As a new blogger, it's much easier to think about using a WordPress theme free when you're starting out and upgrade to a premium theme later (once your blog starts making money).
Is this a wise decision?
Absolutely not. For what ? THE WordPress themes Free are free for a reason: they don't provide you with support and often cause security-related issues, SEO-related issues, etc.
Remember that you cannot make money online without first investing money. Invest in a WordPress theme premium may be your best choice, because the WordPress themes free can cause you many problems.
Let's see why should you avoid using WordPress themes free in 2023 and beyond.
Why should you avoid free WordPress themes in 2023?
Security concerns
One of the main reasons why you should avoid free WordPress themes in 2023 and beyond is security concerns. Whether you know it or not, millions of WordPress sites are hacked every year and most of them are hacked due to security vulnerabilities, including:
- Use free themes
- Using malicious themes (canceled themes)
- Downloading themes or templates from unauthorized websites and Black Hat forums
- And the list continues
Did you know that every time you use free themes from untrustworthy sites or canceled themes from torrents or black hat forums, you risk the security of your WordPress site? How ? Most of these free WordPress themes may include malicious code installed in their scripts and files.
In this way, they redirect the backlinks and traffic from your website to other sites, including gambling sites, adult sites, spam sites, etc…
Additionally, there are other security issues including backdoors, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, malware attacks, etc. that can occur with most free WordPress templates and themes.
So if you are looking to increase your search traffic, you should avoid free WordPress themes and instead spend a few dollars to choose secure themes for your WordPress sites.
Mobile responsiveness issues
Another major reason to stay away from free WordPress themes is that most of them are not mobile friendly. Whether you know it or not, Google places a high priority on mobile-friendly websites.
According to Statista , by 2023, the number of smartphone users worldwide is expected to reach 6,841 billion.
So, if your website does not load correctly on mobile or tablets, you will lose a lot of traffic, conversions and sales. Although you can use plugins like WPTouch to easily create a mobile version of your site, it is always recommended to use a premium WordPress theme or template that gives you mobile responsiveness by default.
In case you're wondering, here's what a mobile-friendly layout looks like compared to a traditional layout (which isn't mobile-friendly).
As you can see from the illustration above, there are many limitations with a non-responsive mobile layout, including:
- The text is too small to read
- Links and call actions are too close together
- Difficult to navigate
You can overcome all the above problems by having a mobile responsive theme. Our top 3 recommendations for premium WordPress themes (that are mobile friendly) are:
- GeneratePress
- Genesis framework
- Elegant themes
SEO Issues
The majority of free WordPress themes are not SEO optimized. Did you know that your WordPress theme affect your overall search ranking? Yes, it's true.
Here are some ways themes can affect your rankings.
- Bad themes can affect your website loading times (which has a direct impact on your search ranking)
- Bad themes have poor website architecture, which is bad for your site's SEO.
- Bad WordPress themes can affect your website visitors with bad navigation issues
Above all, free WordPress themes can block your CSS resources.
As you can see above, few themes block CSS resources, causing your website pages to lag in rendering.
Another problem is backlinks
Most free WordPress themes have a hyperlink in their footer that provides the theme creator with a backlink to their website. This dilutes your page ranking and the terms of use of the free theme clearly mention that the hyperlink must be kept intact in order to use the theme.
You are actually giving a backlink to the theme creator. If you focus on domain authority and don't provide any dofollow backlinks from your websites to others, don't use free themes.
This is the reason why you should avoid most free WordPress themes because they are not SEO optimized.
Compatibility issues
Compatibility of free WordPress themes is also an issue. With the latest plugins being developed at a rapid pace, themes often fail to keep up with their pace. Again, to make the theme compatible, coding effort is required and if you are not skilled enough, you will have to purchase the talent.
Most free WordPress theme designers do not create mobile-friendly free WordPress themes. So you have to pay them extra dollars if you want to make it mobile friendly (in case you really like the free theme you are using).
They are difficult to modify
Free WordPress themes offer basic functionality, limited widget areas, superficial documentation, and relatively not-so-clean code.
This is not to disrespect the theme creators, but when it comes to customizing these free WordPress themes to suit the needs of the blog or website, it requires some coding effort, which has its own curveball. learning and secondly, if you like to opt for With the support of the theme creator, you will often have to shell out money from your pocket.
Even if you want to change the functions of free themes, you will end up having the worst loading times on your WordPress sites. So you just have to get help from the theme creator, which costs you money.
Free themes usually lack complex features like e-commerce and integration with third-party payment processors. This means that to get the functionality, new code must be written, which again means money must be spent on the free themes you use.
Lack of customer support
Lack of customer support is probably the biggest reason to stay away from free WordPress themes.
Most free theme providers have many problems to solve.
Support is just one of them. Releasing new versions, creating patches for existing themes, and maintaining existing themes already takes the lion's share of their time. The support queues are huge and they often don't spend any time handling the support ticket.
These problems faced by free WordPress theme users have prompted many developers to use WordPress theme opportunities to create aesthetically pleasing and more functional themes. Many premium theme providers have mushroomed to offer theme frameworks (Genesis and Thesis, etc.) and standalone themes with various features.
The benefits of WordPress are fully exploited by these developers to create themes offering e-commerce sites, directory sites, membership sites and many other complex websites. By extending the core functionality of WordPress, which was previously best known as a blogging platform, these premium theme developers make it easy for users to extract content management system (CMS)-like functionality.
