As WordPress has grown in functionality and popularity, thousands of great website themes/templates have been developed, making starting or improving your website easier than ever. Theme developers range from students experimenting with building a theme as a project, to large-scale businesses with many experienced developers churning out several new WordPress themes a month. Some WordPress themes are free, while other themes are considered ‘premium’, in that you pay to download and use them.

When I recommend premium themes to people, the first response I sometimes get is ‘why would I pay for a WordPress theme when there are many free WordPress themes available”? I’ve ran a few websites built on WordPress (including this one), and asked that same question at first too. If you are looking for a theme for your website and are weighing the options of free WordPress themes vs. premium themes, I will discuss the pros and cons of both options.

Free WordPress Themes:

There are certainly many instances where using a free WordPress theme will be perfectly fine for your needs. If you are running a personal or small business blog, and aren’t looking to do much customization for your site, there are a lot of very well-designed free themes that might be a very good option for your site.

Let’s look at the biggest pros and cons of free themes:

Pros:

• The Cost. You can use themes for free, of course.

• Large Selection. There is a large amount of themes to choose from – almost to the point where it can be overwhelming to sort through them all. There are thousands of free WordPress themes out there, so there’s a good chance you can find one with the style and layout you’re looking for.

• You Can Try Many Themes. Because they’re free, you can experiment with different themes. If you’re not happy with the theme you chose, although it may take some work, you can switch to another theme without spending any money.

Cons:

• Lack of customization options. Unless you have a good understanding of coding, many free themes don’t offer many options to let your customize your website.

• Theme Updates are Rare. When you use a free theme, don’t expect the theme to be updated. When updates to WordPress are released, if your theme is not updated, you can run into issues. If you run into bugs while using the theme, don’t count on the theme developer to fix them.

• No Technical Support. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of using a free theme and encountering some problems with it, and not being able to get any response from the theme developer.

• Inconsistent Quality. While there are some good free themes available, there are also a lot of bad ones. A lot of free WordPress themes are quickly designed, and lack the robust features found in many premium themes.

There are other reasons why free themes are not for everyone. Some free themes require you to keep the theme developers’ name in the footer, while others are making footers encrypted and selling links that you can’t remove from your site. There have even been reports of people hiding malicious code in free WordPress themes to spread viruses. Also, the majority of free themes out there are designed for blogs. If you are looking to use WordPress as a CMS for a small business website or for a professional blog, it’s worth considering purchasing a premium theme.

Premium WordPress Themes

Premium themes generally run in the range of $25-$200, and are often designed by web developers with a lot of experience, and often groups of developers. For many premium theme developers, this is their full-time business. They are committed to designing great themes and building a base of satisfied customers, and many of them have people staffed to handle things like technical support and billing issues.

Let’s look at some the biggest benefits of using a premium theme:

• Nicer Theme Designs. While there are free WordPress themes with excellent designs, premium themes typically feature more professional and higher quality designs, and are more feature-rich.

• Theme Updates. With premium themes for WordPress, most theme developers release periodic updates to many of their themes. You benefit by having new features added to your site without having to do any work, and you can be sure that your theme will be updated to work well with future versions of WordPress. And besides, it’s nice to be able to look forward to update releases for your website – It’s like having someone working to improve your site on an ongoing basis, for no extra charge!

• Technical Support. This one is huge, and often justifies the cost of a premium theme by itself. Most reputable premium theme developers are committed to providing support for their themes. While WordPress is an outstanding platform, it is still technology, and like virtually any type of technology, issues can come up from time to time. There are some general WordPress and technical forums out there where you might be able to get some help, but even if you get a response, it could be weeks until someone replies to your post. You could also pay an independent developer for support, but you can easily pay around $75/hour for that. I’ve had the unfortunate experience (on more than one occasion) of running into problems with free themes and being unable to get any response from the theme developers. I’ve also relied on support for premium themes, and I like having the peace of mind that support is available nearly any time I need it. Unless you’re an experienced developer, having technical support for your theme is a great benefit.

• Easy Customization Options. With most free WordPress themes, if you want to do things like changing your website’s fonts and colors, borders, background images, widget locations, page layouts and much more, you have to edit the source code files. Most premium WordPress themes include custom theme Options Panels on the WordPress backend that let you make all these changes with a simple click of a button. The level of customization options can vary from designer to designer, but overall, premium themes include much more extensive theme controls than free themes.

• WordPress Theme Frameworks. The ability for developers to build complete theme frameworks, and then design child themes and plugins for their frameworks is an outstanding feature of WordPress, and something not possible on many other website software platforms. Theme frameworks basically take the theme option panels to another level in terms of your ability to easily customize your website. Frameworks also let you easily swap child themes for other themes. This lets you lets you retain most of the settings you had already spent time configuring. While there are a couple free WordPress theme frameworks that I’m aware of, there are several great premium options. WordPress Frameworks such as Thesis, Genesis, PageLines Platform Pro and RichWP are very popular, as they give you nearly complete control over customizing your website, without having to touch any code.

As far as cons of premium themes, the fact that they’re not free is really the only thing that comes to mind. When looking at the price of a premium WordPress theme, don’t just think of it compared to free themes. While it might be worth seeing if there’s a comparable free theme out there, if you are serious about building a powerful blog or business website, remember that you could also being paying up to several thousand dollars to a web developer to build your site. Using a WordPress theme often lets you have an even better website than people and businesses spending a lot of money for their site. My view is that the money you would have spent on web design can be much better spent on starting to market your business or website.

A WordPress theme is an investment that has the potential of letting you quickly make your money back, plus much more. For most businesses, the cost of a premium WordPress theme will be offset if your improved website leads to just 1 or 2 more sales or customers.

After using both free and premium WordPress themes, I find that the cost of premium themes is well justified. I actually even feel like a lot of theme designers could charge more for their themes, as I think that the value you get from WordPress themes is worth much more than the relatively small price you pay for them.

Browse and sort many of the best WordPress themes straight from our homepage.