PSD to WordPress Conversion: 10 Tips to Ensure Long Lasting Success

With powering over 26% of websites globally, WordPress now dominates the CMS arena. The main reason why most of the people today prefer to choose WordPress over other CMSes is its flexibility and ease of use. The template system in WordPress lets users to change the look, while the plug-in architecture allows them to extend the functionality of their websites/blogs.

Given that the popularity and usage of WordPress, the majority of webmasters are now favoring the conversion of their design files into a well-functioning WordPress theme. In such a situation, where the conversion process seems to be a complex task for WordPress developers, following below tips will ensure the prolonged success for a PSD to WordPress converted site!

Slice the PSD Properly:

The first and foremost step to a successful PSD to WordPress conversion is pixel perfect slicing. No matter which software/application you use for the slicing process, cutting pixel perfect images must be your top priority. As a WordPress professional, you must have a good understanding of what can be created dynamically and what cannot. In fact, slicing should be used for cutting design elements that you’re unable to create dynamically, like images and button. In my opinion, you should use Adobe Photoshop for slicing because it makes the job easier to perform and organize.

Optimize Images:

The next important thing is speed! Are the images that you sliced optimized? Does your PSD to WordPress converted theme load at the speed of light? Remember, the slower a website is, the more it will lose on its visitors. Images that are unnecessarily large in file size can affect the overall speed of your theme. Hence, you need to optimize your sliced images so that the website could load faster as well as rank better in search engine result pages.

Use the Most Recent Version of WordPress:

A good place to start will be choosing the most recent version of WordPress for your conversion project. That’s crucial mainly for two reasons: Security and New Features. With every new version, WordPress introduces a numbers of updates, features and security bug fixes which you need to prepare your WordPress theme for. Moreover, integrating your converted HTML template into the most recent and stable version of the WordPress also helps you to stay tuned what’s new in WordPress.

Write Search Engine Friendly Code:

As a WordPress developer, you must have sufficient knowledge of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress. Where writing clean, error-free, semantic code helps your website rank higher in search engine results, on the other hand, errors in your code prevents search engine from crawling your site properly. Even though WordPress is already a search engine friendly CMS, you still need to optimize your theme for search engines in order to get the best possible results.

Follow WordPress Coding Standards:

Make it a habit to follow WordPress Coding Standards while converting a PSD file to a WordPress theme. They not only help you avoid the most common coding errors but also enhance the readability of code to a great extent. Following WordPress Coding Standards simply means anyone in the future will be able to easily understand and modify theme code, if needed.

Incorporate Responsive Web Design:

Since Responsive Web Design is the future of web, you must incorporate it into your WordPress theme. The rapid climb in the usage of mobile and tablet devices over the past few years has made it mandatory for any website to have responsive design. Even, now Google also considers "mobile-usability" as a crucial ranking factor and recommends Responsive Design as the best practice for mobile search engine optimization.

Make Themes Widget-Ready:

WordPress Widgets are a great way to provide theme users the ability to control design and structure of their sites. Making use of widgets, users can customize their themes in accordance with their specific layout needs. To ensure long lasting success of PSD to WordPress conversion, the theme you’re coding must be 100% widget ready and should let users easily drag and drop their favorite widgets anywhere.

Run W3C Validation:

As a PSD to WordPress professional, you must check whether or not your theme code is valid using W3C Markup Validator. Doing so will not only make your theme more accessible across all kinds of devices and web browsers, but also will improve its usability. Moreover, a W3C validated theme attracts more natural or organic traffic to a WordPress site.

Check Cross-Browser Compatibility:

Test the cross-browser compatibility of your WordPress theme to ensure it will work without any hindrance over the web. Examine your PSD converted theme on latest versions of all major mobile and web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.

Perform Quality Assurance:

After the process of conversion is completed, perform some quality checks to ensure the converted theme adheres perfectly to all the predefined web standards and delivers users an exceptional experience. Fortunately, there are a few WordPress plug-ins, like Theme Check and Theme Test Drive, which proves quite useful in testing the quality of a WordPress theme.

Ajeet is a senior web developer at WordpressIntegration - PSD to WordPress service provider, where he is responsible for writing custom JavaScript code during the conversion process.