I’m sure you’ve come across many free wordpress themes on the internet by now. I’ve seen many of these myself and was quite tempted to use these starting out. However, what you need to remember is there is no such thing as a free lunch and in the case of free WordPress Themes this is very often true.
With few exceptions, Webmasters make these free wordpress themes available to you because they want your website to serve as a linkback to them. How would you be linking back to them you say? Well they have built in weblinks to their websites in the theme you’ve downloaded. The reason back links are valuable to them is for two reasons, they want your website visitors to go visit theirs. They are also counting on external links to their websites to give them higher ranks in the search engines.
To test my claims on the garbage that can be found in some of these themes download the Theme Authenticity Plugin (TAC) and then download and install a few free wordpress themes from various sites you would find in a simple Google search. You’ll be quite suprised, and maybe even disgusted.
Some of these webmasters make it very clear that you are not to remove these links or they may even warn you that the theme will no longer work if you do. I can say from experience that this is often true. Removing a link will sometimes break the theme and at other times, the link will somehow magically appear back in the footers and sidebars of the theme no matter how hard I’ve tried to remove them.
I must also warn you that some of themes even have encrypted code in them, so that you are not able to remove these links very easily. Many people are concerned that this code is could lead to R-rated websites or websites that are involved in SPAM or other practices which no one wants to be associated with. All in all, I wouldnt have minded the inclusion of these codes and backlinks in my free wordpress themes if I was at least warned that they were included in the first place. The websites I found them from were engaging in false advertising as far as I am concerned. Free wordpress themes could end up being something I would be paying for later.
Please note, some free wordpress themes are made available by premium wordpress designers who offer better designed themes for sale. I wouldn’t be concerned over bad coding or their backlinks in this case. There are even some premium wordpress themes that require a backlink to the designers website as per the license requirements which you will have to agree to before purchasing.
Even if you happen to find a free WordPress Theme that contains no malicious encrypted code or backlinks you will want to purchase a premium theme if you are at all serious about having a successful blog. Read 10 Reasons Why You Want to Buy A Premium WordPress Theme to find out why.
