Upgrading From Off The Shelf Themes To Custom WordPress Solutions

A WordPress theme is a template solution that is pretty much ‘ready to go’. It has already been designed, coded, tested and is simply awaiting your content and branding to hit the go button.

There are over 46,000 WordPress themes available on ThemeForest (a popular template selling website). The most popular theme has been downloaded over 400,000 times. That’s a single template in use on nearly half a million websites.

Themes are very popular, and with some of the pros covered below, you can see why.

Pros of WordPress Themes/Templates

1. Low Cost

The most obvious choice is of course price. Starting from as little as, well £0. You can explore the library and discover a theme that’s right for your business and your budget. Typically the most popular themes are priced at around the £50 mark. For a new or fledgling business, this can be highly attractive.

2. Time & Speed

Given that you’re simply shopping for a website, a bit like the way you buy your groceries, the time it takes to get a template website live is a fraction of what it takes to build a fully bespoke solution.

Depending on the agency or developer you are speaking with, times can range from a few days to a month with a templated theme. This depends on the amount of customisation needed, who is adding the content, and how busy the agency or developer is.

3. Good Looking Design

Most of the demonstration websites do look very appealing. Many of the most popular themes start with a core design, which is adapted multiple times, to produce industry focused designs.

So for example, a plumber can see a version of the theme that would suit a plumbing company, with appropriate stock photography already in place. This creates an easier buying experience for a small business.

4. Bundled Plugins For Customisation

Most of the popular themes come with page builder plugins, that allow users to customise their website themselves. Letting them juggle with page layouts, and even create new page templates.

Some other plugins like font libraries and header menus, are also usually bundled in. To allow the user to customise the experience, and try to make the theme feel more their own.

5. Easy To Use

I say this fairly loosely. Although their purpose is to allow users to be able to pretty much build a website themselves, these themes should still be implemented by a competent person.

Although the skill level to achieve this is not what is required of a bespoke or custom website, we’d recommend using a developer or an agency to carry out the customisation. They’ll be able to complete it in a fraction of the time it would take many people to just read the documentation.

6. Better Than An Under Construction Page

A motto we live by is “get it up, and get it going”. Spending too long not making a decision can be costly. A theme regardless of standard, and with the right content, will always provide more opportunities than having nothing live at all. Even if it’s just temporary, it beats looking at an under construction page.

Cons of WordPress Themes/Templates

There are of course many cons to WordPress themes.

1. They’re Not Built Around Your Business

Themes are multi-purpose, created for the masses rather than your individual business. Being that they’re templates, you’re shoehorning your business into the website. Rather than building the website around your business’ needs, goals, and objectives.

2. They’re Not Conversion Focused

As themes are not built around your business’ objectives, they’re also not focused around your content or customer journey.

Although most themes allow you to customise the layout, you could find yourself customising the entire website to align it with your brand and marketing needs. Which is slightly counter productive.

3. The Theme Might Not Be ‘On Brand’

If you’ve invested in your branding and offline marketing, the website should be the pinnacle of your marketing mix. It’s where all of your advertising will no doubt be directed. So it needs to communicate your business’ personality and purpose.

A generic layout with your logo positioned where the theme allows, may not meet your brand guidelines (and really upset your brand designer – they can be really touchy!)

Aside from the logo, what if you have additional brand assets, such as: diagrams, illustrations or shapes? Can these be placed where they need to be, or does the theme restrict the visual appearance, and how they can be displayed.

4. You Are Not Alone

Ever walked into a party and spotted two people wearing the same outfit?

As mentioned above, the top selling theme on ThemeForest has been downloaded over 400,000 times. So the chances are, you may see a competitor with a very similar website. If you do go down the theme route, ensure that you invest more in customisation, to make it more your own.

5. WordPress Themes Are Bloated With Plugins & Unused Features

A massive positive of WordPress is having so many features at your fingertips. However, having them all bundled in to your theme is less ideal. Once your site is setup, some of the features won’t even be needed. Some themes come with WooCommerce, forums, and other plugins bundled in that appeal to the mass market. But once a site is launched, some of these features and plugins are redundant.

In recent Health Check audits, one for a template theme website, and one for a custom website, the theme had 27 plugins, compared to 5 on the custom website. Over half of the theme’s plugins weren’t in use, but had been bundled into the theme. This adds a potentially heavy overhead to a website, which inevitably slows it down. As well as opening it up to possible security risks, if the plugins aren’t kept up to date, or aren’t maintained by their developer.

There can be many reasons for poor loading speeds. Unsuitable hosting, a poorly setup site, large image sizes, etc. But most of the time a theme has so much going on in the background, that the site just falls behind.

6. They Can Be Painfully Slow

Imagine someone wearing a big padded fancy dress costume, running a 100m sprint with Usain Bolt. Slow speeds can seriously increase your website’s exit and bounce rates. With users spending an average of 15 seconds on a website before leaving, if your site takes 5-10 seconds to load, they’re not staying for long.

Slow speeds also affect conversion rates, with every second in loading time potentially decreasing the conversion rate by 7%.

The more weight, the slower the speed. This negative experience isn’t reserved just for your customers. As the backend editing experience can be painfully slow too. Meaning that it takes you much more time to make simple updates.

7. They Can Be A Security Risk

The most popular themes are usually targeted by hackers. They will look to exploit some of the multiple plugins for their own gain. Whether the plugins are being used or not, if they’re activated and not kept up to date, they can pose a security risk for your website.

Ensuring that any unused plugins are deactivated can reduce risk. As well as investing in a 3rd party firewall for your website such as Sucuri.

8. They Are Simply Not Scalable

This is where we see so many businesses commit to a custom WordPress website. After experiencing some of the above mentioned flaws with themes, their biggest frustration is trying to scale or add new features.

Adding new pages or content is extremely easy. But adding a new page with new functionality can cause a host of problems.

Although it can be done, you’re modifying the theme to get this to work, which could be another problem altogether. If the theme hasn’t been setup as a ‘child’, when updating the theme in future, your changes may be lost as the theme update won’t contain your modifications.

9. Support & Updates Could Stop

Theme developers usually provide ongoing paid support, to help with bug fixes and provide updates for security.

If you decide to stop paying the support fee, or if the developer decides they no longer want to find the time to support the theme, this could expose your business to security risks. Not to mention a website that will start to deprecate, and develop more bugs.

Themes that are no longer supported or updated, can actually be more costly in the long term. As your developer or agency will need to modify the theme to solve any issues you may be experiencing.

Conclusion

We never taboo themes because they have a purpose in the market. We feel that they’re a great foundation for startups to get online relatively quickly, and in a cost effective way.

Without experiencing the pitfalls of a theme, businesses cannot appreciate the custom approach. We have seen our clients take this journey and we are happy to help them take it.

The moment of clarity happens when the website becomes critical to the business. They begin asking about adding new features and discussing ideas that fall outside of the theme’s capabilities. It’s in that moment that they begin dreaming of what version 2 of the website could look like, and how it could function.