The Impact of Customization Options in Responsive Themes

When it comes to delivering outstanding customer experiences via your WordPress site, few things make a more significant impact than a fully-responsive theme.

That said, ensuring your site looks good and works well across various screen sizes and resolutions isn’t always enough to blow your competition out of the proverbial water when it comes to usability.

Customization options such as the ability to change fonts, navigation menus, and layouts can help website owners better meet the unique needs of their particular audience.

But how do these customization options impact a responsive theme’s ability to do its job properly?

In this guide, we’ll discuss how customization impacts everything from performance to search rankings and more to help you better understand the role it plays in the success of your responsive WordPress theme.

How Does Customization Affect WordPress Performance?

You don’t have to know much about running a successful website to know that top performance is essential.

Pages that take a long time to load quickly annoy visitors, leading to an increase in bounce rates and even a negative impact on your SERP rankings. 

It’s for this reason that theme developers should pay close attention to how their themes impact loading speed.

This is especially true regarding the method through which they offer customization options.

These days, it’s common for developers to rely on increasingly more extensive collections of essential plugins to provide customizations. The more plugins required, the more they will slow down a site’s loading speed.

To produce the best results, theme developers should focus on providing customization options via minimalist, streamlined code to ensure websites deliver optimum user experiences with little-to-no impact on performance.

How Do Customization Options Impact User Engagement?

Once a website is performing at its absolute best, the next step to delivering a best-in-class user experience is to give visitors the freedom to tailor their experience to best suit their individual needs and preferences.

Doing so has been shown to improve levels of customer satisfaction, ultimately resulting in more time spent on the site.

One effective way to do this is to use content and product personalization, such as serving up content based on the user’s location, browsing history, or selected topic preferences.

Plugins like YayExtra can undoubtedly help with this, though again, any theme that can offer personalized user experiences without weighing down a site with extra tools will always have more appeal.

How Do Customization Options in Responsive WordPress Themes Affect SEO?

On its own, a good, responsive WordPress theme can go along with boosting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, especially if it includes all the essential features needed to deliver excellent mobile experiences.

That said, providing website owners with customization options can take things even further. 

Here, we’re looking at an exception to the golden rule that sites should be made for users, not search engines.

Though the intended audience should always be a site owner’s top priority, taking advantage of the ability to provide search engines with useful metadata about their content will have a positive difference on that content’s ranking.

A theme that offers customizable titles, meta descriptions, and custom excerpts will prove an invaluable way to help websites improve their on-page SEO without depending on performance-affecting third-party tools such as Yoast SEO.

Elsewhere, the ability to create custom taxonomies, optimized category and tag pages, and schema markup can also help to ensure that the right pages get to the right audience.

The Potential Pitfalls of WordPress Design Customization Options

There are very few -if any- WordPress users who will buy a theme and run it right out of the box without wanting to make a single change.

Even if it’s only replacing the demo content with their own or making tweaks to the font size and color to improve readability, almost everyone will want to make that theme their own.

After all, that’s the very reason for installing a theme in the first place.

Naturally, the more customization options a theme has, the greater its appeal.

Indeed, whenever we review WordPress themes here on WPLift, we always praise those that give site owners the absolute freedom to customize every last detail of their design.

However, as good as that can be, it also presents a potential problem, which is this:

User Errors and Rookie Mistakes

Simply put, most WordPress users are not expert web designers. 

Thanks to the development of drag-and-drop page-building tools like Elementor and Beaver Builder, we’re seeing more and more people flock over to WordPress thanks to its all-around increasing user-friendliness.

Please make no mistake about it. This is a good thing. 

As far as we’re concerned, the easier it is for more people to launch a website, the greater the depth and scope of ideas and information shared worldwide, and the more new businesses can launch online without needing significant capital.

In other words, accessible, beginner-friendly web design can benefit both society and the economy.

Still, to ground matters back to the more practical concern of responsive theme customization, when newcomers first discover the endless design possibilities presented by their theme, it’s very easy to get carried away in the excitement.

The result can sometimes be that this unlimited free reign causes users to unwittingly create their own problems.

Perhaps they burden their page with an excessive amount of large images or video content that drain server resources and slow down their page load speeds.

Or maybe, in an effort to stand out, they experiment with background and font color choices that make their content hard to read, ultimately detrimental to the end-user experience.

How Theme Creators Can Help New WordPress Users Avoid Mistakes

Both are relatively common rookie mistakes, though ones that theme developers can help their users to avoid.

One way to do this is to follow the lead of the core WordPress software.

When working with the standard Gutenberg block editor to create content, users can change the background and font colors of individual blocks. If this makes the content difficult to read, the editor will flag a warning, suggesting the user may want to think again. 

Going forward, developing a way to provide website owners with such prompts and warnings may be appreciated by novice WordPress users serious about ensuring their customers enjoy the best possible on-page experience.

On a similar note, building in technical SEO features such as lazy-loading lessens (though not necessarily eliminates) the risk that a user’s own visual content choices damage their performance on mobile and other devices.

What Does The Future Hold for Customization in Responsive Themes?

So far, we’ve looked at the four fundamental areas of responsive themes most likely to be affected by adding customization options. 

No matter what happens down the line, we imagine that performance, user personalization, and SEO will always be significant factors in the success of any website. 

Still, as we all know, WordPress -and the web in general- is a constantly evolving ecosystem. As technology evolves, there’s little doubt that we’re going to see WordPress customization and personalization evolve with it. 

Unsurprisingly, this will be based mainly around the emerging advancements in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

As we’ve already discussed, allowing users to opt-in to specific personalization options can increase their enjoyment of a website, ensuring that they stick around (those reducing bounce rates) and increasing the likelihood that they’ll come back time and time again. 

However, as we’re already beginning to see, AI tools can monitor and analyze how visitors interact with a website, noting their behavior, frequent navigation journeys, and general preferences before automatically offering a more bespoke experience based on that data.

The Impact of Customization Options in Responsive Themes: Summing Up

To put everything we’ve discussed into perspective, it’s fair to say that the most significant impact of customization on responsive themes is that it creates a challenge for theme developers in terms of balancing visitor expectations with the need to ensure maximum site performance at all times. 

After all, in much the same way that Amazon’s game-changing approach changed what customers expect from eCommerce stores of all sizes, the extensive investment in delivering outstanding personalization has meant that customers are becoming more and more used to being able to fine-tune their experience wherever they go online.

Yet for independent theme developers, this often means relying on the same third-party tools or extensive coding that can hinder the very user experiences they’re aiming to improve. 

As we discussed earlier, this is likely going to be where AI and machine learning truly start to prove their worth to WordPress creators, making it easier for both developers and site owners alike to keep up with emerging trends and deliver the best possible experience regardless of screen size, device, or user preferences.