to you if your website is slow when they visit. While many factors can contribute to website speed, your chosen WordPress theme is one of them.

The more built-in features your website has, and the more customization options you have, the slower it can often be to load. If you’re worried about the adverse SEO effects and your customers being negatively affected by slow load speeds, make performance your priority.

This can involve choosing themes with no unnecessary features you won’t use and keeping animations like sliders to a minimum. However, you might also be able to improve site performance in other ways, such as:

• Optimizing image sizes
• Writing mobile-first code
• Choosing the right hosting service plan
• Using a content delivery network (CDN)

Check Accessibility

Website accessibility is important for ensuring everyone has access to your website, no matter their disability. It’s even a law that all government information on a website must be accessible to all disabled users.

While most WordPress theme creators include code to ensure full accessibility, there are no guarantees that the theme you choose will be fully compliant. Ensure it is before selecting it.

If you’re unfamiliar with how web accessibility works, the US Government provides helpful tips and best practices, such as:

• Not relying on color as a navigational tool or as the only way to differentiate between items
• Including alt text in the markup and code of images
• Providing transcripts for podcasts
• Undertaking 508 testing to ensure compliance
• Providing visual access to audio information for videos
• Ensuring mouse and keyboard functionality with voice-control systems

Read Reviews

Just as you might read reviews on products before buying them to ensure they fulfill your needs; you can do the same for WordPress themes. Pay particular attention to information real users share about any installation issues, compatibility problems, bugs, and performance woes. The more you know about a theme before you install it; the more confident you might be in its suitability for your new online CBD business.

You might also be able to speed up the WordPress theme selection process by filtering your theme results from the highest rating to the lowest rating. The more highly a theme is rated, the more trust you might have in its suitability for your new business venture.

Choosing the best WordPress theme for your new CBD business isn’t always easy; especially with many hundreds or thousands to choose from. However, by considering these criteria above; you might be able to narrow down your options and speed up the selection process until you find the most fitting theme for your business venture.