Top 9 Reasons Why Your WordPress Theme is Unsuitable

26 April 2021Ashley Maxwell8 min read

The aim of this article is to help people see the difference between good-quality WordPress themes that are free and free WordPress themes that are nothing more than adverts for their paid subscription services. Since free WordPress themes are not the only wrongdoer in the world of WordPress templates, this article also covers paid WordPress themes. Take a look at some of these issues, and consider if your new WordPress theme is unsuitable.

1 – Paid WordPress Themes That Are Nothing More Than Full Themes Unlocked

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert syndicated cartoon strip once told a story about how he worked as an engineer. His team created a piece of software that was wildly faster than their other products because it was so efficient. Their management team told them to hamper the speed of the program with needless code, so that they could sell an upgrade for the program that made it run faster.

How does this story relate to if your WordPress theme is unsuitable? It relates because people are still pulling that stunt today. Developers are creating fully functional themes, and instead of selling them as they are, they are crippling them and giving them away as free templates with the option of upgrading for money. It is like car hire companies letting you use their cars for free, but they have no wheels, and telling you they can upgrade the car with wheels so long as you pay them.

2 – Free WordPress Themes That Are Simply Adverts For Their Paid Services

Some people do not mind this sort of thing, but there is a level of fairness and decency that goes along with it. For example, if the WordPress theme allows you to create a very good and very functional website with your free theme, and then asks that you may improve it with additional features, properties, and convenience tools, then that is a good marketing tactic. They are giving you something that is good and that works, and are asking you to pay to make it excellent.

Then there are the WordPress developers who give away free templates that are slow and that lack essential features like allowing you to size images above 300 pixels, or only allowing you to use H1 tags. They offer this great-looking website, but it cannot be customised, and even the CSS function is turned off. They then ask you to pay with the promise that all the features you would expect will be returned, and you can actually customise your theme.

3 – Paid WordPress Themes That Tie You Into a Subscription

Offering paid WordPress template and/or theme subscriptions is a fair business model in some cases. For example, if you are offering WordPress themes where regular security updates are required, then funding the update team seems fair. However, there are many WordPress theme creators who tie you into a subscription in a devious manner.

One of the old ways this would occur is to offer you a free trial, and then once the trial expires, you are charged for your continued subscription. Though, most WordPress theme stores have banned this sort of practice, there are many WordPress themes that appear to be free, and then you discover, ten days later that your theme was part of a free trial. You have put hours of work into customizing your theme for your website, and now you feel you have to pay otherwise you will have to re-customise the next theme. Plus, there are themes that claim to be free, but then you have to pay a subscription to activate the theme and turn on all its features.

4 – Free WordPress Themes That Are Faster If You Pay For Them

This ties into the story mentioned in point number one about the ex-engineer Scott Adams creating a piece of fast software that his bosses told him to slow down, so they could sell speed-increasing upgrades. Yet, what is so bothersome about free templates that are artificially slowed down is that it is so unnecessary.

Consider it from a business perspective. On the one hand, you can tell your potential customers that the premium theme is X-amount faster than the free WordPress theme, but where is the long-term benefit in that? Wouldn’t it be better if the free template were fast? If it were fast, the user would be more likely to gain traction on the search engine results, meaning more customers or affiliate money, which means a bigger budget. A bigger budget means the theme user can afford the premium upgrade, and may in fact need the premium upgrade to handle the new influx of web traffic. It seems silly to hobble a free website WordPress template just so a developer can sell the premium version with go-faster stripes. Developers are kicking their customers in the teeth, and then asking their users to pay, so the developers will stop kicking them in the teeth.

5 – Paid WordPress Themes With No User Support

When a free WordPress theme has no user support, you can sort of understand it. For example, when a company stops using a great theme, they figure it is a shame to waste it, so they release it for free and to maybe gain a little positive PR online. You can understand that they do not have developers working on it night and day to keep it updated, and you can often tell when they have abandoned it because the WordPress store actually tells you when the theme was last updated.

WordPress Themes With No User Support

However, when you pay for a theme, you expect at least some sort of user support and some sort of updates to keep things working correctly as WordPress itself updates. Nobody expects your £35 payment for a theme to fund its development and updating forever, but you expect to get a few years out of it before the developer tucks tail and runs. Yet, when you have paid, and you get no user support, no tech support, and the team stops updating it, you are perhaps right to be a little angry about it.

