Free WordPress themes are, of course, free and you don’t need to pay money to use it. There are literally thousand upon thousands of free WP themes that you can find being offered for free download online. In fact, there are more than two thousand themes at wordpress.org’s Free WordPress Themes directory.
However, using free themes especially for your business entails much more disadvantages than the benefit of not having to pay for it.
1. Free WordPress themes can be risky.
Most WordPress themes that are offered for free download at various sites entails a lot of risk because you never know what you are getting. Some of these themes that you can download for free contain malware or viruses that can ruin your whole site.
As for themes you download from WordPress.org’s theme directory, most are safe to use but they may not be up to date, and they are often used by many different people. This can hurt your business branding.
2. Free Themes Can Be Incompatible With Plugins
Free WordPress themes are prone to have coding issues that cause some plugins to malfunction. On the other hand, this could be an indication that the plugin does not work properly. Be very careful, though, because in some cases it can cause bigger problems. Compatibility issues can bring down your entire website, which can be a total disaster if you have already published a lot of posts.
3. Poor Quality Support With Free Themes
Most often, when you use a theme for free, you can’t always count for support especially if you have any problems or questions. While there are some authors of free themes who do the best they can with support, it’s not even reasonable to expect them to be motivated to provide top quality support for a free product.
So when it comes to theme support, it’s much safer to buy from reputable theme developer who guarantees you support. This combined with regular updates, helps you prevent any problems that may arise in the future.
More Disadvantage of Using Free Themes
- free themes are often used by many people so your site may look the same as the other Joe next door and the ten more Joe’s in the neighborhood
- free themes often come with a hidden cost (i.e. link back or free advertisement to the theme author’s site or worse some other grey site)
- free WordPress themes offer you little or no flexibility at all
- most of the free WordPress themes will either be too plain or too colorful leaving you in a quagmire
- free theme often require you to maintain a link back (often at the bottom page) to the author’s site
- free WordPress themes tend to have bugs and errors that no one was keen enough to correct
- in some cases there are hidden advertisements embedded within the theme
Please read the post on “Premium WordPress Themes” to learn more about premium themes that known be trusted by many WordPress users.