Premium themes vs. Free themes

I found this YouTube video and it’s helpful. This guy describes some very important things that come with premium themes.

Now … there’s the commitment.
I’ve chosen a free them and then found something odd about it and then changed to a new theme an hour later.

Curious about other peoples’ thoughts and experiences with Free vs Premium.

The biggest difference relative to this forum is that premium themes are NOT supported here, and if they do not have a GPL license, questions regarding them are not welcome here at all. The support you get with a paid theme varies a lot — so check that out carefully before you buy. What the paid support includes depends on the company and your terms and conditions agreement. Chances are that paid support does not include doing work for you, though you can often pay more for custom work.

Even if you can afford paid support or custom work, it still adds a layer of time / hassles / potential problems that you would avoid by learning some basic CSS and coding yourself. But if you’d rather not make that effort, paying someone else is an option.

WPyogi, thanks for being both honest and informative.

Themes hosted at WPORG must all undergo a pretty strict review process which ensures that all themes are of the same high quality. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some commercial themes.

esmi, thanks! Once again, you jump in and teach me something.

No problem. ??

I also think that support varies tremendously from theme to theme – irrespective of whether they are free or paid for. Suffusion, for example is an extremely powerful, free, theme framework with almost endless customisation options and the support for it has always been excellent (from what I’ve seen). Responsive is another very popular free theme with really good support.

The trick when posting here for support is to ensure that you always post your topic via the “Write a new topic” link on the theme’s page in the Theme Repo. That at least gives the theme developer a fighting chance of finding your topic.

I tried a few more free themes and have decided to go with Suffusion. WOW! This is wonderful. There are lots and lots of dashboards and tweaks and it’s fantastic. A lot of the stuff that was vexing about 2010 Weaver and dealing with code is handled in Suffusion dashboards.

Thanks for the suggestion esmi.

Glad I could help ??

It’s a pity that even if we release free theme under GPL license it will never be approved on WPORG because we’re also making premium wordpress themes. Correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t seen any free theme here that comes close to premium theme design standards. That’s why I think that themes from authors that also make premium themes should be allowed here.