Some More Reasons to Avoid Free WordPress Themes
Although few WordPress themes are free, as we said above, they are not free at all. There is always a pitfall in using free content from anyone. No one gives you a piece of the pie for free, there is always a catch no matter what.
Here are some good reasons why you shouldn't use free WordPress themes.
- Most free WordPress themes are not unique. They do not give an attractive design to your WordPress sites. They're all generic and you just can't stand out from the crowd. If you are a WordPress beginner, you need to stand out and stay unique to quickly grow your online presence. So avoid using free WordPress themes if you want to succeed.
- They always come with BS. They contain unwanted footer links. They may contain malicious code inserted into themes. They often contain complex CSS codes that you cannot easily modify. And many other features you don't want on your WordPress sites.
What are your options now [if not free WordPress themes]?
There are several ways to design your WordPress website (avoiding free WordPress themes).
- Hire someone to design your site from scratch
- Buy a premium WordPress theme (we recommend Elegants Themes)
Now let's talk about each of them.
Hire someone to design your website
If you want to create a unique and attractive design for your websites, hiring an expert web designer is probably the best option. But here's the problem with custom website designs: they are mostly expensive, especially when you have them done by experts.
So, if you have a budget to spend a few hundred (or even thousands) of dollars, you can easily have someone design an SEO-friendly and mobile-friendly design for your websites.
Buy a premium WordPress theme
Fortunately, you don't have to shell out a lot of money because there are many premium WordPress themes that offer you amazing features at affordable prices.
But if you are looking for budget-friendly yet mobile-responsive and search engine-friendly WordPress themes, we highly recommend checking out Elegant themes.
Elegant Themes brings you dozens of attractive premium WordPress themes for just $89 per year. Additionally, a single subscription allows you unlimited use of our themes and plugins, which means that with a single license you can use their themes on an unlimited number of sites.
Quick note: Even if you don't renew their themes after a year, you can still continue using their themes that you have already downloaded forever. But you will lose access to the member area and all new themes, theme updates and support (in case you don't renew after 1 year).
Here is a list of all the amazing benefits of using Elegant themes.
- Gives you access to dozens of premium themes for just $89
- You can use their themes on unlimited sites
- Gives you access to the Divi builder
- Access to 24/24 customer support
- Access to hundreds of pre-built websites
- And the list continues
The best part of using Elegant themes is that you will also have free access to their Divi builder, , which is a builder Easy-to-use drag-and-drop website design.
Divi Builder gives you comprehensive features to easily customize your website layout where you can easily add elements like;
- Pictures
- Text blocks
- Contact form et ainsi de suite
Is there another alternative to Elegant themes?
Although Elegant themes offer you a great package by giving you access to dozens of themes, but if you are still curious to find other WordPress themes, we recommend you to take a look at GeneratePress premium .
It is one of the most popular WordPress themes, downloaded by over 2 million people worldwide with a 5-star rating.
But the premium version of this theme is what you need and it only costs you $49,95 and gives you a ton of amazing features including:
- All premium modules
- Full access to the site library
- Unlimited Websites
- 1 year of updates and support
- 40% Renewal Discount
- 30 Days Money Back Guarantee
Here is the link to benefit from GeneratePress
In addition, GeneratePress , Genesis framework is also another great recommendation designed and developed by WordPress experts who know almost everything about the need to have SEO optimized and faster loading templates for WordPress.
The great thing about the Genesis theme framework is that it is regularly updated (the framework) to make your site loading times faster, better and secure. It is also mobile-friendly, which means that all sites that use the Genesis framework load smoothly on all devices.
So what are you waiting for? Use the following link to grab the Genesis framework today.
Download Genesis Theme for WordPress
FAQs on Free WordPress Themes in 2023
Here is a list of some important questions about free WordPress themes that you may want to know in 2023.
What are the disadvantages of using free WordPress themes?
The #1 reason why most free WordPress themes suck is because they don't offer you any customer support. Besides that, here are some other major disadvantages of using free themes for WordPress.
- They offer basic functions and most website design elements such as landing page builders, email signup forms, etc. are limited
- Most free WordPress themes are not updated (no one wants to update the latest on free themes, right)
- They are not unique at all because most free themes are used by a ton of people around the world
- They are mostly not mobile friendly or SEO optimized
- Most free themes can include malicious scripts in their theme files
What if I still want to use free WordPress themes?
If you want to use free WordPress themes, we HIGHLY recommend that you only grab them from lth WordPress theme directory (where you can find many themes for free). The #1 advantage of using free WordPress themes is that they are all officially approved and safe to use.
What are the best free WordPress themes?
Here are some of the websites where you can grab free themes in 2023.
- ThemeForest
- them Isle
- Theme Grill
- Themes only free
- aThemes
What is the fastest free WordPress theme?
we recommend that you consult Astra is a WordPress theme because it is considered one of the fastest and easily customizable free themes for WordPress. It's really faster because it's a lightweight theme that requires less than 50 KB of resources.
What are the best WordPress themes for businesses in 2023?
you can consider the following themes.
- Zakra
- Heel
- Astrid
- airi
- Sydney
- Hestia
Final Thoughts on Using Free WordPress Themes in 2023
If you are serious about making money from blogging, it is always better to stay away from free WordPress themes for many reasons including no support, zero or no updates, issues related to security, compatibility issues, etc.
Since there are a ton of premium WordPress themes at affordable prices, you really don't need to shell out a lot of money to make your website look premium as you can consider themes like GeneratePress, Elegants Themes, etc. …
So, what do you think about using free WordPress themes in 2023? Share your opinion in the comments.
