Gone are those days when developing a WordPress theme was great fun. With the help of pre-defined simple sliders, WordPress developers could create a premium WordPress theme. That was the time when no major plugins would require to enhance the functionality of the WP website. Even if your WordPress theme is appealing and flawless enough, you can easily scaleup the business, without any complex marketing or promotion.
However, as you all know, nothing remains the same in this fast-paced growing IT industry, though changing time has added a great twist in a tale. Wordpress Premium Theme Development has become a tough competitive challenge even for expert developers.
Undoubtedly, with each passing year, the market has grown, and WordPress has become the most preferred CMS for customers. According to w3techs and WordPress.com, WordPress is power 26% of all the websites on the Internet, taking both into account those using a Content Management System (CMS) and or with a Custom-Coded CMS. If you are considering the data set to only those websites with a known CMS, no surprise, WordPress’ market share becomes even more dominant.
So how can you make a WordPress theme competitive in the fast-paced market? Before discussing the strategies and tips to develop the WordPress Premium theme for your site, let’s bring some light on a few points which are important to keep in mind during WP Theme Development.
Tips to Remember During WordPress Customization:
Creating Premium WordPress themes is a serious task, especially when you want to sell WP themes on a regular basis. The simple mantra to develop premium WordPress themes is to have a clear business strategy instead of choosing to develop it when you are in a good mood.
The second important thing that you need to keep in mind is “Quality”. Remember, without adhering to quality standards; your theme will not even pass the review stage.
Last, but not least! Marketing, Marketing, and Marketing is the key to success. Without marketing, it is difficult to generate potential sales. If a premium WordPress theme isn’t promoted in a way, it won’t generate a good number of sales.
Hopefully, you will get an idea about the basic points that can ensure easy WordPress Customization. Let’s discuss each perspective in more detail:
1. Have a Clear Business Strategy
The choice of business strategy begins with determining at what stage of career you are. Determine, whether you have recently registered the account or already selling themes on Themeforest? If you are already selling your themes in “Themeforest”, then this blog is not for you.
So let’s start the process of developing Premium Wordpress Themes with these tips:
A. Don’t Rush
Be patient and educate yourself deeply before launching something to sell. You might be excited to showcase your craft, but poor quality themes can put your efforts at the sake. So don’t hesitate to spend a few days educating and guiding yourself before creating and trying to sell.
B. Choose the Category
Research and pick the niche you’ll build your theme around. Many categories in the WordPress community such as corporate, creative, blog magazine and eCommerce are quite popular in the community. You can choose any one of these which will ensure your success.
C. Minimize the Theme Building time
Ideally, from planning, designing, development, testing, submitting and approval, the complete process will take more than 30 days. While it’s fair that you won’t have any control over the review process, but you can expedite the writing and resubmission process.
There are many theme submission sites, i.e. Envato Marketplaces, where you can track the review process for any product. Don’t panic, if your review time is delayed. It is worthwhile to switch to your next project and be patient.
D. Divide the Work
If you are the one who is going to handle both designing and development jobs by yourself, then make sure that you have expertise in both areas. Instead, we suggest you hire a WordPress developer or to browse thousands of approved design files on Themeforest.
Instead, be in a rush, take time to examine designs you are interested in, or if you find something you’re interested in, you have plenty of options to hire developers for WP Theme Customization.
Let’s understand how you can spill the work of WordPress Theme Development:
- 60–70% of development and theme support from you and approved design from the designer (30–40%).
- Work will split 50%-50% if your WordPress Skills are Intermediate.
- Single payment from conversion, which means the price depends on the item.
Don’t be surprised, this is the common practice in theme development. Make sure you divide the work carefully and have value to offer otherwise choose 100% independent development.
E. Know your Competitors
This is the biggest and most important component of developing a WordPress Premium Theme. In fact, the best business strategy starts with good research. So take out time to understand the market and determine your strongest competitor. Begin your search by uncovering the names of top-sellers in your chosen category. Secondly, try to understand what factors make these themes a leader of the community. Usually, you will notice the names of the old themes at the top, so understanding how they are developed and managed is one of the major tasks for you.
