Most people buy tableware twice. Once as a boxed set at the beginning, and once properly a few years later, after the set has been reduced by attrition to five plates and three bowls. This is a note on how to do it once.
Start with the count, not the shapes
Work out how many people eat at your table, add two, and buy that many of the shapes you use daily. The two is not generosity. It is the buffer that stops you running a dishwasher in the middle of a meal, and it absorbs the first two breakages without leaving you short.
For most households that means six or eight dinner plates and six or eight bowls, and considerably fewer of everything else.
Buy the shapes in this order
Bowls first. A deep bowl serves soup, pasta, rice, cereal and a salad, and it gets broken most often because it gets used most often.
Then dinner plates. Then mugs, which are personal enough that buying two at a time and building up over years is perfectly sensible. Then one large serving piece, which is the thing that turns a stack of plates into a table. Side plates and dessert plates last, if at all: most people find that one plate size and one bowl cover nine meals in ten.
The measurements worth checking
Plate diameter against your dishwasher. Anything over about 28 cm starts to fight with a standard rack. Measure the rack before you order.
Stack height against your cupboard. Six plates at 2.4 cm each, plus pads between them, is about 16 cm. A shelf at 20 cm is comfortable. A shelf at 17 cm is not.
Mug height against the shelf above it. You need the height of the mug plus enough clearance to lift it out without tipping it into its neighbour.
Bowl capacity in millilitres. “Large” means nothing. 600 ml to the rim is a soup bowl. 350 ml is a cereal bowl and it will disappoint you at dinner.
Weight per piece. Six plates at 720 g is 4.3 kg lifted down from a high shelf in one hand. That is fine for most people and genuinely not fine for everyone, and almost nobody publishes the number.
Mix on purpose
A table does not have to match. What it needs is one thing held constant so that everything else can vary, and the plates are usually the right thing to hold. Keep the plates consistent and let bowls, glasses and linen differ, and the table reads as considered. Vary all four and it reads as a cupboard.
Buy things you can replace
The single most useful question to ask before buying anything for a table: if I break one of these in three years, can I buy one? A range sold as open stock answers yes. A boxed set answers no, and that is exactly how a set of eight becomes a set of five.