There are so many informative articles about WordPress CMS templates online. “Best Templates for WordPress”, “Free Templates for WordPress”, “Cool Templates for WordPress” choose any article and you will be offered dozens of paid or free templates for use and tell you how cool it is to use them.
However, in our article we will try to describe why choosing a template as your own site, especially if you plan to get income from it, is a bad idea.
So, meet our TOP on the disadvantages of WordPress CMS templates:
- When buying a template, it is important to understand that the design cannot be changed especially. Since the code already says where the contact blocks, logo, menu, sliders, blocks with text and pictures should be located. Unique design? My friends, forget it!
- Templates, as a rule, include too many unnecessary scripts and modules (galleries, accordions, sliders, animations) that cannot be turned off, which means that additional code will significantly increase the speed of loading the site. Did I say substantially? Yes, your site will load at the speed of a turtle!
- Templates are very difficult to change, the code is too piled up. And in the free templates of low-quality code, a huge amount. Would you like to rewrite the template for yourself? Good luck This is a very laborious, dreary and lengthy process. It’s easier to make a theme from scratch than delving into someone else’s code!
- Search engines do not “like” templates because there are too many similar sites on the Internet. A long road to the TOP of search results from Google, Yandex, Bing is provided to you.
- Templates often conflict with the necessary modules and there is not always support for such great plugins as WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, BuddyPress. Without these tools, you will have to finish the code you need with pens, and this will take a lot of time and nerves.
- A normal template is hard to choose from the many templates that are on the network. Moreover, sometimes a free template may be better than a paid one. Want to play roulette? You are welcome, the choice is yours!
- Limited features of the visual editor (Visual Composer, Divi Builder, Buiver Builder, Fusion Builder) which always comes with a theme and its “heavy” weight is not the best solution for a good site. Another problem often pops up – poor adaptability on tablets and smartphones. And since Google has been using the Mobile First Index since July 2018, you can forget about the top ten TOP!
- Hidden links. Very often, developers hide outbound links to their sites in templates. This is very bad for ranking your site and very good for their own sites where links lead. Significantly reduces the ranking of your resource in the search.
- Ready-made templates, even those that are in the top sellers, have a lot of bugs and errors. Developers fix them as they upgrade, but still this creates a huge inconvenience for users and owners of template sites.
- Ready-made templates during installation will not look like they look in demo versions. Even when importing demo content, the template will be very different from what we see in marketplaces.
- Ready-made templates mainly use Google fonts that do not have Cyrillic support, so fonts may not work adequately.
- The presence of vulnerability. Often, developers do not think about security, but perhaps specifically leave the opportunity to crack and inject malicious code into the template.
- The complex structure of the template. Developers rarely adhere to the official WordPress code and implement a lot of complex code, scatter template files across too many directories and sub directories. Finding the right piece of code for any editing is another task.
- The templates often implement support for social networks and resources that are common in the “West”. Various integration with resources such as Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter is not always needed by the user. It is difficult to remove the above widgets to the user without knowing the code.
- Templates often do not work on some versions of PHP. This creates big problems in the operation of the resource.
- When you make any changes to the template code and its files, updating the theme becomes impossible. An updated topic will overwrite any changes you make. Developers include Child themes for such tasks, but they will have to be finalized and updated manually, which takes a lot of time.
- Recently, a lot of Multipurpose themes have appeared on the market, which include 20-30 different finished designs. Therefore, the amount of code and styles that are contained in the template make it extremely difficult and difficult for a simple user. Download speed suffers first. In our practice, there were patterns with 40,000 lines of code in a CSS file!
Our advice – approach the choice of templates for your websites very carefully, but rather write the site manually (custom). In the future, it will pay off dozens of times!
Forever yours, God of WordPress development.
