10 Checks to the Perfect WordPress theme

I've seen it happen so often. People have a great blog, and at some point, they decide they need a new look and feel. They then decide to either buy one or use one of the free themes available at wordpress.org. There's a couple of things they'll look at, usually in the order: layout / look and feel, usability and optionally, room for advertising.

If the theme meets their needs in all two or three of these points, they download it and start installing it. If that's what you do too, this theme checklist is for you!

A theme has quite a few things it has to take care of, and a lot of themes out there don't take care of all of these. This is a checklist that should help you prevent getting into trouble when you start using a new theme.

If you're thinking of installing a theme, open up the directory that your supposed to upload, and check the following:

1. Hooks

   WordPress plugins use so-called "hooks" to be able to perform their designated tasks. These hooks allow for instance to add extra output, tracking codes, etc. A lot of issues with plugins will arise for you when a theme author forgets to add these hooks. This is how to check for them:

   1. In header.php, it should have a small piece of PHP code that looks exactly like this wp_head(); or this do_action('wp_head');, usually just before a piece of HTML that looks like this: </head>.
   2. In footer.php, it should have another small piece of PHP like this wp_footer();, or this do_action('wp_footer');
   3. In comments.php and/or comments-popup.php, it should have a piece of code like this: <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?>, just before the </form> HTML tag.

2. Template files

   Another wise thing to do when you're changing themes, is compare theme files. If, for instance, your current theme has an author.php file, which contains the template for your author profiles, and your new one doesn't have that, that might be an unpleasant surprise when you install the theme. The files you should be checking for in your old and new theme:

   • home.php: the homepage template
   • single.php: the template for single posts
   • page.php: the template for pages
   • category.php: the template for category indexes
   • author.php: the author template, used when someone wants to find all posts by a certain author
   • date.php: the date template, used when someone tries to look at for instance a certain month of posts on your blog
   • archive.php: this template is used when either category.php, author.php or date.php isn't there.
   • search.php: used when someone searches on your blog, a very important template to look at if you're concerned about usability, and whether people are able to find posts on your blog.
   • 404.php: Used when WordPress can't find a certain post or page, this is a very important template file to have!

3. Is your theme widgetized?

   WordPress supports the use of widgets for your sidebar, this allows you to control what appears in your sidebar from the WordPress admin panel, without having to edit your theme. By now, every WordPress theme should support this, but I still encounter themes which do not support it.

   You can determine whether your WordPress theme is widgetized by opening the sidebar.php file in your theme folder, and checking whether the following code is in there somewhere: dynamic_sidebar('');. There could optionally be text in between those quotes, as long as the dynamic_sidebar part is there, your theme is widgetized.

   If your theme is not widgetized, Automattic has a great tutorial on how to do that.

4. Does your theme have a search option?

   You wouldn't believe it, but there are WordPress themes that do not have a search box built in. Make sure yours does.

5. Does your theme work in all browsers?

   Usually, themes come with a demo site. What you should do, is go to browsershots, and put the URL that's in the link to the demo site in to it. Then wait a while, and you'll get screenshots of all major browsers on all platforms, and you can check whether your theme works everywhere, or not.

   It's not the biggest of deals if it doesn't work in a "small" browser, but if it doesn't work on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox and Safari on all platforms, you should be thinking twice about whether this new theme is the best choice for your blog. After all, you don't want to exclude certain groups of people from reading your blog, do you?

6. Is the theme's code valid?

   Many a theme author is more of a designer than a coder, and thus they sometimes hack around until it finally looks the way they want, without bothering to check whether the code they've written is actually valid HTML. If it's not, current or future browsers might have issues rendering the content correctly. You can check whether the code is valid by using the W3C's validator. Lorelle wrote an excellent article on the benefits of compliance.

7. Check the outgoing links!

   A lot of theme authors will add a link to themselves in the footer of the theme, others might even add multiple links. Certain SEOs have gone as far as paying theme designers to build designs, and spreading those for free, just to be able to add links to their sites in the footer. Because of that, you need to check what your theme will have you link to.

   The best tool for this is Dave Naylor's Keyword Density tool, which provides you with a nice list of all links in your theme and their anchor text. It finds two different kinds of links, follow, and nofollow. Nofollow links are NOT counted by search engines, and thus won't affect your site in any way.

   Follow links are counted by the search engines though, and you should be aware of what you are linking too, as linking to spammy sites might get your own site penalized! Thus, if you're newly chosen theme is linking to any sites that look weird to you, or very commercial, see if you're allowed to remove those links, and if not, chose another theme!

8. Can the theme handle pages?

   If you use pages in your layout, it's important to know whether your theme will automatically add links to them, and whether it can hold pages a few levels deep. You wouldn't be the first to "lose" some of your pages just by going to a new layout.

9. Make sure your theme supports trackbacks

   People who blog about you, or your blog will try to automatically send trackbacks to you. To be able to do that, your site needs to have it's trackback information listed somewhere. This doesn't have to be visible though, all you have to make sure is that before the endwhile; in your single.php and page.php template files, there's a line like this:

   <!-- <?php trackback_rdf(); ?> -->

10. How is your theme handling titles?

    You should check how your current theme is handling page titles in the file header.php. You can find it within the <title> HTML tags. If the title tag differs, you might want to check out why and what happens when you enable your new theme. Sometimes it's for the better (for instance because it turns around blog description and page / post title), but you have to make sure up front!

    It will probably look something like this:

    <title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

    If it does, you'll be a lot better off by changing it around to:

    <title><?php wp_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

    You can also chose to just do wp_title('');, and take care of all the titles with a plugin like Headspace2.

If your theme does all of this correctly, you should be quite ok. Good luck with your new theme, and if you have any tips on other things to check, please share in the comments!