Free vs Premium Theme: What will you prefer for your WordPress Site?
2Undoubtedly, WordPress is one of the most convincing Content Management System in the web world. It offers thousands of striking themes to make visually-tempting websites for website owners. Not only does WordPress have the wide range of free themes to its merit, but, is also offers multiple premium themes. So, we can say it gives you the flexibility to choose the desired theme that fit your site design.
However, many WordPress owners find themselves in the muddled situation when they are making the selection between the free themes and premium themes. Usually, newbie WordPress user prefer free theme with an objective to save their money. But, most of the large businesses use premium themes because they offer additional features and functions as compared to the free ones.
If you are also a WordPress user and finding yourself in the same situation, then you must read this blog. In this blog post, we will thoroughly compare the free & premium themes with their advantages and disadvantages. Of course, every WordPress owner wants an ideal theme for their site, but to find that one is not as easy as we think.
So, with the help of this comparison, we will try to help our readers or WordPress owners to quickly make the decision while choosing a perfect WP theme (free or premium) for their site.
Let us start with the advantages and disadvantages of Free WordPress themes:
Before making your decision, you need to know about the pros and cons of Free WordPress theme. And here, this blog post will explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of free WP themes.
Advantages of Free WP Themes
1. They are Free of Cost
Most of the WordPress owner opt for free WP themes because they are free. This means that you just need to download the most suitable theme and install it in your website and use it.
2. Free themes are much more compatible with other plugins as compared to premium themes:
As free WordPress themes are more common and the number of plugins that they support is also huge. And, in case, your plugin doesn’t work with the desired theme, you can report the issue to the official repository.
3. Easy to use
One can easily download and install the free WordPress theme to their website. You just need to install it from your WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Themes.
4. They are simple and linear
If you are a novice WordPress owner and don’t know much about the technical coding, you can opt for a free WordPress theme. It allows you to easily customize the design of a website, without any technical assistance. It means you can make small modifications into your website by using free WP theme.
Disadvantages of Free WordPress Theme:
1. Lack of Support
Free WordPress theme doesn’t come with any personalized support. Obviously, all themes have bugs that need to be fixed as quickly as possible in order to make the life of a WordPress user easy. In case, you trapped into an adverse situation, you will have to settle for general support through WordPress.org.
2. Free themes don’t provide warranty or assurance
One of the major disadvantages of Free WordPress theme is that they don’t come with any kind of assurance or warranty of working.
3. They don’t update on a regular basis
It is very important for a WordPress user to update his/her website, plugins and themes on the regular basis. But the update frequency of free WordPress theme is not as good as that of Premium WordPress themes. And this could make your site open to the security vulnerabilities.
4. They offer less features
Most of the free WordPress themes don’t offer a large number of features and functions. While on the other hand, premium themes come with the extra features and functions to make your site more compelling and professional. Therefore, many people opt for a premium theme, instead of free one because it offers options to let you upload a logo or change the color of font kind of features on the blog or site.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Premium WordPress Theme
Premium WP theme offers a ton of advanced functionality to the user. On can easily find a large number of premium themes in the markets. But, before choosing the best one, you can overview the advantages and disadvantages of a premium WordPress theme.
Advantages of Premium WordPress themes
1. They come with Support
Almost all paid themes come with some type of support such as a forum, phone, email, etc. It is because the developers have created premium themes as a source of livelihood, and thus they tend to offer the first-rate support to all their clients and customers.
2. Regular Updates
If you are using a premium theme, then it is the responsibility of the framework company to regularly release the update of your theme. So, it will be better for you to opt for paid theme as you can enjoy the latest version of theme that can boost the design of your website.
3. It offers advanced functionality
The biggest advantage of paid theme is that it offers a wide range of additional features and functions that allows the user to customize the design of a website with ease. Usually, premium theme developer offers the latest features and web integration to their clients.
4. Gives more priority to Security
WordPress theme shops or authors spend a lot of money in providing the high-security measures to their customers. So, if you have a paid theme, then you can protect your site from hackers or spammers.
Disadvantages of Premium WordPress Theme
1. Paid theme is quite expensive
Sometimes the price of your favorite theme can be quite high, but you are unable to buy that particular theme. In fact, most of the small businesses or freelance bloggers cannot afford the costly theme for their site or blog. In that case, they use free WordPress theme because they are completely free.
2. They don’t have an official review process
Premium themes don’t offer an official review process, which means the theme developers or shops can ignore the WordPress development best practices in several areas. Sometimes, it can cause minor issues, but sometimes it can be serious ones.
3. Hard to Configure
The paid theme developers develop themes that are quite complicated in nature. A novice WordPress user, with little technical knowledge, will find difficulties in modifying the premium themes. In such a case, they opt for a free WordPress theme.
4. Extremely efficient
In the race to develop most feature rich themes, many developers could insert numerous features and functions that you will never use and this could make your site run slow on the web browsers. So, it will be better for you to opt for a theme that can offer you the desired functions and features that can fit your business needs and standards.
Tips for choosing a Free WP Theme
If you have decided to use a free WordPress theme for your site, then you need to follow some tips while choosing the most suitable Free WP themes.
- Use free WordPress theme from a reliable and leading source. In fact, it will be better to use a highly rated theme from the official WP repository.
- While searching free themes on the repository, you need to be careful that the theme’s author is active and release updates on the regular basis.
- Look for support while browsing the free WP themes because some shops and authors do offer support.
- Always ensure that your new free theme is compatible with all popular browsers. It is always good to pick a theme that works well with different browsers as it will help use to generate leads by driving more traffic to the site.
Tips for Choosing Premium WordPress Theme
If you want to buy a premium WordPress theme, then you are probably choosing a safer option. But, still it doesn’t mean that it won’t cause an issue. In order to utilize the advantages of premium WP theme, you need to consider the following tips:
- Pick a Premium theme that meets the needs of your business and generate enough revenues through your purchase.
- Choose the most trusted and reputable theme developer if you want to buy a premium theme for your website. You can find many developers who don’t care about the quality of the themes; they only care about the sales. So, it becomes essential for you to deliberately choose your theme author. You can read reviews and choose someone that is having a good track record.
- Check their support offerings to ensure that they will meet your standards and business needs. You need to find someone who can offer you the high-end customer support.
- Don’t fall for the features that don’t port to other themes. Always pick a theme that can offer a great portability.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we compared the advantages and disadvantages of free themes and premium themes. Now, you will be able to decide which type of theme you will opt for.
We are using php, but for wordpress site its very informative solution. Thanks.
I always prefer premium themes for my clients but thanks sharing some advantages of free themes.