WordPress is now the most dominant CMS today. At last count it powered 25% of all sites on the internet. That popularity has spawned a healthy theme and plugin ecosystem. A search of any site that sells themes will result in thousands if not several thousand results. This makes it so much harder to find a good theme. There are features that should be given priority when looking for a good theme. Here are three:

Responsiveness

More and more web traffic is coming from mobiles and other non pc devices. Smartphones and tablets are the majority. However, thanks to Android there are a lot of devices with different resolutions. The only way to combat this is to use a theme with a fluid responsive layout that can adjust properly even to non standard resolutions or aspect ratios.

Slider

Websites with sliders tend to look better. Better looking websites also tend to perform better in search engines.  In its Panda update, Google used machine learning to give better looking websites a ranking boost. Look for a theme with built in slider support. Even if you don’t use it initially, the options will always exist.

Custom Menus and Sidebar

One last feature that can be very useful is for the theme to support multiple menus and sidebars. This way you can create and then assign menus and sidebars on a page by page basis or even by category. One use would be to give all the pages of a specific category a specific sidebar customized for that category.