What is a theme?

As a new WordPress user, you may be excited about customizing your site. You may even have a mental picture of what your finished site will look like. However, if you lack design or coding experience, fulfilling your vision may be a daunting task. Fortunately, themes are one of WordPress’ more inherent and useful features — they enable you to customize your site’s appearance and even incorporate additional functionality. In fact, with the right theme, you can customize your site to your exact specifications with (in many cases) no coding or design experience required. 

A WordPress theme is a group of files (graphics, style sheets, and code) that dictates the overall appearance of your blog or website. Themes can control something as vast as your site’s layout, or as minute as your hyperlink colors. It’s easy to think of a theme as a ‘skin’ for your site, but they are much more powerful than that. Rather than simply providing a look and feel for your blog, a theme enables you to control the presentation of your site. For example, let’s say you blog about food, but you also have an online store. The right theme can display your blog posts in a certain way while offering a completely different layout for your store’s pages. 

Themes are an inherent part of WordPress. In fact, the platform includes a number of themes out of the box. However, there are a few reasons why you may want to choose and install a fresh theme on your site:

• To improve your site’s visual appeal. If you have a specific vision for your site, you can choose a suitable theme and customize it to meet your requirements.
• To enable more design customization. If you have no design or coding experience, many themes offer a wealth of customizations to help you create the right design.
• To implement additional functionality. Depending on your needs, a theme may include functionality related to your niche that can’t be found elsewhere.

While the default or a customized version of a theme can work for plenty of websites, there are actually thousands of themes available to choose from, covering specific niches and purposes. Let’s discuss this in more depth now.

Multipurpose vs. Niche Themes

In short, there are two loose categories of themes. First, a multipurpose theme caters to a number of different niches and site types. They usually include multiple kinds of pages, extensions, codes, widgets, and tools to provide more options for customizing your site, regardless of its focus.

While niche-specific themes are also customizable, they’ll often be tailored to one specific topic or industry. They won’t include as much scope for customization as multipurpose themes, but the refined functionality will usually be laser-focused on the exact requirements you’ll have for your site.

For the most part, there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing your WordPress theme. However, it is important to ascertain your requirements before making a choice. That is what we are here for! We will work with you to recommend a few themes that will be a good fit for your project.

What is a plugin?

A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites.

WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. In the WordPress community, there is a saying that goes around: “there’s a plugin for that”. They make it easier for users to add features to their website without knowing a single line of code.

 Plugins can make everything from small tweaks to massive changes to your site. For example, some plugins can even turn your WordPress site into a fully functioning eCommerce store, social network, or forum. Or, they can also add smaller features like an Instagram feed. Some WordPress plugins don’t even have front-facing effects. For example, you can install plugins to improve your site’s performance or help it rank better in search engines like Google.

Although there are sure to be plugins that can do the task you want them to do, some are much higher quality than others. Again,. that’s what we are here for! With many years of experience and having used hundreds of plugins, we can help identify the best for your site. Even better news is that we have developer licenses for some of the best plugins which can save you hundreds of dollars!

Some of this article content is from wpbeginner.com as well as Kinsta.com