Being a website owner, you should always focus on creating a visually appealing and user-friendly website that can encourage people to access your site and stay on it for longer. An aesthetically designed website can help you get more web traffic, which in turn, boosts your conversions and maximises your sales.
A good web design generates revenue but also represents your brand/business the way you want it to. This means the colour combinations, font size and style, background colours, layouts, headers and other aspects of web design play a key role in the success of your web business.
The best part is, WordPress comes with a ton of beautiful free as well as premium themes from top-tier companies to let you enhance your site’s design, without any coding. You will get all the rich features and customisation options to help you create your WordPress site the way you want.
But, sometimes it becomes challenging for beginners to choose between free themes and paid ones. Well, both are good options, but making the right decision as per the business requirements is essential. Both versions are used to enhance the websites design, but still, there are some key differences that you should know before making your final decision.
1. Cost
Free WordPress Theme
Since it is a free WordPress theme, you don’t need to pay anything to download, just install and activate them. It’s completely free of cost. It is a perfect option for those who have just started on their WordPress project.
This means if you are new and don’t have a huge budget, you can use a free theme to modify the design of your website.
Premium WordPress Theme
Premium WordPress themes are quite expensive, but still, they are affordable as compared to hiring a professional WordPress designer. If you want more advanced features and customisations, you may need to buy a reliable and quality premium WordPress plugin.
They come with unique functionalities and customisation options that let you create a highly professional site or blog with ease. All you need to do is to pay a fixed price for the selected premium theme.
2. Ease of use
Free WordPress Theme
Free themes are simple, user-friendly, and intuitive, which helps you create a unique design for your WordPress site on the fly. You don’t need to learn any coding or programming languages (HTML, CSS, or PHP) to create or customise your site design. You just need to download and activate the theme within your site and enjoy its rich features.
Premium WordPress Theme
Premium themes are also easy to use, but due to the availability of lots of features, it becomes quite difficult to manage them. Plus, you will need to take some time to explore different features and other additional options available within the paid theme.
Alike free themes, you don’t need to get your hands dirty in coding to tweak the design of your site.
3. Features and Customisation Options
Free WordPress Theme
One of the disadvantages of free themes is that they come with limited features. You will get some basic features that will help you create a simple site – a good option for a beginner. But if you want a fully-customised website, then you will need to opt for paid versions.
Free WordPress themes don’t usually come with additional features such as using shortcodes, creating landing pages, responsive icons, etc. This is one of the biggest limitations of free themes.
Premium WordPress Theme
Most website owners choose premium themes over free ones because they come with the unlimited number of features and customisation options.
Such themes offer some exciting features such as a drag and drop option, eCommerce compatibility, multilingual functionality, tons of headers and layout designs, responsive design, etc to let you customise your site, without any coding skills.
4. Review Process
Free WordPress Theme
All the free themes available in WordPress’ official repository go through a strict review process to meet it’s quality standards. Plus, these are tested for standard compliant code and cutting-edge technologies to let you create a highly interactive and professional looking site.
Premium WordPress Theme
Unlike free WordPress themes, paid versions don’t go through a strict review process. The authors of paid themes can overlook to best theme development practices while creating them. This causes compatibility issues for those who use such themes. Issues can persist while installing a new theme or updating an existing theme.
5. Security
Free WordPress Theme
Since most of the free themes don’t get updated on the frequent basis, they remain more vulnerable to security attacks and threats. So, make sure you review their update status and other details before downloading any free themes.
Premium WordPress Theme
Security is always a big concern for WordPress site owners, but buying a paid theme from a reliable online theme shop can take the pressure off from your shoulders with ease. Trusted premium themes get upgraded on the regular basis to help you address and fix its security issues with ease.
Plus, the theme developers are more focused on providing best security features to their potential customers to maintain goodwill. This means using paid theme can give you a more secure and reliable WordPress environment (to help protect your cryptocurrency-themed site, for example) as compared to some of the free ones.
Final Verdict: Which is the best option for you?
Both the free themes and paid themes are great. They are incredible to enhance the overall look and feel of a site with ease. But if you are a beginner or have a small business, then you should start off with a free WordPress theme.
They are free, simple, and user-friendly that comes with some of the basic features to let you create a simple site with ease. You don’t even need to dive into any coding while creating or customising your site. Plus, they have been through a strict review process to give you more compatibility with other WordPress plugins and in-built tools.
Once your web business grows, you can opt for a reliable paid theme from trusted sources that can meet your specific requirements with ease. Using a paid theme means getting more advanced features and customisation options, high security, and other advanced options to let you create a top-notch site.
Conclusion
You should do some thorough research before making the final decision. This blog post will help you decide which theme version (free or paid) is better for your business. Now the final decision is up to you. Decide and creating a compelling site for your business.