Your WordPress website or blog is as good as the theme or template you are using.  WordPress websites that rank high on  Google search and other search engines like (Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Aol, Duckgo e.t.c) have themes of high standard. Website visitors will also always be attracted to websites that have good webdesign and navigation.

List of Characteristics of good WordPress theme

Before purchasing your WordPress theme/template consider some of the best characteristics or features that it must have that are listed below;

1. SEO Friendly Theme-80% of WordPress themes are not  SEO friendly. This means that you will have to do alot to ensure that your blog posts rank high on search engines. If you intend to buy a premium wordpress theme ensure that template is SEO friendly. Most of them do indicate that.
2. Mobile Friendly Theme-Your WordPress theme should be responsive. The theme should be able to  fit in to any mobile device. Old themes were designed for desktop use only and therefore look bad on mobile devices. Others do not load content at all.  Websites that are not mobile friendly a number of visitors and have poor search rankings.  You can use PageSpeed Insights to see if theme is responsive or mobile friendly.
3. AMP compatible theme-Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a service that was recently launched by Google that enables  web pages to load instantly. Confirm with your theme and ensure that its HTML markup is upto standard for AMP to work on your blog post without errors
4. Breadcrumbs- Breadcrumb is a trail on a page or post that indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy. On top of this post title you will see a breadcrumb. Theme with breadcrumbs improve site navigation for visitors.

   

5. Light Weight Themes-Light weight themes  increase the speed at which your pages load thus increasing user engagement. Studies have shown that web visitors prefer blogs that load faster than heavy websites that take lots of time to load. You can  use PageSpeed Insights to see if theme  you want to purchase is loading faster on both mobile and desktop (It should have a percentage of 80% and above).
6. Customization-your website theme should be easy to Customize. The more Customization options or features a theme has the better.
7. Theme Layout-look at the homepage, post, navigation menu and sidebar and ensure that the theme proves what you want.

Above are just but some of the few characteristics to consider before buying a WordPress theme. You can also add any other important theme features we have left out in the comment section below