When building a WordPress site, many people choose to buy a premium theme instead of commissioning a custom build. The cost of buying a theme is often one tenth of a custom project, or even less, but the quality of paid themes can vary a lot depending on the skill of the author. Based on my understanding of WordPress themes and my own experience buying premium themes, I summarized several things that are worth paying attention to before making a purchase.
1. Whether it uses a theme framework: A WordPress theme framework can help speed up development. A well-designed framework can let us achieve the same effects and rich features while writing as little code as possible. If you plan to do secondary development on the theme you buy, choosing a theme built on a framework can save a lot of effort later.
2. Page load speed: Optimizing page speed is not especially complicated. You mainly need to pay attention to all the factors that affect loading time, such as using fewer images, providing images at the right dimensions, compressing CSS and JS, placing JS at the end of the page, and setting client-side cache correctly.
3. Technical support: Free themes are usually maintained by individual developers in their spare time, so you should not expect too many updates after release. Paid themes are usually maintained by a team or a company. Looking at how they update and maintain their other themes is a good way to judge how much support your theme will receive.
4. Whether the code follows standards: A theme that follows web standards usually has a better code structure and stronger SEO performance. In general, paid themes are developed by experienced WordPress developers or teams, so the code is more likely to follow those standards.
5. Lifecycle: How long will the theme provide technical support: a few years, or lifetime support? Once you choose a theme, the content of your site often becomes tied to it. For example, some themes rely heavily on shortcodes. If the current theme is abandoned and you later have to change themes, the content built with those shortcodes may stop displaying properly if the new theme does not support them.
6. SEO support: How well the theme supports SEO is also worth considering. There are many SEO plugins, but if the theme itself does a poor job with SEO, the effect of those plugins is reduced significantly.
7. Number of users: If only a small number of people use a theme, it is harder to find answers when you run into problems. It is also important that the theme vendor provides an official support forum, because users can discuss issues there and often find answers from previous discussions.
The points above are simply a summary of my own experience. People who buy premium themes regularly will certainly have their own perspectives as well, and you are welcome to share them in the comments.
