So if you have ever considered a WordPress website, you have probably seen the millions of premade WordPress themes out there. A premade WordPress theme can be purchased for about $60-$100 which means you can save thousands on your website, right? Well, not exactly because these short-term savings can hugely reduce sales long run as premade themes are riddled with issues, which we have outlined below. You get what you pay for so buyer beware…
Very Generic Looking
With over one billion websites on the World Wide Web, you really need to be unique to stand out against your competition and cater to your target market to maximize lead generation. Premade themes are made to be generic because they need a huge volume of sales to recoup the costs of web design, development, and support. They are generic because they need to sell to anyone and everyone. A vanilla website translates into a poor user experience which means a much lower conversion rate.
Slow Loading Times
Most of these premade themes are stuffed with endless features of functionality because they need a huge volume of sales to sustain their cheap prices. This ultimately makes all premade themes load considerably slower than custom-made websites because they are bloated with lots of code that you do not need. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load and a one second delay in page response can result in a shocking 7% reduction in conversions. Even a slightly slower website can cost you thousands in the long run.
Limited and Difficult to Customize
Although all premade themes boast tons of features and endless page layouts, you really need to stay within the boundaries of the premade theme everything to work. It is very difficult to build page templates and functionality outside of your chosen premade theme. All premade themes need to be customized for your content but this customization process can take much longer than expected as most premade themes are poorly coded and lock you into certain features. Furthermore, the developer you are hiring to customize your premade theme most likely was not the original theme developer which means that they will need more time to learn and understand the code before they can alter it. Sometimes customizing a premade theme can make longer than building a unique website from the ground up.
Poor SEO
All premade themes suffer from inefficient code because they are building in a myriad of features and functionality to appeal to as many buyers as possible. Code bloating causes a poor user experience which will negatively impact your search engine rankings ultimately reducing traffic and sales. If you want to see how you can improve your website through SEO, social media, usability and more, please get a free website analysis at WooRank.
Problems with Updates & Security
All premade themes need to be customized in some way for them to be useable. However, customizations are overwritten if you attempt to update your WordPress website in the future unless you are able to segregate your customizations. Many premade themes require tons of slow-loading frameworks and plugins like Genesis, Gantry and Visual Composer, all of which are a nightmare to update and pose unnecessary security risks.
More Time Consuming
As with anything that is off-the-shelf, you need to familiarize yourself with the product before you can customize it for your needs and requirements. It can take longer to tinker with a premade theme than just to build a custom website from scratch which why some clients end up spending more money using a premade theme. We had one San Francisco law firm purchase a junky theme for $1.99 and invested over $5,000 to make it all work out.
Discontinued Support
Many clients come to us because WordPress updates have broken their website because the premade theme is no longer supported. We always believe in building long-term relationships with our clients so that they will always have someone who thoroughly knows their business and website to call for support and web maintenance.
Our Two Cents
Although premade WordPress themes can seem cheap and fast, they will cost you thousands in lost future sales. Not properly investing in your online presence just means that you will end up paying in other ways. Even if you invested as little as $5,000 in a custom mobile-friendly WordPress website today and it lasts you about 4 years, that works out to be less than a Starbucks coffee per day!
For the reasons above, we have moved away from theme customization projects because clients are always dissatisfied with the final product and usually end up starting over anyways. Contact us to design your custom responsive WordPress website that will get you results.