6 – Free WordPress Themes That Insert Their Own Adverts

This sort of practice is dying off these days. Nowadays, when you get a free WordPress theme where the developers insert their own adverts, you often get free hosting and a free domain name too. However, there are still WordPress themes that sneak adverts in here or there.

A more commonly accepted method is where you get a free WordPress template, but the creator puts a link to their website at the bottom of your website. This is commonly accepted because some people think it is fair that they give away their theme in return for a link, but it isn’t as fair as you think. You are the one putting the work into the website, you are the one ranking it up the search engine results. Sure, a link from your website may be worthless at first, but after ranking up your website through the search engine results, a link from your website would have cost the theme creator far more than you would have ever paid for the theme itself.

Theme creators are not being charitable when they give away their free WordPress themes; they are working a business model that usually involves getting you to buy a premium theme, and almost always involves using your online credibility to promote whatever website they are linking to. So, the next time somebody calls you unfair for removing the “Theme created by” link at the bottom of your free WordPress template, remember that the theme developer wasn’t being charitable when she/he/it gave away the theme, nor does the developer have your best interests at heart.

7 – Paid WordPress Themes That Are Overly Bloated to Fake the Appearance of Value

Here is the marketing tactic, you front-load your theme with all your best stuff, and you give it away for free. People are bowled over by how great your free version is, so they rush to buy your premium theme. The trouble is that you have already given away your best stuff with the free theme, so you have to bloat out your premium theme with needless tools, needless decoration, and plenty of features that only a tiny minority of users would need.

You may be thinking that this is a fair marketing strategy because they are giving the best stuff away for free, but pity the poor people who bought the premium theme thinking it was something special, only to realise it is a bloated mess. The developers would have earned far more respect and a better online reputation if they had simply charged a fair price for their theme and had abandoned the whole “Free WordPress theme” idea completely. Sure, their initial sales would have been slow, but if their theme is as good as it is, then eventually they would have made their money and nobody would have felt cheated.

8 – Free WordPress Themes That Spam Your Admin Area with Notifications

There are developers that beg for reviews, they are mentioned in point number nine on this list, but some developers are not happy with just begging for reviews. Some will nag you to download and install certain plugins. Some will hoist pointless updates on you every week, so you have to look at their notification screens.

Possibly even worse are the themes that claim to have your best interests at heart, and start notifying you of things they think are errors, but in fact, you did on purpose, like telling you to fix your image file sizes or to add search engine friendly tags to your news posts.

9 – WordPress Template Companies That Beg For Reviews

There are two reasons why this is annoying. The first is because it manipulates the review systems in a big way. By begging for reviews, they are going to get a few quick “Yeah it’s okay” reviews off right away just so people can get rid of the notification. The second reason it is annoying is that it is often your first ticket to being treated like a whining infant. Once you have left your review, then suddenly your support tickets go from being number nine in the queue to being number 309.

Suddenly, your complaints about interactions with plugins are ignored, and soon you discover that if you wanted H3 tags, then you should have paid for the plugins. But, probably, above all, developers begging for reviews is annoying because it shows a lack of confidence in their own product. When you buy a luxury car, you don’t have them contacting you begging for Google reviews because they have confidence in their product. Get a life WordPress developers, if you want good reviews, then make good products.

Final Thoughts – That Little Warning Sign

I wrote an article called “How to Figure Out Which WordPress Plugins to Avoid” and it has this image in it, and as you can see, the plugin has 10,000 installs, but only 12 reviews:

Terrible Plugin Ratings ReviewsIt struck me again when I came across this little review about a WordPress theme:

30000 downloads and only 3 reviews

I don’t mean to tell you things you already know, but as a gentle reminder, WordPress install numbers and positive WordPress reviews can be faked. As is evident by the numbers themselves, developers are paying click farms to plump up their installation numbers and positive reviews. This is nothing new. It has been happening on Google My Business and Amazon for years, but it is something you should be aware of. Do not be bowled over by numbers and positive reviews, always take a peek at the negative reviews to see if the same complaints are being repeated over and over. If so, then the negative reviewers are probably on to something, and you should probably pick another WordPress theme.

Of all the red flags that appear on negative WordPress reviews, consider the criticism “Can’t get a refund” to be one of the worst. When a company doesn’t allow you to get a refund, especially for something like a WordPress theme that is unsuitable, then something is severely rotten within the company.