Wordpress Theme – Which features you need and which you don’t?

There is a saying too many features can confuse you. Well it is rightly said. Nowadays theme providers are busy making their themes with all and every feature they can think of. Often unnecessary plugin, sliders, tons of garbage coding are entered into theme coding because of this.

Let’s see the factors for unnecessary and unwanted features and decide which ones we should have and not have.

1.       Too many features is confusing

Too many features like parallax, complex animated javascripts, all sorts of shortcodes, complex table and other options which might not appeal or is rather unnecessary for a particular theme are often added. These features most of those theme owners won’t be needing and can make your theme slow.

Like for example in a restaurant theme you don’t want too many tables or scripted animations whereas in a designer theme you might need them. So one has to understand which features are needed in a particular theme and which aren’t.

2.       Tons of heavy styling options

Tons of heavy styling options are added. Like changing link color, font color are perfectly fine. But changing color of the whole theme by having each and everything in a color picker is making your theme heavy as well as confusing your end customer.

3.       Too many widgets

Way too many widgets which one may not need ever are also added sometimes. Like recent posts, categories, content boxes which are well served by default WordPress widgets are unnecessarily added by few theme developers.

4.       Too many templates

Way too many templates with different content boxes arranged anywhere and everywhere are given for users to make a page. However the basic crunch and the simplicity and how to do it is lost somewhere.

5.       Many sliders

Nowadays many theme developers add layered sliders, nivo, responsive, cyclone and host of other sliders which are again unnecessary. One website requires max to max just 1 slider so what’s the use of adding those plugins and showing them to a client.

6.       Many unnecessary plugins

Often ordering, sorting, sitemap, pagination and other unwanted plugins are added by theme developers. These features aren’t coded into the theme but are added as a plugin. Now the problem here is that even though these plugins were needed for the previous theme but in case you change the theme to a new one you might end up still running those plugins since they were added by the previous theme and ending up making your site slower.

7.       Heavy admin panel with own drag and drop interface

Drag and drop features are easy to use and again are debatable. Some people find drag and drop easy whereas some say that it is unnecessary because all WordPress can do via pages, posts, custom fields and widgets so drag and drop template creator is actually confusing and making things worst. In case of simpler themes drag and drop proves unnecessary like for example a one page design or 4-5 pages theme site one shouldn’t be including drag and drop because that may complicate things for your client.

8.       Many shortcodes

Too many shortcodes which one may not even require are also added into a theme.  They may sometimes end up killing the css part of a particular page.