Working with WordPress opens up a global market of themes, with one-click you can instantly transform your website with a new look. Here’s my Theme Buyers Guide.

Before we start, let’s talk figures. There are over 10,000 themes available to you, approximately 3,000 are offered “FREE“. Many of these “FREE” themes give you a basic setup then charge you to upgrade to “premium features”.

I would personally avoid using “FREE” themes, many of them only give you a certain amount for free and offer “premium features” as an upgrade, let’s face it, these guys know you need those “premium features” and it often ends up costing more than a premium theme.

You should also consider the compliance and security of free themes.

Now I’m not saying they’re all bad, but in my early days of developing with WordPress I learned an important lesson with a free theme. I installed a popular free theme, it had poorly coded Javascript which led to my hosting being hacked.

The hackers took down every single site on the shared hosting server. This caused untold devastation to my clients and my reputation.

So my advice is to avoid the pitfalls of freeness and get a “premium theme” or custom built theme.

Buying a Theme

How much should you pay for a theme?

As a guide price, you should be paying between $25 – $50 for a well developed and supported theme.

Where can I buy themes from?

I’ve always found Envato Marketplace / Theme Forest the best place to find good quality themes.

Why buy a Premium Theme?

If you’re a have-a-go-hero, the great thing about buying a premium theme is many of them come equipped with “demo content”. This means with one click of a button you can import a complete dummy website configuration including all pages, menus, images and dummy text. All you need to do is change the text and update suitable images specific to your business.

Things you should be aware of.

When buying an off-the-shelf theme, be aware of over bloated code. A lot of themes cram in features you may not necessarily use. This leaves a wasteland of unused code behind.

Why does this matter? Because over-bloated code will slow your website down, this may put off potential customers when visiting your website and search rankings on page speed.

Where do I go?

Many online market places offer premium themes. We’re an affiliate of Theme Forest. They have around 8,500 themes available to purchase online.

Click the banner below to visit Theme Forest

The perfect solution…

In an ideal World you will be purchasing a custom built theme. Designed by a professional and coded by experts (like us 🙂

This way you get a unique look and feel, no other business will look like yours, you’ll get a lightweight coded theme where only the necessary code gets added, making your site lightening fast and you get a real person to set up and configure your site to make sure it’s optimised and secure.