There are variety of free WordPress themes and Premium themes available online . Selecting the one for your blog could be a very tough decision.
Are you new to blogging? You must be thinking to kick-start your first blog with free theme and later switching on to premium one. Right?
Wait! You’d be wrong and even curse yourself later when you get affected of it’s side-effects. I don’t mean to scare you, but this happens to many bloggers when they choose free themes. The truth is that – Free is not always Good, even if it is WordPress Theme.
Why would the business owners give away something for free? There are some reasons why you’re offered free themes by these theme developers. You’ll better understand the disadvantages of the free themes when you read the below reasons of why the themes are given away for free:
Sad Reasons Why You Should Avoid Free WordPress Themes
Unwanted Encrypted Links in the footer
It is a most hated thing to have unwanted and encrypted links in your footer section. Yes, When you accept the user agreement form of the theme developers, they keep their affiliate urls on your website’s footer section in exchange.
Moreover, if you try to remove these links, you’re breaching the agreement and still if you try to do that, all you’ll get is broken theme. Often, these links can redirect you to malicious sites and you can hit by dangerous virus on your website.
On the other hand, you’ll get a bad impact on the SEO of the site and see a downfall in your ranking due to such encrypted codes. Additionally, Instead of having the unwanted links, why not add some additional features to your site.
Not SEO Optimized
In the free WordPress themes, there are hardly any in-built SEO features. So, in order to make the theme SEO-optimized, it is required to have clean code, responsive layout and design, lesser JS and CSS codes and faster loading speed and time.
On the other hand, all of these SEO features are available in the Premium versions offered by the theme developers. There are various WordPress Theme Development Services available in the market. You can get your customized theme development done with them for getting a clean and powerful blog.
Issues related to Plugin Compatibility
There are many themes that do not support advanced plugins. The themes are rarely updated and most of the plugins support an updated theme.
So, this leads to the poor SEO performance and a bad user experience.
No Customer Support & No Updates
If you face any issues installing the theme, you may not get any customer support from the company. It is only when in future, if the developer updates the theme for solving out bugs and for advance coding, you will not get notified.
You do not get any customer support from the providers as you’re not paying them. The Premium version users can avail the updated versions.
So, your site is always on risk.
Limited Features
Free WordPress Themes have less number of features integrated than the Premium versions. These handy features prove to be beneficial in boosting your website’s performance and usability.
Using websites with basic features, it is tough to beat your online competitors who’re using the advance features with premium themes.
Finally, not all the themes are coded for the same purpose. There are many WordPress developers who’ve published a clean-coded, well-structured themes and later made them into paid version. So, if you’re not expecting the above issues be solved, the free themes will be better option. But, if you’re one who’s looking to have all these advantages in their theme, then you should definitely go for premium themes. Not only functionality and features, your blog will be more feasible with the responsive layouts and the latest updates.
I hope you’ve understood, what would be the side effects of using free themes to your blogs. Do you have anything to discuss, Please share your valuable thoughts.
