Warning Signs Your Free WordPress Theme is Sabotaging Your Blog

When you start your new blog and select WordPress as your CMS (Content Management System), a free WordPress theme is automatically installed on your blog.

You always have a chance to upgrade to a premium theme, but you never pay attention to it and keep using the free theme months or even years later. You may never realize that this free theme is actually costing you a lot.

But how can you find out for sure?

Why There’s No Such Thing as a Free WordPress Theme

You might think that you had chosen the free theme so you had done great work. Actually no, because “free” must always have a hidden price.

Free themes come at the price of your time and resources, which is the most valuable thing in today’s life. They snatch your audience and badly affect your blog’s growth.

The longer you delay in upgrading the blog’s theme, the more chances are there that you give up because of frustration.

No doubt, choosing a free theme seems a good idea in the start; later it starts decreasing the life of your blog.

How would you determine if your free theme is working fine or is sabotaging your blog?

The following points describe the 7 warning signs your free WordPress theme is sabotaging your blog:

1) You Change Your Theme More Often Than Your Clothes

When will you know that now it’s time to upgrade your WordPress theme? You are not happy with your theme and don’t want to use it for long.

A free theme makes you feel better but later it starts disturbing you and you feel the need to change it as soon as possible. There could be many reasons that may force you to change the theme or upgrade it. These reasons may include; the theme is not as appealing as other blogs or your blog looks identical to other blogs or your theme is having lacks needed functionality.

Changing the theme regularly seems harmless, but it does have many major issues associated with it.

Firstly, it is time-consuming work. Every time, you need to search for a theme and then download and install it on your blog. After that, you have to configure the new theme settings and check if the theme is reflecting the customizations you made before. Playing around with new themes also takes time.

Secondly, it also affects the user experience. You need to think from a user’s perspective. The users are used to the layout of your blog and know how to find something they need. And then suddenly the layout is changed, they try to adjust with the new layout and adapt it. When they’re about to get used to the new layout, the theme is changed again. Don’t you think, this way they would get annoyed? Surely, they would.

If you had surfed your time, money, and energy on the premium theme, you would never feel the need to change it soon. So try to invest in a premium theme that will stay with you for a long and adopt the changes you make.

2) You’re Using Plugins to Plug Holes

Most Bloggers make this mistake, they think using many plugins on the blog will give better results. But no, using too many plugins proves to be harmful to the blog’s health. Plugins seem like a quick fix but they probably aren’t.

A poorly coded plugin can ruin your entire blog, so always try to be choosy about using plugins.

Around 42,000+ plugins are available this time, and all of them are not poorly coded. There also exist some excellent plugins. Every plugin comes with a risk, but you won’t have to take this risk if your theme had all the functionalities you need.

Most commonly plugins are used for the following features:

– Social sharing

– Optimized image galleries

– Related posts

– Visual editor

But a Premium theme most likely comes up with all of these features, eliminating the need for such plugins.

Some plugins are not avoidable even though you use a premium theme. This means you should have to make use of plugins wisely. Don’t use too much and only use what is most necessary.

3) Your Nav Bar Is Like a Cockroach That Just Won’t Die

A landing page is the best option to gain more subscribers. Thus, every blogger wants to have a landing page on their blog. They want a landing page with no Nav bars and no sidebars because it mostly distracts the visitors from the one call to action to subscribe to the blog.

But some of the free themes don’t have the ability to remove all the navigations from one or set of particular pages.

Many free themes allow you to hide the sidebar for the purpose of displaying the content in full width. But they don’t provide you the facility to remove the Nav bars from specific pages, which is the need for a landing page to work correctly.

A very limited number of plugins are designed to perform this task. But according to the reviews on these plugins, there appeared many issues with these plugins.

If you want to know if your theme has a landing page feature or not, follow these steps:

– Click the “Pages” menu from the WordPress dashboard and then open the page to edit.

– On the right side of the screen, look for the “Page Attributes” option. In case you don’t find it, click on the “Screen options” residing at the top of the screen and check the “Page Attribute” box.

– If your theme has a landing page feature, you will see the “Landing Page” or “Blank Page” options to select within “Template”. If it doesn’t have a landing page, you will see the “Page Attributes” portion below

You can also check about the landing page feature in the theme’s documentation. You can find the documentation here: Appearance > Themes > Them Details. If there is nothing mentioned about the landing page, it means the theme doesn’t have this feature.

With a free theme, you can buy a premium plugin to fulfill this function. But this wouldn’t be a good choice, besides you can surf your money on a premium theme that will create landing pages as well as provide other features too.

Continue to part 2 of this article