How to Create a WordPress Responsive Theme-Based Website?

Last updated on November 24th, 2023 at 05:15 pm

A responsive website design is no longer a choice but a grave necessity for businesses when building websites online. A responsive web design ensures that your website loads properly with the right elements on all device types—including mobile and tablets.

A DesignAdvisor report suggests that 70% of users will likely return to a mobile-optimized and responsive website. At the same time, 73.1% of customers will more likely abandon a website with a non-responsive web design.

Hence, optimizing your website for mobile is crucial to meet the expectations of the majority of your target customers. Of course, you can opt for expert website design services from creative agencies and website design companies to build a responsive site—but it’s not a necessity.

Luckily, you can easily create a responsive website using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS)—thanks to the plethora of available, responsive WordPress themes. However, choosing the right theme is important to ensure high website uptime.

In this article, we’ll see how you can create a WordPress responsive theme-based website to ensure high user satisfaction and deliver a quality experience. But first, let’s start by understanding the benefits of a responsive website for your brand.

Why Does Your WordPress Website Needs To Be Responsive?

A responsive website helps create a strong first impression on users. This is why many SEO and website design companies prioritize designing a responsive website.

Here are the reasons why your WordPress website needs to be responsive:

• Promotes better user experience as more users surf the internet using mobile devices.

• Boosts SEO performance as mobile-friendliness is Google’s top ranking factor.

• Helps attract target users and improve conversion rates.

• Reduces bounce rates.

How To Choose The Right Responsive WordPress Theme?

As mentioned earlier, the first step to creating a responsive WordPress website is selecting the right responsive WordPress theme.

Here are a few critical things to consider when choosing a WordPress theme:

• Choose an industry-specific WordPress theme offering features that best align with your business goals. For instance, if you own an eCommerce website, you must choose a theme that efficiently integrates eCommerce plugins and neatly displays your products.

• At the same time, if you’re a web developer or designer—choosing a theme that helps showcase your services, testimonials, and portfolio is important.

• Choose an appealing theme so you don’t have to spend time modifying your website’s layout from scratch.

• Choose a highly customizable theme with the flexibility to customize colors, fonts, logos, layouts, and more. In addition, you can pick a theme that seamlessly integrates with a page builder—making it easier to perform the required customizations.

Once you’ve chosen the right theme, there are other critical things you need to create a responsive website.

What Do You Need To Create A Responsive WordPress Website?

You need a domain name, a web hosting plan, and the preferred WordPress theme to create your responsive website.

It’s also recommended to keep your site’s content ready—so it’s easier to upload them directly when creating your website.

1. Domain name

A domain name will allow your site visitors and customers to find your brand website on the web. Hence, opting for a domain name that represents your business is essential.

You can either pick the domain name as your website’s name or choose a different name if you’re creating a personal blog or portfolio. Using the .com extension with your domain name is recommended, as it’s widely popular and doesn’t tie your website to a specific location.

2. Web hosting plan

Several web hosting plans are available—from Shared Hosting and Cloud Hosting to Managed WordPress Hosting.

Choosing a hosting plan that offers the right resources, like bandwidth, RAM, disk space, and CPU cores, is crucial to choose a hosting plan that efficiently handles your site’s traffic. When choosing a website hosting service, you must also check the uptime guarantee, performance, speed, and security.

3. Images and content

Ensure you keep your website’s content ready—including images and copy. These include the web page copy, blogs, About us, Work with us, and services pages.

Preparing content in advance lets you copy and paste content with no hassle in the demo content sections of the modern WordPress themes.

Creating Your Responsive WordPress Theme-Based Website

Once you finally pick a suitable theme, choose a domain name and web hosting plan, and have the ready content—it’s time to start creating your website.

Here are the steps to create your WordPress theme-based responsive website:

Step 1: Install WordPress

The first step is installing WordPress. Typically, the web hosting provider sends an email consisting of your dashboard’s or control panel’s link with your username and password.

Make sure you log in using these credentials. Once you do, click on the ‘WordPress Install icon or button and follow the installation instructions. Next, you must fill out the prompted details, including your site’s name, description, email address, username, and password.

Once you fill in these details, click on the Install button—and WordPress will be installed.

You can view your dashboard using www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin (replacing your site name with the domain name) and log in with your credentials.

Step 2: Install A WordPress Theme

Go to Appearance > Themes > Add new in your WordPress dashboard and click on Upload Theme.

Upload the downloaded theme’s zip files and folder and click on the Activate button once the installation is completed.

Step 3: Install The Necessary Plugins

Once you activate the theme on your WordPress Dashboard, you’ll see a notification that indicates you need to install certain plugins to use all the theme’s functionalities.

Click on the ‘Begin Installing Plugins’ link to go directly to the installation screen and install the necessary plugins you require.

Once you’re on the screen, select all the plugins you see and click on the ‘Install’ button.

Then, go to Plugins > All Plugins > Inactive. Select all the inactive plugins and click on the Activate option from the menu’s drop-down.

Some of the responsive mobile WordPress plugins are JetPack, WordPress Mobile Pack, and WPtouch.

Installing these plugins ensures you can exploit the themes for every functionality, so your website is responsive and customized for mobile devices.

Step 4: Customize Your Website

The last yet most important part of setting up your responsive WordPress website is replacing the theme’s demo content with your site’s content, importing images, and customizing your site’s visual appearance.

Go to the Import tab on your theme’s WordPress dashboard. Select the preferable demo version that best matches your brand’s style and tick on the contents you wish to add, such as widgets, set home page, slider data, and more.

Once you select the content, click on the Install button. Once the import is successful, your website is ready for customization.

To replace the demo content, go to Pages on your site’s WordPress dashboard and click on the Edit button of the web page you wish to customize. Depending on your theme’s page builder, you can customize your page’s layout, modify CSS, add additional modules, and more.

Moreover, you can also edit elements like buttons, tables, images, icons, videos, or texts or add additional elements as required.

At the same time, you can customize your website’s visual appearance by adding a background image, uploading your brand’s logo, controlling mobile styles, customizing the web page’s fonts, modifying header and footer information, and more. You can also track your site’s scripts, like Google Analytics code, to optimize your website’s performance and minimize scripts and stylesheets.

Conclusion

Creating a mobile-optimized and responsive website may seem daunting, but it’s all about choosing the right WordPress theme to make the process as seamless as possible—especially if you’re a beginner.

At the same time, choosing the right web hosting plan, installing the necessary plugins, and customizing your website is essential to make it highly responsive for your users.

So, follow the steps mentioned in this article or hire a credible web design Companies that can help build a responsive WordPress website that attracts customers and ranks higher on the search engines.