What should you choose for your blog? Free vs. Paid themes

Design plays a very important role in the success of your blog or site. If your site has great content but a dirty design then you cannot get readers for your blog. Your blog design should be appealing to your readers’ eyes. So a blog is as important as content of the blog. When you are searching a theme for your blog, you get two options – Free and Paid. So which one should you choose?

Most people prefer using free themes as they don’t want to spend money on the thing that is freely available and also they don’t want to take any risk on the new project (new blog). It is a good idea too and there are thousands of free themes available on the web for all platforms like WordPress, Blogger etc. with many good quality themes too. But some people prefer to use only paid themes. Why? Answer is they do not want to take any risk in their project, they want a quality theme for their quality content. But all paid themes are not quality ones and all free themes are not crap ones. When choosing between free and paid themes you should be aware of following facts –

Choice options

You can download any free theme and try it on your blog, if you like it you can use else try other themes.

But in case of paid themes you can’t try them for free. You must read reviews by other bloggers on theme you are going to buy and also you should first find other better themes than the theme you are selecting.

Support

In case of paid themes, generally you get a good support from the developers. You can customize that theme easily or get it customized according to your needs from the developers. You can get all your problems solved by them without the need of messing with codes or seeking help from other people. Most of the good paid themes have good support option or they have established good support forums where you can get help from other users and developers.

Most of the free themes lack this important feature, designers create the theme and publish it on the web, they are not responsible for any problem you encounter while using that theme. They can provide only limited support. If you need any help in customizing that theme, you need to seek help from other sources, mess with codes or hire a freelancer to help you with the theme. So Paid themes have an advantage here.

User friendliness and Customization

Paid themes are generally easy to use and customize, they provide many options to make your theme unique and set it according to your needs. There are many themes available that provide a one-click service for changing color scheme, layout and all other options. You can easily customize your theme even If you are not very good at HTML, CSS etc.

But in case of free themes, you can’t easily customize them if you are not familiar with web development techniques. Then you would again need to get help from other people and pay them for the work. Your free theme may result more expensive than the paid ones in this case. But if you are good at HTML, CSS, PHP etc. then customizing a theme is not a big task for you. Just download any free theme and customize it according to your needs. You can easily create a unique theme from scratch.

Security and upgrades

Paid themes can be easily trusted and they are more secure. If you buy a theme from a trusted source then you can use that theme without any tension. Whenever there are any changes in the platform you use e.g. When you need to upgrade your WordPress installation, your theme will not get affected with this. If the upgrade causes any problems in your theme, then you can get it easily fixed by developers.

But in this case free themes are not trustful if they are not from a trusted designer or source. They also leave a link on the theme to their website and some free themes also encrypt their footers. So if you try to remove the attributes your theme will stop working. Some encrypted codes can also degrade your blog performance on search engines or cause other security risks. When your update your blog platform, then also it depends on developers whether they provide necessary support or not.

Conclusion

So you should choose a free theme only if it is from a trusted source. You should also check if developers have released other themes and provided the basic support like updating themes when you update your WordPress installation. Also if you are good at coding then free themes are best for you. On the other hand paid themes are best for users having little knowledge of web development techniques and for those who don’t want to waste their time on looking for trustful sources and support from developers. You should also note that if you are just going to start blogging, you should prefer a free theme and use it until your blog get some popularity and then you should switch to a paid theme.

If you are also a blogger or going to choose a new theme for your blog then don’t forget to share your views and suggestions with us.