Why you should avoid WordPress website templates

The design is the first thing your visitors judge when they come across your website. User experience is equally important. If you take a closer look at WordPress templates, they underperform in both areas.

Where do WordPress website templates fall short?

So what is it about pre-made themes that make them unreliable when it comes to a business website?

Subpar optimisation of WordPress templates

Whether you pick a single- or multi-purpose theme, they will both include excessive code that can slow your site down.

Multi-purpose themes consist of a lot of page templates, add-ons and features to cater to a wider audience. Your business will use just a fraction of the available features. The rest will be a burden for your hosting.

The same applies to a single-purpose theme, though to a lesser extent. Even if you find a theme designed for your business type, it still needs to offer features for a wide range of companies. Your business is unique and you won’t need every single feature.

Your website won’t stand out

One purpose of having a business website is taking a part of the online space and making it your own. Depending on the popularity of the theme, there will be dozens to hundreds or even thousands of businesses with a similar website. This interferes with any of your marketing and branding efforts. Speaking of which…

The flexibility is worse than perceived

Adding or changing elements of WordPress website templates can severely damage your website. A simple measure of installing a WordPress plugin can cause a conflict with your theme. This means you’re limited to what the theme has to offer. At this point, your design doesn’t leverage your business – it becomes a constraint. No amount of money spent on marketing and branding will overcome that.

Getting support can be tricky

While premium theme support has improved a lot over the years, they do not warrant stability. Even if the creators of your theme will fix the bugs, it will take time – you will lose visitors and clients during that time.

If the theme you’re using is popular, the support will be better. But on the other hand, your individual issues might not apply to most of its users. As such, the developers won’t see your problems as a priority.

At the same time, having a fix done by an external developer could cause conflicts with future updates of the theme. The potential issues are just piling up.