Voosh Themes

Premium WordPress Themes – Are They Worth Paying For?

What is it about Premium WordPress themes that makes them worth paying for? There are lots of quality free themes around, so why should you invest in a theme when you can get one for free?

In this article I’d like to share my thoughts on what it is that makes Premium themes “Premium” and why they are potentially worth investing in.

I’m going to make the assumption that you’re purchasing a theme from a quality provider – however, I should emphasize that the points I highlight below do not necessarily apply to all premium themes. Just because a theme is labeled as “premium” it certainly doesn’t mean that the theme is of high-quality and offers great value for money.

You might want to check out a previous article 10 Things To Consider When Choosing A Premium WordPress Theme to help ensure that you pick a theme you’re happy with.

Quality Support / Documentation

One of the main reasons for purchasing a premium theme is to receive support when installing and tweaking the theme. It’s almost inevitable that you’ll require some help when configuring a new theme, so it’s important that someone who is familiar with the theme is available to help. Whilst developers of free themes often provide support for their templates, this is by no means guaranteed. When you’re paying for a theme, however, it’s quite reasonable to expect that you’ll get some help when needed. The same also applies to documentation – you would expect a premium theme to come with appropriate documentation that enables you to configure the theme, but this isn’t always the case with free themes.

High-Quality Design

When you’re purchasing a premium theme you’re hopefully getting a professional and classy design that you don’t always see in free themes. However, specifying what a “professional and classy” design looks like is difficult as it’s a very subjective thing – for example, I love clean and minimal designs, but I know other people have different tastes and may prefer designs that are more abstract or grungy. Whatever the design style, you’d expect it to be of high-quality and offer a pleasant user interaction experience. Obviously you will probably be looking to tweak and tailor the template to meet your needs, but by default the theme should be easy to use and look great.

Unique Features

Unique features are something else that you typically get in premium themes that you might not find in free ones. By “unique features”, I essentially mean things like widgets and scripts that add a touch of class to your site – this can include jQuery sliders and image faders, featured posts, animated effects, drop down menus, and pretty much anything that extends the functionality of WordPress. Again, you’d also expect to get some support and help with these widgets when you have purchased a premium theme – this may not be the case with free templates.

Theme Options / Easily Customizable

It’s fairly standard now for premium templates to provide a number of theme options that make it relatively easy to configure the appearance and functioning of a site without having to get your hands dirty hacking code. Some examples of theme options might be changing the color scheme, adding images to an image fader/slider, configuring the structure of the template (e.g. the number of columns to use), and adding your latest tweets. The exact options provided will change from theme to theme, but they should hopefully help to make the site easier to configure and manage.

Browser Compatibility

With a premium theme you can expect your template to work in all major browsers. This includes browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer (versions 6-8). The theme should look consistent across all of these browsers – it doesn’t necessarily have to be pixel perfect, but it at least needs to be very similar in each of these browsers. You would also expect that if some of the unique features (like image faders) do not work properly in older browsers that they should degrade gracefully and not break the whole site.

Source Files

A premium theme will normally provide you with all the source files required to create the template – in particular, the Photoshop source files (or whatever was used to generate the images for the design). You have to be careful here though as not all theme licenses provide this – you’ll often see two licenses being offered by theme companies – a “standard” license (where you get just the theme) and a “developer” one where you get the theme files and the source Photoshop files (for an additional price, of course). Here at Voosh Themes I just have one price and you get everything at that price – this is just my preference, but other companies may take a different approach.

Well Written Code

When purchasing a premium theme you will hopefully be getting a template that has been well coded – the code should validate and be well structured so that you can easily go in and make changes if you ever need to. This is again an area where support for your theme is key – if you ever need to make changes to the source code, you ideally need the theme developer close at hand to make the changes for you, or at least to point you in the right direction.

Conclusion

So, are WordPress themes worth paying for? I think in general it depends on your personal circumstances and your goals for a site. Premium themes are certainly worth the investment if you’re after a professional design that you want to get up and running as quickly as possible.

This small investment in money can potentially save you a lot of time and enable you to focus on the things that you really need to get done. However, if you’re only interested in creating a small personal blog for sharing your thoughts and you’re happy with using a free theme, that might be a better option.

What do you think? What makes a theme “premium” (i.e. what features/benefits do you expect to see)? How much are you willing to pay for a theme? Please leave a comment below – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

P.S. If you’re currently on the lookout for a new theme, check out the premium templates here at Voosh Themes – there’s also a free theme (Satoshi) that you can download.