4 Reasons Why Cheap Themes Only Get You So Far
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Not everyone can afford (or wants to pay for) professional web design and development… and hey, you know what, we get it. You’re a new business, or you’re just not that invested in being serious with the internet. It’s cool. But did you know that more often than not, especially with the internet, you get what you pay for?
This is more of an influencer post that, hopefully, will convince some that buying a theme (whether it’s for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other CMS) packed with tons of features and options, or working with someone who buys one and then passes it off as their own, is not such a great idea. And I’ll try to do that with four, no-brainer reasons.
Reason #1: Feature Bloat
Feature bloat is our personal #1 gripe with pre-built themes, whether they be freemium or premium. Up until a couple of years ago, we used what we call “boilerplate” (framework) themes that gave us a blank white slate, and allowed us to take any design we created for our clients brands (which was done as a custom design in photoshop) and build on top of them.
The reason why we chose to go this route was due to a couple reasons. It was more cost effective for us as most of the common features/functionality we would want in a website were built in (accordions, modal windows, general shortcodes (for WordPress)). These pre-built options allowed us to save our time, which equated to cost savings for our clients.
Unfortunately, any time there was an update to the theme, something would invariably break, requiring us to spend an hour (or a few) fixing the issue(s). Additionally, there was noticeably slower page load times due to all of the assets that would have to load on any given page due to the features that the theme would include. To us, this was a double edged sword we no longer wanted to play with.
In the last couple years, we have taken to developing our own theme / template frameworks that only include what we know is needed/wanted in almost every website, and we’ve done so in a way that focuses on doing things efficiently and based on a high set of standards. Site speed, client onboarding/training, etc. have all dramatically improved because of this.
Reason #2: Security
Any time you write a line of code, you open yourself up to the potential for security vulnerabilities (okay, okay… that’s not totally true, but when it comes to writing software for the web, it definitely is). You can never be 100% positive that third party themes and plugins are going to stand the test of time; heck, even some of the most popular, well built themes and plugins on the market fall subject to vulnerability. It’s just the way the cookie factory crumbles sometimes.
We have found that most clients view their website, once built, as never needing to be touched again. This invariably leads to failure in keeping their website software (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) up to date, along with their potentially purchased themes and plugins.
When an update for a platform, theme or plugin is released, especially for security reasons, it’s critical that the updates get applied. Unfortunately, most everyday businesses / organizations don’t have someone in place to do it, nor do they generally want to invest in the services of a professional company to do it. This ultimately leads to out of date software that leads to the potential of getting hacked… or worse.
Reason #3: Customization
Of course, when you purchase / acquire a theme or plugin from a third party for your own, personal use, you are constrained to how they do things, programmatically speaking. Of course, you can always try to customize the theme or plugin to suit your needs, but this introduces backwards compatibility issues when updates for the theme or plugin are released, and may also introduce additional bugs that you need to spend time fixing.
While most themes offer options to easily tweak colors, fonts, etc., any further customization possibilities are limited, unless you wish to spend a good amount of time implementing those customizations. While this can sometimes save you an hour or two here and there, as compared to when you “roll your own” (or have someone “roll your own” for you), over the long term, the ability to maintain those customizations outweighs the time to just “roll your own” to begin with.
Lastly, developers generally do things a bit differently, comparatively speaking. One developer may program a feature one way, while another programmer may program the same feature in a completely different way. This can, unnecessarily, further add to the time spent trying to customize something to fit your needs.
Reason #4: Future Compatibility
I briefly mentioned this in some of the former sections, but future compatibility can become an issue with third party themes, especially if you customize them.
We have seen organizations who worked with another web design company, who ended up purchasing a pre-built theme (often times a fully built theme that only needed to be tweaked and “wa-la!”, you have a website) and tweaked it, passing it off as their own custom design and website.
After a year or so, the client needed to update their web platform (in this case, WordPress), and in doing so, the theme broke. Features/functionality no longer worked, menus were broken… you name it, there was most likely something wrong with it. We stepped in to try and help them “patch” the problem, but upon further investigation, found that the theme was no longer being developed (the premium theme developer retired their specific theme), and so there were no patches available.
Ultimately, this lead to quite a few hours of our time trying to manually fix the issues for them. The problem with this, aside from the fact that what should have taken an hour to update everything and make them current took 10 hours, is that future updates may render our temporary patches/fixes to be useless, forcing us to either go through a full rebuild (which probably should have happened anyway), or spend the time all over again fixing the issues a second time.
Either way, not fun, and not worth the trouble and scrambling.
Obligatory Reason #5:
As a professional business or organization, whether you’re for-profit or not, you deserve better. Often times with the internet, cheap begets cheap. Seriously, you get what you pay for. When you work with a professional designer, developer, marketer, strategist, etc., who is doing what they do, specifically tailored to you—that’s when you get something of value.
So, I implore all businesses and organizations looking for a digital strategy partner, whether that be for marketing strategy, branding, web design & development, SEO, or something else, don’t settle for the “quantity over quality”. Don’t settle for cheap because the numbers sound better. Don’t settle for organizations that boast hundreds of clients and low costs. It’s really not worth it in the end. You deserve better, and there are many digital marketing agencies like us that can help you.
Interested in finding out how we help businesses and organizations win with their digital marketing? Get in touch with us today!
