WordPress is the world's most successful content management system and blogging platform. It powers approx 32% websites which are live on the World Wide Web. In a very short time, a massive amount of sites has opted for WordPress because of its simple interface and quality features. The WP software is based on the open source tech which means you can use it for free. So if it's free, then why to pay for a commercial WordPress theme? 

At present, there are a vast number of WordPress templates/themes available in the market. If you not able to find a suitable one, opt for custom Wordpress theme development services in which you will get your hands on a tailor-made layout for your portal. While looking out for the template you will come across several free and paid themes. There are great products in WordPress Directory, some are good and some are terrible. 

Buying a premium theme has its own benefits such as quality images, easy navigation, fully-customized, customer-centric experience. What should you look for before purchasing a paid template?

1. A Good Feature Set

A template offering great features will make your customisation process stress-free. Buy a theme which allows you add/remove elements whenever you want. Moreover, it should also have an easy navigation system so that everyone can browse through the content, products and services offered on your site. 

2. Solid Performance

The demand for Wordpress web development services providers is rising day by day. So it's recommended to hire someone who offers you with a high-performance theme which comes with optimised images, zero bloatware, lightweight, no bandwidth-hogging payloads and contains useful widgets. Before making your template live on the web, test it properly. 

3. Without Stuff You Don’t Need?

Some paid themes come loaded with several author choice widgets. This may not be a problem if they add value to your site's functioning. It will be good if you use only those which are required and keep rest of the widgets disabled to avoid any lag. Activating each and every feature of a theme sometimes degrades the user experience. 

4. Client-Facing Functionality

Almost all the web designers and clients love WYSIWYG, drag and drop functionality, colour pickers, live web previews and several other lovely features which make the HTML/CSS integration and web development hassle-free. Premium themes often provide an experience which stretches WordPress to new user-friendly limits. 

5. Developer-Friendly

Nobody wants to face tricky and complex codes which are hard to tweak. Most of the paid themes have a well-documented structure and permit users to make changes without wading through thousand lines of codes, compressed HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP scripts. 

6. Service and Support

The best thing about paid templates is that they offer 24/7 assistance for the users. Moreover, the developers also offer tutorials to the users who don't have much technical expertise. Premium templates are more likely to offer a high level of assistance when you by mistake run into a development and usage issue. You can get in touch with the developers via email or telephone. Apart from that, you can also post queries in the WordPress theme community which has thousands of global users and experienced WP developers. 

7. Ongoing Updates and Fixes

Several free or cheaper templates are written once and never updated. The developers behind these themes usually move to something else which pays their bills. So does the users ever receive any bug updates? Will it continue to operate with the next release of the WP version? Those creating premium templates usually charge money from the users, so they have to roll out necessary updates and bug fixes. 
 
Conclusion

Purchasing paid themes is a good way to give a user-friendly layout to WordPress powered website and if you have a hefty budget for WP development then opt for custom theme development.