WordPress Themes Explained: How to Choose the Right One
WordPress themes can be overwhelming with tens of thousands to choose from. Here's what they actually do, what to look for, and why a lightweight theme like Astra is often your best bet.
What Does a WordPress Theme Actually Do?
With tens of thousands of WordPress themes available, it's easy to get overwhelmed by flashy demos, one-click imports, and promises of stunning layouts. But strip away the marketing and a WordPress theme has a pretty straightforward job: it controls the basic visual style of your site.
At a bare minimum, your theme determines which fonts your site uses, what size they are, what colors appear across your pages, and the overall visual structure. You can tweak these settings through the WordPress Customizer — think of it as a preferences panel with a live preview rather than a full page builder. The options you'll find in the Customizer depend entirely on what the theme developer decided to include, so some themes give you granular control while others keep things simple.
Themes also provide templates for your blog posts and pages, controlling how that content is laid out when someone visits your site. That said, it's now easier than ever to create your own custom templates using page builders, so choosing a theme purely based on its built-in templates isn't as critical as it used to be.
How to Choose the Right Theme for Your Site
The best approach to picking a theme is to think about what other tools and plugins you plan to use on your site. If you're running an online course with something like LearnDash, or building pages with a specific page builder, look for a theme that has built-in compatibility with those tools. A theme that complements your key plugins will save you hours of styling headaches.
Modern WordPress development has shifted toward lean, lightweight themes that don't try to do everything. Features like sliders, animated titles, and fancy visual effects are better handled by dedicated plugins or a page builder. This keeps your theme simple and your site fast.
The biggest reason to avoid feature-heavy themes is something called content lock. If a theme bundles in sliders, custom layouts, and proprietary shortcodes, all of that disappears the moment you switch themes. Your content gets wrecked because it was tied to that specific theme's features. By keeping your theme lean and using standalone plugins for extra functionality, you stay flexible and can swap themes down the road without breaking everything.
Why Astra Is a Solid Choice for Beginners
Astra has been one of the most popular WordPress themes for years, and for good reason. It's lightweight, versatile, and has a generous free version that's genuinely feature-rich — not a crippled teaser designed to force you into upgrading.
One of Astra's strengths is its built-in compatibility with popular plugins. For example, it includes dedicated styles for LearnDash, so if you're building a site with online courses, your pages look polished right out of the box. But even if you have no plans to use LearnDash, Astra works well as a general-purpose theme for virtually any kind of WordPress site.
Installing it takes about 30 seconds: head to your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes > Add New, search for "Astra," click Install, then Activate. Keep in mind that while you can have multiple themes installed, only one can be active at a time — you can't mix and match features from different themes into some kind of super-theme.
Keep It Lean: The Modern Approach to WordPress Themes
If there's one takeaway from all of this, it's that less is more when it comes to WordPress themes. The days of choosing a theme because it came packed with 50 built-in features are over. A lean theme that handles styling well and plays nicely with your chosen plugins is the smarter long-term play.
Find a theme that works with the major plugins on your radar — whether that's a page builder like Elementor, an e-commerce plugin like WooCommerce, or a course platform like LearnDash. Let dedicated plugins handle the bells and whistles, and let your theme do what it's supposed to do: make your site look good without getting in the way.
This approach keeps your site fast, your content portable, and your options open. When you eventually want to refresh your site's look, switching themes becomes a painless process instead of a full rebuild.
Watch the Full Video
Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.
