WordPress.com offers 4 different plans from the free plan, which is limited, through to a business plan which is billed at £240 per year. To see the differences between the plans you can click this link. 

As the only way to get complete autonomy over your website and hosting, and at a lower cost, is through a WordPress.org account, I would recommend you use this option.  

With over 55,000 WordPress themes available it’s easy to get lost whilst searching for the right theme for you. The first place I would recommend you start your search is by looking at websites you like online. You probably already have a few which are saved to your favourites, whether they’re online shops, service based websites or blogs. Make a note of what you like about them so you can refer to the design elements when searching for your own theme. 

Once you’ve found a few websites you like, pop the URL of each site into WPThemeDetector and if it’s a WordPress site it will tell you which theme it’s using and where to find it. 

You can also search for themes on marketplaces. Here are some of the most popular: 

When on the marketplaces you can search for themes you found via Theme Detector or you can include key elements which are important to you. For example if you are a photographer you could search for ‘photography themes’.

When choosing a theme you’ll also be choosing the page builder which is an essential part of designing your website. The page builder will contain the options and settings for different elements such as: text boxes, titles, images, separators and backgrounds. 

It is also where you control the design settings which make your website unique – for example the padding (spacing) on columns and containers and how rows and columns align. 

Mike Cottam, from Cottamweb explains about page builders in this post.

A lot of the most popular themes come with their own page builders as part of the theme and I would recommend these as they’re designed to work together rather than using separate themes and page builders as this can lead to a buggy website.

Anyone with coding knowledge can create a WordPress theme and sell it on online marketplaces such as Etsy, Creative Market, their own website. I would stick to searching on the main marketplaces as these have to meet the quality standards of the marketplace selling them. 

I would recommend checking out the testimonials attributed to the theme, it’s star rating and do a quick Google search to see the feedback on the theme to assess whether it’s the right one for you. 

You can also take this further to look at the theme’s support forum to see how quickly developers respond to and resolve enquiries.

Premium themes come with a price tag. You can expect to pay anything from $10 to $100 for a theme. The majority of themes will be a one off purchase and as long as you have a license key and register it, you’ll be able to have the theme for life and update it as and when the theme releases updates. Some themes can be purchased on an annual subscription basis and you will only be able to update it if you continue to pay for a yearly subscription. 

There are 2 options for designing your website when using WordPress themes: you can import a theme demo where the site has been prebuilt by the developers of the theme you have chosen or you can choose to build your website from the ground up, starting from blank pages and adding in the design elements yourself. Some themes will have the flexibility for you to choose to build some pages yourself if you choose to and import some prebuilt pages to cut down on your workload. 

Here are the pros and cons of using a demo:

Here are the pros and cons of custom building your website:

When creating a website I always recommend you use a child theme – this inherits all the styles and settings of your chosen theme (parent theme) but crucially, when updates are rolled out by WordPress or the theme itself, any customisation changes you make will not be overwritten by the updates. Often premium themes will come with a child theme which you install and activate once you’ve installed and activated the parent theme. If your theme doesn’t come with a child theme then there are plugins or instructions available online to create a child theme.