How to choose a premium template provider

Sounds like you’re on the right track, but I’m not sure what you’re asking and how we can help. We can help you with pragmatic issues, not business advice. Do you have a specific question? We need to drive this away from prices and more towards support.

In this forum, we don’t even answer questions about the themes that WordPress hosts, since each has its own forum.
How can we answer anything about code that isn’t hosted here?

To avoid a headache in future if some of those projects live to be two or more years old I think premium themes are the right choices for such projects,

Themes should display content and style it, and that’s it. Not sure why you’d need to pay money for that when there are thousands of free themes here. And if one has a problem or is abandoned, just switch to a new one.

You don’t need to pay money, but the author can be bound into a contract that contains support and maintenance services which are being bought. That takes good research but if that’s what someone needs then I’d say go for it.

You are both right.

I have accented more the price, but the price is not that much important. I have spent last day familiarizing myself with what some of those firms sell, what I need, what I may need, and what I definitely will not need.

StudioPress whose hole offering is rounded around something called Genesys framework I will not need. Elegant Themes offering is all about Divi theme. I still like Aspen Group whose Page Builder gives Divi functionality to any theme (seems to be a very capable piece of software), beyond that they also have some landing pages, plugins, and many themes. From the studios that offer just the themes, one (Modern Themes) is represented here with a few “Light” themes (which are mostly dated; before WP5 release date), the other (Anariel Design) which is also mostly dated in a similar fashion, and the other two Visualmodo and Dessign Themes which aren’t represented here at all.

When I asked a question yesterday I have hoped that someone who had experience with the work of any of those companies answers or that someone points me what should I look out for, but I’ll try to find some independent review to answer those questions if I don’t find them here.

It may be that I am thinking in the wrong way about all those premium services and premium themes. Why does a website owner choose to buy a premium theme instead of a free one?

I understand that in most cases there is one layer in between, the developer, which knows the answer to my question, chooses the right theme for a project with which he is already familiar and if it happens to be a premium theme, incorporates its price into his end price.

I have hoped that all those google search console errors (Text too small to read, Clickable elements too close together, Content wider than the screen, …) and other warnings if happen with a premium theme could be addressed through a support ticket. For example, for my first project, I have used the Pods plugin which was a bit of advanced topic at the time, it took time to figure out that at that moment it could not coexist with Gutenberg. Their excellent support, here, helped me with some advanced filters.

@joyously:
I have read somewhere or heard in some webinar that it should be avoided to change themes with active sites because the content loses ranking in google search when the theme is changed. I do not know if it’s true or not, but if it is, it would be a strong argument to choose a theme carefully and stay with it as long as possible or until a full redesign.

Also, there is the question of speed, many Studios claim to have much faster load times with their pro themes as with their free themes. I have at my site a bit of a speed problem (with google mobile crawler), but it’s reasonable to assume that its due to Pods use.

I’m skim-reading..

I have read somewhere or heard in some webinar that it should be avoided to change themes with active sites because the content loses ranking in google search when the theme is changed.

There’s a big difference from affecting search engines to losing ranking. Nobody can say that you’ll lose ranking and you should always question advice that cannot be proved. However it is true that changing themes does affect search engines because search engines read the HTML of your site (which changes in each theme). Whether it changes for the better or worse is still not something you will ever know.

What I recommend you do is search for themes that have been marked as being good at Accessibility. Accessibility promotes good HTML at its foundation.

Also, there is the question of speed, many Studios claim to have much faster load times with their pro themes as with their free themes

That makes no sense. They will only be able to truly claim that with their own free theme, as they’ll know how it works and what specifically is slowing their free theme down (usually due to poor code). If that’s the perception they’re putting out then that’s bad on them, but don’t listen to general claims.

It may be that I am thinking in the wrong way about all those premium services and premium themes. Why does a website owner choose to buy a premium theme instead of a free one?

Please note that we can’t answer this as that’s a business question.

I understand. Thank you for your time.

One of the reasons for these questions is that I don’t know enough about the field to which marketing claims add value to and which lower the value of a specific offer and your answers helped me learn more and better understand some of the claims.