Real estate agents always ask me what WordPress theme I recommend.

But choosing the right theme is a lot more than just picking something that looks nice. Choosing the right theme for your business blog is going to set the tone for your business online moving forward.

That said, here’s a few critical questions to ask yourself when choosing a WordPress theme…

Question #1: What are your primary goals and objectives?

Before you begin your search for the right WordPress theme, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions:

• What type of content will you be creating? (Video, written, photos).
• How do you want your content to be organized? And how can you best organize that content so it’s easy to access? Easy for site visitors to take action on what you want them to do?

Answering these questions up front will give you a better idea of what to look for when searching for the right WordPress theme. You can narrow down your search and weed out the themes that simply will not work for the type of site that you’re trying to create.

So let’s say you don’t like to write, but you love creating video content. You’re going to want a theme that makes it easy to upload and organize video content like the Production Child theme from Nick the Geek.

Or maybe you run a luxury staging company, so you want something elegant that really allows you to upload high quality photos from some of your recent stagings. The Decor Child Theme from StudioPress might be just what you need.

Question #2: Will you be updating your blog often or not very much?

The great thing about WordPress is that you can design it to look and function any way you’d like. So let’s say you want to create a blog that functions as a local newspaper for things to do in your community. You can design your blog so it looks like a local newspaper. Real estate blogger Martin Millner did just that-check out: buckscountypatoday.com.

On the other hand, if you’re not blogging often, you probably don’t want to have your blog displayed prominently on the homepage. The worst thing you can do is have an out-of-date real estate blog displayed front and center to new site visitors. So instead, you create a site with a static homepage that highlights your community landing pages showcasing your latest listings. Here’s a great example of a real estate site sporting a static homepage design from Ha Media Group.

Once you’ve decided whether you’ll be publishing often or not very much, you can select a theme that has either a “magazine feel” because you’ll be publishing content often, or you can pick a theme whose features have a bit more of static homepage design. There’s plenty of both.

Question #3: Is this theme mobile responsive?

Google says:

…a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.

When a site visitor clicks through to your website from search results then quickly quicks away because of a poorly optimized mobile website, it tells Google that your site doesn’t have the content they were looking for. So needless to say, mobile matters.

With a mobile-responsive design, there’s no need to use a plugin to make your site mobile and no need to create a whole separate web app to render your site on mobile. Now, you simply have one website that works across all mobile devices.

You’re ready to pick a theme!

Once you’ve answered these 3 critical questions, you’re ready to pick a WordPress theme!