WooCommerce Themes and a question about bloat

[Rado]

What are some decent WordPress themes you use? I'm in the process of building my first E-Com store and I'm looking at the following three (it won't let me post links to them):

BuSo Lightning - Of course
Storefront - The official WooCommerce theme
Shophistic Lite - Another clean looking theme I like

Also, is there a disadvantage to installing a bunch of themes and then uninstalling the ones I dislike? Could that leave anything behind in my database or elsewhere that might slow me down?

 

[Jason Abbot]

Are you set on using woocommerce for the e-com integration? I would assume so, but just want to clarify.

Personally, I absolutely love themes made on the genesis framework, so I recommend them 9 times out of 10.

You can find several ecommerce ready themes on their website (studiopress .com/themes, filter for eCommerce). I've used several of them and very rarely am dissatisfied.

Also I wouldn't entirely ignore themes which may not be INTENDED for ecom/woocommerce, but can still work well. It all really comes down to how much work you're willing to put into customization. But even right out of the box, there's a ton of themes which work pretty decently when woocommerce is enabled on them. If you want to save some money, you may want to try some free themes first and see how they look!

 

[James Fraggle]

Personally I have used the store front theme. The reason for this is its one of the most popular and its the official woocommerce theme. I find that, although you need some extra plugins, you get a lot of power to customise things without having to dive into the code.

If you're worried about your instance being messed up I'd advise migrating over to a new site or using "staging" for testing, it allows you to create a complete clone of your site so that you can mess around without breaking the live site, you can then push the site to live or destroy that particular staging copy. Some hosts allow staging instances so it could depend on your host - if you have cPanel just try searching "staging"... If you're on shared hosting then its unlikely you'll be able to do it. I've avoided LOADS of disasters with the proper use of a development environment so I'd strongly consider moving to a host that allows it if your host doesn't.

 

[Dave-London]

Hi Rado,
I had been using WP for about 8 years, until I moved to my own CMS. I always installed several themes and just selected the one I wanted after seeing how my pages looked. Sometimes I would change the theme after a few months. I never uninstalled any themes and I never had any problems with having several themes loaded.
Hope that helps.