Whether you are converting PSD to Wordpress theme or developing a premium WordPress theme, you need to understand the bar graph of recently added themes in your chosen category. If you notice an attractive sales from the top-selling theme each week and on the other hand, single-digit sales from the newly added themes, you should expect your initial sales to match the lowest numbers.
The next big thing that you need to take into account is the” changelog of the older top-selling themes”. It means, initially they were launched much likely as a simpler package, but over time such features have been added to it like WooCommerce, Demos, Revolution sliders, page builders and so on.
2. Set the Goal To Achieve High Quality
Of course, after putting all your best efforts, who wants to see the “Hard Reject message from the review team…Obviously, no one!
The only way to avoid to see this hurting message, again and again, is to focus on the Quality of the theme. There are several components that you need to take into consideration while developing a theme.
Let begin with it…
A. Design Your Theme Carefully
Afterall everything starts in WordPress with the design, so don’t hesitate to showcase your creativity.
To develop a Premium Wordpress Theme, you are advised to examine your competitors but do not replicate their design, elements, colors, or even structure. This will not only increase the chances of rejection but also restricts you to exhibit your creativity. If you doubt your design, consider WordPress expert or pre-designed themes to explore better design options.
B. Verify Technical Quality
Before you get your hands on designing a WordPress Theme, make sure you examine the WordPress theme submitting requirements. Read all the content carefully, ensuring your theme must be adhering to the requirement.
According to experts, theme authors must pass the Envato Theme Check without any issue along with the basic WordPress Theme Unit Test.
C. Think About Added Features
Before making any premium plugins in theme, it is a rule to make it compatible with the 3rd party plugin. To make your WordPress Theme competitive, I would highly recommend that you include WPBakery Page Build ($250 extended license) or Free version of King Composer as your page builder. For the theme slider, Revolution slider or layer slider is the ideal choice. The best part is, all these plugins can be packed with your theme for free.
D. Optimize the Features
Remember the most important rule, what’s the use of stuffing features, if customers are not able to leverage them. Do your potential buyers know that:
- The WordPress Theme has multiple header versions
- It has unlimited color options
- It has a boxed or framed version
- You can access different footer variations
- It has an RTL version
Whether your design is brilliantly unique, your code is all-powerful, but if you are poor in a demo, your theme fails to reach a potential customer. Make sure to test your demos on multiple screen sizes to ensure a perfect experience for the users accessing different devices.
E. Test The Hosting Performance
If you are developing a WordPress theme for business, you need business server solutions. Web hosting sites like HostGator, GoDaddy are not the best options for your business. Most Wordpress Development Company to buy a Virtual Private Server or Cloud solution to check the actual hosting performance of your demo.
3. Promote Your WordPress Theme
Now, this is important! Without marketing your WordPress theme, you will only reach 10–20% of potential sales. If you really want to generate good sales, then good research and investment are crucial. No surprise that only 1–2% of top theme sellers know this secret.
Now you must be wondering which platform you should choose to market your theme? Platforms like a Facebook advertisement, Google Adsense, colorlib reviews, buysellads are the few reliable sites that really work.
Further, you can leverage the benefits of marketing campaigns. Take a risk, experiment with marketing campaigns to measure and analyze your market, but you need to make some investment for that. If budget is your weakest point, then these campaigns will not work for you.
Let’s wrap it
Hopefully, you understand that WordPress Website development is not as easy as Converting Website to Wordpress Theme. In fact, theme development is a great challenging task and marketing it even more difficult. One thing that you always need to keep in mind while entering to the WordPress theme community, you need to constantly improve it if you really want to survive in this shrinking market.
The best way to achieve success in Wordpress Premium Theme Development is to respect and learn from your competitors and cooperate with other users and believe in delivering the best quality to avoid rejection.
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