Themes for WordPress is a hot topic, especially for newcomers. Many are available within the WordPress repository, plus thousands more on various websites. The choice of themes is largely driven by how nice they look, not how well they are coded or comply with best practices. Obviously only a small number of geeks out there are even in a position to make judgement upon the coding of a theme. This means that in 99% of cases, looks alone, or the price, is the main determining factor.
For a normal small or home business site I will admit that almost anything will do the job. But if it’s a site for a business use, then really different criteria needs to apply and needs some professional input. A higher quality product (theme) is needed than what may be deemed popular in the mainstream.
What’s wrong ThemeForest & Elegant Themes?
These are two of the most popular places people turn to for a ‘Premium’ WordPress theme. So, why are they on my personal banned list?
In the case of Themeforest, I’ve found the coding from most of these independent developers is overly complex and support often poor. One typical nightmare discovered recently, the Trades theme is particularly bad from a performance perspective. It tries to be all things to all people, heavily laden with bells and whistles that starts to confuse the newcomer. It’s now less a wordpress site and more something else. The more fancy tools included that appear to make it easier for new designers to customise stuff without knowing coding, the slower the site will be, the worse it will rank and more difficult/costly to upgrade later.
These issues are fixable to some extent, and we offer a repair and optimisation service that helps clean up and accelerate sites using these feature-rich themes.
There’s Bad sliders too
Many of these themes also bundle in the popular Revolution slider, which is also on my banned list! This popular slider is a resource hog and without expert setup, may needlessly drag down your site speed. It’s up to 10x slower than the fastest sliders of similar cost.
All this shows how easy it is to get swayed by good looks, lists of features, star ratings etc. It’s the risk of just ‘following the crowd’, instead of doing an objective analysis. It proves, in the case of revolution slider, that even 40,000 users can be wrong, if the objective was to have a high traffic website and engaged visitors…
Elegant Themes Issues
Similarly with Elegant Themes. Their popular ‘Divi’ theme, loved by many web designers due to the page building tools, breaks some fundamental rules in terms of how a theme should be coded and used. Their fancy layout system makes it more difficult to change to another theme later, without having to alter individual page or post content. It forces you to stay within their own ecosystem, which should never be the case. The use of shortcodes everywhere doesn’t help performance either.
But it looks really nice
However the issue of ‘how pretty it looks’ always arises. How can something that looks really nice be bad? Looks and branding are SO important we’re told, explaining why most junior web designers, marketers or those starting out on line, will continue to buy on looks.
But it’s clear looks alone are never enough to have a successful, high traffic website, in fact pretty themes with fancy sliders and all emphasis upon looks, can have the opposite effect, with a lame duck website that has no real purpose, or traffic. There needs to be a balance between aesthetics, function and purpose. read more.
It’s possible to fix these sites and bad themes, but it’s not nice work and ends up being a compromise. Instead, start with a good theme base. Here’s my preferred theme provider listing
Questions? Contact me using the form below
[gravityform id=”2″ name=”Contact us” title=”false” description=”false”]