Blogging Tips: When To Buy a Premium Theme

Using a WordPress.org site is easy, and wonderful — with so many beautiful free themes to choose from, it's easy to find an attractive theme that has all the features you want. When, though, is it worth it to buy a premium theme? The short answer: when you want more freedom, higher quality, and easier usability. The long answer? Keep reading.

I see three main benefits of buying a premium theme, on top of generally better aesthetics:

1. Better Coding
   Premium themes cost money because someone took the time to make high-quality code — code that works, doesn't have glitches, and doesn't have sketchy sections of code that potentially muck up your site in the future. With good coding comes faster sites that play well with plugins, and perhaps even come with custom plugins to make your life even easier.
2. Access To Help
   Premium themes almost always come with some sort of access to the developers themselves — if you can't figure something out, and they haven't already written an answer on their FAQ or forum, you can ask them directly! Instead of spending hours trying to figure something out, why not go straight to the source? With a free theme, this is next to impossible {and, ironically, would be much more utilized because it's needed more with poorly-constructed themes!}. I've yet to actually have to contact a developer about a premium theme, though, because of #1 — they're so well constructed, and their FAQ pages usually walk you through anything you might need to do. When you're doing your own site maintenance, this is such a timesaver!
3. A Better Back-End
   This has nothing to do with squats. The back-end of your site — the part nobody sees when they come to your site, but where you do all of your maintenance and posting from — will be much cleaner and easier to use. Again, if you're doing your own maintenance, this is huge! Another bonus is that unlike free themes, which are often never updated, despite changing technology, premium themes are updated regularly to keep you current! Right now, this means responsive design ready for mobile viewing — a must if you're trying to blog professionally!

More than anything, premium themes are a great way to crank up your professionalism. Premium themes are clean, functional, and much more customizable than free themes. You can find some truly amazing themes that immediately take your site from "blah" to "WOW!" Seriously — check these out. Since you've paid for a premium theme, you're getting high-quality customer service, impeccable coding, clean-aesthetics, and way less of a headache. As with most things, you get what you pay for — a premium theme is worth every penny (this coming from a former skeptic!).

So, when do you know it's time? For me, it was when I was ready to take my blogging to the next step — step up my game aesthetically, increase professionalism, and at the same time make my job {as the techie for my site} easier.

I personally use the Genesis Framework, which I cannot recommend enough! It's really easy to use and highly customizable. My theme is from StudioPress, and you can browse their themes here!

This post was not intended to be a sales pitch, but if you need help with a site redesign — let me know! If you're operating on a WordPress blog and want a new look, we can make it happen quickly and affordably! Email me! Alternatively, you could look at other hosting services to get your website up and running from companies that offer hosting services such as hostiserver and others.