WordPress by far is the most popular content management system or blogging platform used worldwide. Reasons for popularity of WordPress being its ease of use, good on eye and easy to use admin panel, flexibilities to extend it and make more versatile etc.
You might have used WordPress in you website or even thinking about using it for your website in near future. Pretty sure you must have asked yourself – Shall I buy a premium theme or go for Custom Build Theme?
The process of selecting theme depends upon several factors. These includes cost, your long term target, your target market etc. Sometime premium theme which is less costly might be good option, in other circumstances custom built theme serves the purpose of your website better.
Here by I will be listing some of major factors which way you should go for?
1. Cost
Definitely the cost is the utmost factor in deciding which way you should go for.
If you are looking to get jobs done within limited budget, premium theme is a better option. This is if cost and savings is top of agenda than any other thing. A premium theme cost anywhere between 40-60 Dollars on an average and there are plenty of option on the web to select one that suits your requirements.
On other hand if you have decent budget and looking for much more quality website it is a good idea to find and hire an experienced wordpress web developer. I will be discussing on major points on what option will be better for your website.
2. Page Speed or Loading time for website
One of the biggest flaw that most of premium theme have is that since its targeted for wider audience, it comes with extended functionalities and hence it will baulk load lot of unwanted css and javascript files and unwanted programming language logics.
Apparent consequences of it being it will inject many server request lookups and slow down the site. It’s always good idea when selecting premium theme to test how many server request it send as well as test page size.
On other hand, custom wordpress theme is built only targeting the custom features are needed by the website. And hence it minimises the server redirects as well as the page size will be relatively low.
Considering since responsive websites loads the same website in all devices, it might be quiet a big decision to choose a premium theme or custom theme. If a low page size and decent speed is required then custom theme is recommended else if you don’t mind if the website loads bit slowly overall then premium theme might be a good solution for you.
3. Maintainability and Flexibility
As mentioned previously premium themes come with featured packed installation which in turns add more plugins with the theme prebuilt in. This will in turn lead to maintaining and updating the plugins at frequent intervals.
On other hand a custom wordpress theme have relatively less number of plugins and hence maintain and updating the plugins won’t be hassle. Also adding new features in future will be much easier to build on custom wordpress theme as there will be less dependencies.
Unlike in case of premium themes, there is a minimum chance of collision and conflicts due to presence of less code and plugins in custom wrodrpess theme.
4. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
My experience dealing with premium theme is that adding up advanced SEO features can be bit tricky. This is not to collide with the fact that there are plenty of themes there which are well built for SEO. But in general, premium themes lack these features.
Unlike premium theme, custom wordpress theme can be well built around targeting better SEO features. One of the major topic where custom topic overrule over premium theme is the SEO Silo *.
*Silo being advanced SEO topic I will be writing in later topics.