How to choose a WordPress theme for a business

The image in a listing is nearly always a home page, and a home page is the easiest part of a website to design. What you are buying is everything behind it.

Click every item in the menu

Open the live preview and work through the navigation one item at a time. Count two things as you go: the links that open a page somebody designed, and the links that go nowhere, repeat the home page or land on a placeholder. The ratio between those two numbers is the most useful figure you will gather all day, and nobody publishes it for you.

Open the pages nobody photographs

• A single blog post, and the blog archive it sits in.
• An archive or category listing for whatever the business sells.
• The contact page, the search results page and the 404 page.
• The same four on a real phone, held in one hand.

Count the forms

A contact form is the thing a demo screenshot implies most often and ships least often. Find the form, look at whether it is styled like the rest of the design, and submit it if the preview allows. Then ask whether the form comes with the theme or with a plugin you are expected to buy separately.

Read the count in the claim

"40 demos" can mean 40 home pages, 40 inner page layouts or 40 complete websites. Ask which, and ask what arrives when you import one: only pages, or menus, forms, header, footer, images and settings as well.

For Canvas, the answer is on the record: a demo is a whole prebuilt website, inner pages included, there are 80 of them across 16 categories, and every plan includes every one. Each catalogue card carries its page count and the content types it brings. 75 of the 80 ship a working form and 19 are complete WooCommerce stores. Every demo also runs as a live website with its inner pages, archives and forms in place, so you can run the test above on us before spending anything.

Browse the 80 Canvas demos

Find the demo for your industry

Licensing is the part of this decision with the least published information and the largest consequences. Seven questions, and the answers belong in public on the vendor's own website, long before you have to email anybody.

• How many websites does one licence cover, and what counts as a website?
• Do staging, development and local copies use a seat?
• Are sites you build for clients allowed on your licence?
• What does the renewal cost, and is the first year discounted into a higher figure later?
• What happens on the day the licence expires: does the site keep rendering, or do parts of it stop?
• Is there a refund window, and does it cover renewals as well as first purchases?
• Is the code GPL, and is any of it obfuscated or set to stop working on a date?

The Canvas answers

• Sites. Starter covers 3 websites, Pro 10 and Agency 100 plus multisite network activation. A site is one WordPress installation on one domain.
• Staging. Staging, development and local copies of a site you have licensed do not use another seat.
• Client work. Sites you build and manage for clients count like any other site. Hand one over and the new owner needs their own licence for updates, demo imports and AI, while the site itself keeps rendering either way.
• Renewal. The same price you paid the first time, once a year. There is no lifetime plan.
• Expiry. Every page keeps rendering, premium blocks included, and nothing is hidden from visitors. Updates, new demo imports, AI and editing of premium blocks pause until you renew, with a 14-day grace period if a check cannot reach our servers.
• Refund. 7 days from a first purchase, no questions asked. Renewals and upgrades are not refundable.
• Code. The theme and the plugin are GPL v2 or later, with nothing obfuscated and nothing set to expire.

Vendors answer that question differently, and our comparisons quote each one from its own website with the date it was read. The Astra comparison records what Astra says stops when a licence lapses, and Canvas against Kadence sets out what Kadence's terms allow after an order expires.

The Canvas licence, clause by clause

Plans, seats and the refund window

Both of these get asserted on sales pages and both can be checked by you, on the vendor's own demo, in about fifteen minutes.

Accessibility, in ten minutes

• Press Tab from the top of the page. A skip link should appear first, and a visible focus ring should then move through the page in an order that matches the layout.
• Open the menu with the keyboard alone, including a submenu, and close it with Escape. Menus that only respond to a mouse hover exclude a real proportion of visitors.
• Zoom the browser to 200 per cent and check that nothing is cut off, overlapped or scrolling sideways.
• Run a free accessibility extension on the home page and then on an inner page. Inner pages usually score worse, which is why they are the ones to test.
• Ask whether accessibility is tiered. If any of it sits behind a higher plan, or stops when a licence lapses, that is worth knowing before you buy.

Speed, measured honestly

• Open the browser's network panel on the demo and look at the total transferred and the number of requests on a page that is mostly text. A text page pulling a slider script and a shop stylesheet tells you how assets are loaded.
• Run a page speed test on the demo URL, then remember what you measured: the vendor's hosting, not yours. Your host, your images, your fonts and your other plugins matter as much as the theme does.
• Ask the mechanical question instead. Does a page load the CSS and JavaScript of every component the product ships, or only of the ones that page actually uses?

Canvas ships header, navigation, main and footer landmarks, a skip link to the content, headings that follow their order and visible focus on everything you reach with Tab. Menus, mega menus, side panels and modals open, move and close from the keyboard, and motion respects a visitor's reduced-motion setting. Accessibility, security and data export are never premium features and stay available on an expired licence. On speed, a page enqueues only the CSS and JavaScript of the blocks it contains, with 35 further optimisations, each with a switch of its own.

The honest caveat belongs here too: no category of product is automatically fast. A carefully built page in a good builder will beat a careless page in a block theme. Measure your own pages once they exist. A screenshot from either side proves nothing.

How Canvas measures performance and accessibility

You are buying a relationship with a maintenance schedule, and all of it is public before you pay.

• Read the changelog before the sales page. The dates tell you whether the product is maintained. A twelve month gap, or no changelog at all, is the finding.
• Open the documentation and check it matches the version being sold: current screenshots, a date on the article, and coverage of the settings, down to the ones no sales page mentions.
• Find where support happens, who answers, and whether it requires an active licence.
• Check the stated requirements, including which WordPress version the product is tested against. A theme untested on the current WordPress is a theme you will be testing.
• Ask how updates arrive: through the WordPress updates screen, or as a manual download you have to remember to fetch.
• Ask what happens to your customisations when an update touches a template you edited.

For Canvas: updates appear on the normal WordPress updates screen once your licence is active, patch releases can install automatically if you turn that on, and if a release changes a template you customised in the Site Editor, Canvas names that template afterwards, so the two are easy to compare. New demos ship every two weeks. The documentation is 382 articles with 313 screenshots generated from the shipped code. Canvas needs WordPress 6.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer, and is tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Read the Canvas changelog

Take this to any product page, ours included. Most of it is free, and none of it requires you to buy first.

1. Open the live demo and click every menu item. Count the pages that are genuinely designed.
2. Open a blog post, an archive, the contact page and the 404 page.
3. Count the forms, and submit one if the preview lets you.
4. Repeat the first three on a phone.
5. Ask what the demo count counts: home pages, layouts or complete websites.
6. Ask what an import brings: pages only, or menus, forms, header, footer, images and settings.
7. Build one page yourself and look at how it is stored, before you have twenty of them.
8. On a staging copy, switch theme and deactivate the layout plugin, then open three pages.
9. Get the site count, the definition of a site and the staging rule in writing.
10. Get the renewal price and the expiry behaviour in writing.
11. Check the refund window and whether it covers renewals.
12. Change a logo, a menu item and a footer column without opening a file.
13. Tab through the demo, zoom to 200 per cent and run an accessibility extension on an inner page.
14. If you sell, walk shop, product, cart and checkout on a phone.
15. Read the changelog dates and check the documentation against the current version.
16. Ask which plugin draws anything the demo shows that a theme cannot do by itself.

Sixteen checks, and most of them cost nothing but an afternoon. If a product survives them, price becomes the last question rather than the first. Several of them can be run on this website today: the 80 Canvas demos are live sites you can click through page by page, the licence terms are written out clause by clause, the changelog carries dates, and a first purchase is refundable for 7 days if the rest of it does not survive contact with your own project.