Over the years I have had a lot of people that have come my way asking me to review their existing theme purchased on a commercial market. While commercial WordPress themes are a ready-made websites, quite often buyers don’t know how to set them up because the documentation is quite extensive and technical.
In the era of modern web and mobile responsive design it’s becoming more and more increasingly important to pay attention to the quality of your theme and your plugins, rather than the look. And by that I mean that it can still look nice, but will it actually work when you start to put in the pieces that you want for it to perform for your business needs?
Business owners don’t know how to gauge that quality because they don’t know code and don’t have the time to learn how to use WordPress in a efficient manner in order to judge. After all they are not web people they are business owners.
So how do you tell if the theme or plugin is right for you?
Look at how many comments about it.
If you read through the comments threads on most marketplaces you can pretty much see people like yourself having either a excellent time getting the same set up as the demo, or they’re having a complete nightmare.
Give yourself a second and go through the comments no matter how many there are and spot what the problems other are having. Take time to see if they have been addressed by the author or support team. I don’t particularly like marketplaces myself considering that commercial themes are packed with code creating bloat. I’ve commented and written about this before here.
It’s not exactly the best situation, but if you’re having to settle for a commercial theme you might want to check to see if others are having a difficult time with it or not.
Look at other websites that are using it.
Whether it’s a Plugin or Theme somebody out there is utilizing it. So therefore go to that website and check it out. Navigate through it and see if it actually performs from the front end as it does on the demo. Some theme developers host the demos on the best case scenario for a hosting server and don’t share the specs with potential buyers.
Every marketplace has a live demo set up that you can look at and navigate through on the front-end, but it doesn’t really compare to the real world examples when someone else buys it and uses it for their site.
The downside of going to Commercial.
Unlike themes, plugins are a little different commercially. On WordPress.org you can see how many installations are using the plugin, a star rating, support tickets resolved and more. However, commercially you are left to do the research and hope that the author will guarantee support if issues come up in a timely fashion, which is often paramount to website owners.
My experience has always been left on the hook with a broken theme (website) or function of my online store, when it comes to going commercial with themes and plugins. It simply isn’t possible for the author, or authors, to support the amount of requests for a theme, or plugin, if something goes wrong within hours.
This is bad for your business because you have lost potential revenue they cannot be measured. Moreover you will never be able to recuperate it. It’s simply a number that will remain unknown.
At our firm we do “premium” because we are not commercial. The reason we choose to say premium is because we offer you our expertise in a timely fashion and we build for a custom fit to suit you. Our developers have 10 years experience with WordPress, and know what plugins, themes, and frameworks work well for a specific business model.
We cannot moderate all third-party plugins and themes for customers that bring those to us, it’s simply to time consuming as there are 40,000+ plugins in the repo on WordPress and that’s not counting the commercial market.
That’s why we try to guide customers down the path of letting us build something for them instead. Because it is difficult to have an online presence and be dependent upon another third-party or several third parties. We deal directly with you.
Bad Code
Not all coders follow WordPress standards and proper coding. There is a right way and a wrong way to add styles (CSS) and JavaScript to a theme or plugin. If not done correctly several issues can arise later for you that you may not see until you are too invested to change. For example, if you entire site is served over a SSL (http vs https) you could see styles and scripts create a “mixed content” warning in the site. Meaning resources are coming in over a unsecured connection.
However, don’t freak out, there is a fix and it was written about very well in this post from ManageWP. Read post here if you are tech savvy you’ll get it quickly resolved.
Essentially the fix can sometimes include reaching out to your developer, but there are a couple of plugins you can try. But the ultimate fix is to just do it correctly, no shortcuts. That’s where premium comes in, and we are that solution.
The cost of premium?
Paying for custom can help you avoid wasting more time and money on a problem that should have been avoided. It may be more costly but in the long run, but you save headaches and personal energy you could have devoted to your product and customers.
A website is the first impression they have and online you only get 7/10ths of a second to impress. Slow sites hurt SEO and user experience, not to mention lost potential revenue you cannot measure because of poor site planning and code.
Contact us to get a quote, as these premium service do come with a price tag, but how valuable is your sanity? And you would be surprised what we can work out with you if you’re on a budget.
