The Problem With Premade WordPress Themes

WordPress (WP) is an extremely popular Content Management System (CMS) for websites. I would guess that 90% of our clients run WP software. This website is running WP.

They’re are many reasons to choose WP. One of which is it’s great for SEO and uploading content. It’s also easy to increase page speed and load time of your website. Sites like Themeforest also have many amazing pre made themes for as low as $50. But there is one main reason why WP might not be the best CMS for your website.

WordPress Security Issues

Since WP runs on an estimated to 23% of all websites, it’s the target of security issues.

Obviously the software falls victim to viruses or spam by hacking into the software itself or through the many plugins. I’ll let Alex Grant educate you on WordPress security issues and threats so you can protect your website. As long as you follow the steps from that blog post, it is extremely unlikely your site will get hacked.

One of the key things to avoid security issues and threats is to simply update yourWP version to the latest. WordPress released version 4.5 on April 12th. They do plenty of updates to avoid security threats.

Great right? In most cases, yes. In some cases, it’s a nightmare.

Why though?

The Problem With Premade WordPress Themes

Because some premade WP themes purchased from places like Themeforest might not be compatible with the latest version of 4.5. This has happened to one of our clients back when 4.0 was released. And it happened again when 4.5 was released.

Because of this, I’m normally cautious of updating a clients WP software when an update comes out. And I was for one of our newest clients The IV Lounge. The issue wasn’t with the theme itself they have. It was with a popular plugin called Visual Composer which helps structure and display your content.

Visual Composer was breaking down with the new 4.5 release. Up until April 15th, you were screwed as that’s when Visual Composer (VC) pushed through a new update which was compatible with 4.5.

If you happen to experience an issue like this, you’ll have to do some research to see what is causing the problem. I Googled and searched Twitter once I noticed our clients site was not displaying content properly.

Once you find out that there is an issue, the easiest solution is to downgrade your WP version to the previous one that was working. This would take you to be certain what WP version you were running before and for you to or your web developer to have your FTP server details.

This worked for our client when their site wasn’t working with the WP 4.0 update. It didn’t work The IV Lounge.

Why?

The issue was that their previous web designer had setup WP to automatically update.

Great idea. Unless things like this happen and our clients web designer went MIA a few months back without giving them their website hosting and FTP details.

Thankfully our clients site is almost back fully. There is just a couple more issues we are sorting out.

But it’s a reason to avoid premade Wordpress themes. Sometimes it’s better to pay for a custom design that will work with any WP update. It’s also another lesson for you have access to your website hosting and FTP account.