When you create a new WordPress blog it will by default install the twentyseventeen WordPress theme (soon it will be twentyeighteen I guess). But how can you find the right WordPress theme for your site? And should you pay for a professional theme like Divi or Elegant Themes?

I believe that the short answer is no, you shouldn’t, at least in the beginning. I have seen many sites that have been created recently having only a couple of pages or even just a “Hello world”, but already running Divi or other premium site builders.

I believe it’s only a waste of money till your site doesn’t have many visitors who could cover these expenses.

Will a great desing increase the number of visitors to your site? Hell no! You will struggle for several month to attract visitors, because as you create a new site it’s almost invisible. Search engines will just ignore you in the first 6 months, so you will need to use social media and other means to attract more visitors.

You want people to share your content and they won’t share it because your desing is good. They will share it if your content is good. Of course you will want to have some design, but nowadays there are many free themes that can bring this level.

How to find the best WordPress theme for your site?

Well, you can just browse and try out free themes in WordPress, playing around a bit with each of them.

There are also several “best wordpress themes” articles on the net. Beware though, most of these are only created to sell premium themes for commission, so you can’t really trust any of these “reviews”.

However, the best way of finding the right theme for you is checking out new sites and find one desing that you like!

And for this you will only need two great tools / websites.

1. Find your dream theme through Brand New Blogs

One great tool of course is Brand New Blogs. Just go and check out some of the new websites, for example those that were created in June. We have a database of thousands of blogs and every time you refresh that page you will see different new sites. Just browse till you find one which you like.

These are snapshots of websites, you can visit the ones you like and see its design in details. If you find one that you like, go to step 2.

UPDATE!

As a new feature, now you can see the theme and plugins for every site that is shown in our random site picker (where this information was available.)

2. Find out which theme that site uses by using wpdetective

Once you have found a great desing, go to wpdetective.io and enter the site’s url to the search field.

It’s a magnificent tool which will quickly scan the site you have submitted and let you know which theme(s) it uses and will also list all the plugins installed on that site. I use it a lot and have found a lot of great themes and plugins. Do you see any cool widget on a site? Just go to wpdetective and find out what it is.

2/b. How to find the theme of a WordPress site manually?

Sometimes wpdetective will not show any results, but you still have some options, you can check the theme manually. Just go to the website you want to check, right click somewhere on the page and choose “View page source”.

The source code of that page will open in a new tab. It will look like a mess, but don’t worry, all you have to do is hit Ctrl-F and search for the term “wp-content/theme”

The word right behind “wp-content/themes/” will be the theme used on that site. For example in the above example it’s ColorMag which is a great theme by the way.

Having a nice WordPress theme is cool, but it’s not that important in the beginning. You can create a great blog by using the built in twentyseventeen theme (I also have one blog which still uses this theme) and you can make it work. But feel free to play around and try new ones. Most of them will have its limitation, but with a little bit of hacking you can overcome these weaknesses, we will talk about it in a separate article.

Do you have any favourite WordPress themes? Share it in the comment section below!

UPDATE!

As a new feature, now you can see the theme and plugins for every site that is shown in our random site picker (where this information was available.)

Also, we have published an article about the most popular themes among new sites.

And if you want to see more, please subscribe and get access to the Top 1000 themes list.