With the increasing popularity of WordPress, a great amount of amazing websites have been designed and developed by WordPress theme designers/developers.
Fundamentally, there are two type of themes available in the market – the free WordPress themes against premium WordPress themes.
Whenever I start recommending people to use premium WordPress themes, they often ask me this question, “why use premium WordPress themes when I can use free WordPress themes?”
In fact, there has been much debate over free WordPress themes against premium WordPress themes
Well, all I can say is both are great to work with, depending on what type of website you are intending to create.
In here, I will discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of using free WordPress themes against premium WordPress themes pros and cons
Advantages of free themes:
– It is free! There is totally no financial risk involved in using free themes. If you don’t like theme A, you can just abandon it and try out theme B!
– A large library to select from. Do a simple search on “free themes”, and you will find yourselves overwhelmed with the thousands of choices you get to choose from! With so many to choose from, there will bind to be one which you will like!
Disadvantages of free themes:
Virtually all free themes do not have the option for you to customize your website the way you wanted. You need to be a coding expert to be able to understand the WordPress coding and change the coding yourself.
– No updates at all. Do not expect your free theme to be compatible with the latest WordPress version. You will most likely face compatibility issues.
– Practically no help is available. The biggest problem with free themes is that if you will to face any issues, you will not be able to get any help from the developer.
– Quality varies. Although there are some high quality free themes available in the market, there are also a couple of low quality free themes. Numerous free themes are developed very quickly with no quality control, and therefore, don’t have the features found in numerous premium WordPress themes.
– A couple of free themes make it mandatory for you to keep the developer’s name in the footer. There are some other developers who encrypt the footer and promoting links which you just can’t remove from your website. There have been numerous reports of some developers installing detrimental coding in free themes to spread viruses without you realizing it.
– Furthermore, a great deal of the free themes is designed for personal blogging purposes only. If you are a small online business owner and is looking to create a professional business website, then a premium theme will clearly be a better option for you.
Premium WordPress Themes
Typically, the pricing of premium themes is in the range of $25 – $180, and these are developed by a very skilled team of website developers. More than often, designing premium themes is their full fledged business. Keeping this in mind, no developers will jeopardize their reputation by creating a substandard product, putting their business at risk. Their goal is to establish a pool of happy and loyal customers and they do this by developing great looking premium themes and helping people with any problems they have.
Now, lets take a look at some of the
Advantages of using a premium WordPresstheme:
– Great looking themes. It is without a doubt that premium themes are usually more elegant, stylish and professional compared to free themes, not forgetting that premium WordPress themes are abundant with great features as well.
– Consistent Theme Updates. Virtually all theme designer themes will release frequent updates to most of their themes. Updates will mean that you get to enjoy using the brand new features added to your website without you having to do any extra work. Most importantly, you can rest assured that your theme will always be compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
– Technical help is always available whenever you need it. Encountered some major problems with your newly installed premium themes? Well, not to worry. Top notch premium theme developer team will always be there to help you solve any pressing problems/issues you have with their premium themes. Most premium theme developers are able to respond to any of your enquires within 24 hours!
– Customization is as easy as ABC. As mentioned above, if you want to perform some basic customization (such as change your website font or colours, background images etc ) on your free themes, you will need to try to understand the WordPress coding and then try to edit it (a very tedious chore to go through). With premium themes, you do not need to go through the great length in editing the WordPress coding. In fact, you do not need to know anything about coding at all! Virtually all premium themes come with a custom theme option, allowing you to make any changes with just a simple click.
Disadvantages of premium WordPress themes
– The only complain I had about premium theme is that you have to pay for it. However, considering the flexibility and features you get with premium WordPress themes, I have to say that premium WordPress theme is a worthy investment.
If you are a business owner and is serious about setting up an impressive website to attract more visitors/buyers to your website, keep in mind that the cost of engaging a website designer to develop your website can easily rack up to thousands of dollars. Premium themes on the other hand, only cost a tiny portion of that amount, and still able to deliver outstanding results.
