When we pick Divi to create a new website on WordPress, we make the best use of prebuilt Divi elements. The most preferred prebuilt Divi element which we always utilize are child themes. These Divi child themes allow you to create a professional business website or blog within a few minutes. Just download, install, and activate the child theme and your website is ready. These phenomenal capabilities make Divi child themes everyone’s choice but have you ever thought that choosing the right theme for your website is also crucial?
This blog post will guide you through the important accessible points and key factors that should be kept in mind before choosing a perfect child theme for your Divi website. Let’s understand why it’s important to choose the right theme and how you can do that.
1. Assess the Purpose and Needs of Your Website
Assessing what kind of website you have and accordingly finding out its purpose and needs would be a great move. We can categorize the assessment on three prime factors: Business Type, Target Audience, and Functionality Requirements. Let’s discuss them in brief.
Business Type
The selection process starts with the first thing – what’s your business that you are taking online through your website. The needs of different industries would not be the same.
If it’s an eCommerce store try to use the child themes that offer WooCommerce integration, customizable products, shop pages, and easy-to-use checkout.
If you are creating a portfolio website that’s generally used by designers and photographers, then the chosen theme must have a sensational visual appeal, minimalist layout, and responsive galleries.
If sharing knowledge and experience through blogs is your goal, then go for the content-focused child themes that come with easy navigation and better readability.
Target Audience
Knowing who is your target audience and what it expects from your side is also important.
Visual Styling: If your audience is young and wants a modern, clean design then a Divi child theme reflecting a sleek design would be the best choice. The older audience browsing news, or health and wellness websites will prefer a classic design.
Structure and Layout: A child theme with creative layouts would be a good choice if your audience is a tech tech-savvy and can quickly learn things. The conservative audience always looks for old school approach and enjoys a simplistic and user-friendly design.
Functional Requirements
Last but not the least are functional requirements which vary with the goals of your website.
If we are designing an eCommerce website, compatibility of the Dvi child theme with WooCommerce is mandatory.
When we talk about SEO optimization, a theme built with SEO-friendly code and providing advanced options for meta tags, headings, and alt text will be a perfect choice.
The child themes with responsive design are always preferred. That’s because such child themes ensure the website’s visual appeal on various devices including mobiles and tablets.
2. Key Factors to be Kept in Mind While Choosing a Divi Child Theme
Apart from the purpose and needs there are certain other key factors that should be focused on to choose the right Divi child theme for your Divi website. We’ll break down and discuss those factors in detail to analyze how they play a major role in the child theme selection for your Divi website.
Design and Visual Appeal
The website design must align with the brand identity of your website. The visual appeal of your website must reflect your brand’s image to the target audience.
The customization options of the child theme will help in crafting your website with beautiful fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
Let’s understand it with an example.
We need to create a website for a luxury jewelry brand that is known for its elegance and craftsmanship. We will select a Divi child theme that carries over the sophistication and luxury of the brand.
We finalized two themes.
Theme A: It has a vibrant color scheme with flashy bold fonts and interactive animations.
Theme B: This child theme offers a clean and soft color layout with sleek typography.
Theme B wins the game as it visualizes the elegance and luxury of the jewelry brand with its sophisticated design and sleek visual appeal.
Layout and Flexibility
It is also important to assess the flexibility and customization options of the prebuilt layouts it offers. You can quickly set up different sections of your Divi website using the ready-to-use layouts.
Let’s understand it with an example of creating a real estate website. We would prefer a Divi child theme that offers the following prebuilt layouts and customization options.
- It must have a Homepage layout with featured listings, property search bar, and agent profiles.
- Dedicated property listing layout with images, description, and location of property on a map.
- Engaging client testimonial layouts to build trust among the clients is necessary.
- Blog page layouts must come with featured images, and sidebar widgets to display the market insights.
- Contact form layouts should have custom fields like budget and property type.
These prebuilt layouts can do half of the job quickly if offered with enough customization options.
Performance and Speed
The selected theme must not have unnecessary scripts, features, and design elements as they can slow down the website and hamper the website performance. All these unnecessary elements such as sliders, animations, or pre-installed plugins are combinedly and termed as ‘Theme Bloats’. The right Divi child theme must have
- Lightweight code will help improve the website speed.
- Lazy loading to reduce the initial loading times.
- Minimum external scripts result in efficient loading and deliver a smooth user experience.
- A clean and minimal design will help to showcase all the content in an organized look.
- Optimized CSS and Javascript will stop the excess code from slowing down your website.
Let’s consider you’re building an eCommerce store. The selected theme must beautifully display the products with a seamless user experience on the website. Understand it with examples.
- The homepage takes too much time to load due to heavy animations, background videos, and high-resolution images.
- Unnecessary social media feeds, popup forms, and large galleries can slow down the websites and frustrate the users.
These situations can drive users to abandon shopping carts leading to sales decline.
SEO and Mobile Responsiveness
The right Divi child theme must follow the best SEO practices to improve the visibility of a website in search engine rankings. Let’s see what can be expected in terms of SEO from the right Divi child theme.
Clean and semantic HTML must be there to ensure easy crawling of search engines and better understandability.
- It must have proper header tags with keyword optimization.
- Scalable images that resize themselves without slowing down websites.
- Easy-to-use mobile-friendly navigation with buttons and menus.
These things drive more traffic and improve the user experience of the website on various devices.
We can understand it with an example of a fitness website or blog. A perfect Divi child theme for that fitness website must follow certain SEO-friendly practices. Let’s take a quick look at them.
- Clean HTML structure helps search engines easily crawl and index pages, improving search engine visibility.
- Optimized header tags will make it easy to highlight keywords “workout tips” or “healthy eating” without tuning up the code manually.
- Scalable images showing workouts and nutrition automatically resize on mobile screens to prevent slow loading.
- Mobile-friendly menus help visitors easily browse the workout categories and jump to different sections with a tap.
All these work together to make the fitness website visible in search rankings and result in good organic traffic.
3. Test and Review the Divi Child Theme
When you finalize a Divi child theme for your website don’t forget to test it and check its performance, if it suits your website purpose or not. Follow these steps to test it.
Test it in the Staging Environment
The staging environment is a perfect setup to check and analyze if there are any issues without disturbing the live site. This prevents the live website from an unwanted changes that can occur while testing the child theme.
Check Compatibility with Plugins
Test the seamless working of the Divi child theme with essential plugins like WooCommerce, security, and SEO tools. The right child theme should work seamlessly with all the necessary plugins and will maintain website’s core functionality and purpose.
Test Performance and Loading Speed
Google Page Speed Insights or GT Metrix can be used to check the performance and page loading speed of your website. This will detect any specific slow-loading issues and can be treated with suitable fixes.
Analyze Responsiveness
Preview the Divi child theme on various devices to test its responsiveness and functioning on different screen sizes. Open the browser settings and check its responsiveness on different devices.
Final Takedown
Finally, we can conclude that choosing the right Divi child theme is necessary to make the recognition of your website among the audience. Assessing the purpose of your website, what are its goals, motives, and what audience it is targeting is also crucial. Talking about the key factors: design and visual appeal, layout flexibility, performance and speed, SEO, and mobile responsiveness are some other important areas that need to be analyzed before choosing the right Divi child theme for your website. All these things work together and guide you to find the perfect child theme to increase sales and business growth of your website.
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