How good a theme is comes down to mainly two things: functionality and speed. Some themes have one or the other, others have both, but most have neither.Odds are, if you know what you want your theme to look like, you won’t be able to get it with a free theme. Even most premium or paid themes don’t offer a bunch versatility, which means you’re going to end up with some frustrations. Not only can it be hard to make the theme look the way you want, but it can also be super difficult to get it to work with certain plugins. So functionality is huge. You want a theme that’s super versatile.The next is speed. A lot of themes are just loaded up with a bunch of garbage that no one wants to use. If there is a feature that it has that you don’t want, odds are that theme is going to slow down your website. Some themes that allow you to customize things use what’s called short-code, which basically means instead of changing the actual functionality of the theme, it has a code that performs an overwrite. This will slow down your website a HUGE amount. Avoid shortcake if at all possible.So which theme is right for you? Now the question is what do you want to use it for? If all you care about is getting your content out there and you’re just blogging, there are two options I recommend. 1. Clean Bloggist. This is free and you can search it in the Wordpress Platform. It’s super simple, wicked fast, and it is the best theme I know if all you want to do is create content. 2. My second recommendation is Acabado. This is basically a glorified version of clean bloggist. It’s geared towards making a blog monetizable. This theme is premium and is $50/year or $99/century (weird, I know).If you need something that is more customizable, I would recommend getting a bare bones theme (premium) and adding a visual builder plugin. I use GeneratePress premium for my theme and BeaverBuilder Standard as my plugin. Both of these are annual renewal premium products. But they’re worth it. They make things fast and easy to edit.So there’s a lot out there. But make it easy on yourself and don’t spend hours and hours looking for the perfect theme only to realize it’s not all it’s cut out to be. I spent hundreds of dollars on themes and plugins before realizing I can do just about anything I want if I get GeneratePress and BeaverBuilder. You probably won’t ever need another theme again.