Sometime in the future, your website is going to need a refresh and today we’re gonna talk about whether to go with a refresh of a free theme, a premium theme, or a completely custom theme and talk about what the differences are and which choice you should make right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, Episode No. 398.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and I’m here today to talk all about WordPress. And we’re gonna be talking about WordPress themes mainly because I start looking around YourWebsiteEngineer.com and think, “Hey, it’s been a couple years since this has had any updates or changes or modifications to it.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, I should make some changes and make it current with 2018 and whatnot.” So, I was thinking about, “Okay, do I go with a theme? Do I just start customizing the theme that I already have and make some changes?” And so that kind of is why we’re gonna be talking about that today.

But first, I’ve got three announcements and a plugin to share with you. The first announcement is WooCommerce Custom Products Table beta. This was just released today, July 17th, and the announcement is basically that WooCommerce is now adding a database table – so, its own database tables – in order to make WooCommerce much, much faster and more efficient when generating reports and gathering data that’s happening in your store. So, this beta has come out and it’s basically worked through – and they’ve changed the structure of WooCommerce – instead of using these default tables inside of WordPress, they use their own custom tables.

And so they did some performance testing just to see what this looks like and they basically set up two identical stores on the same hosting provider with the same theme and the same WooCommerce settings. The only difference was running the custom products featured plugin. So, it’s a plugin that you can add that will move all your data from the normal tables to these new, custom tables. And they created a dataset of 500 products, imported them to two identical stores – both using Storefront as the theme, no other plugins and one store with WooCommerce data – and basically both stores had 70,000 orders in the database and the metadata range was in the range of 1.4 million rows. And so with the new average load time on the shop page, it went from .57 seconds down to .41 seconds.

On the checkout page, it went from .43 down to .29 and, on the admin side of things to refresh the pages on the admin side; it went from half a second down to .37 seconds. So, it’s really cool. I haven’t had a chance – it just came out like an hour ago so I haven’t even had a chance to play with it yet – but if you are interested, you will need a couple things. You need the Custom Products Table feature plugin – and there’s a link to all this in the show notes. You need WooCommerce 3.5 development branch and you need WPCLI to migrate products into the new data stores. And then there’s the tests and it tells you exactly what commands to use in WPCLI and you can work through all of the issues there and set that up.

So, that is something that’s coming in WooCommerce 3.5. Another thing that I want to share is over on WordPress.org/news, there is a quarterly update and it is the Q-2 2018 update and this is some of the things that were worked on in Quarter 2 and it kind of breaks down the things by the different areas within WordPress.org – so accessibility, CLI, community corps, design, documentation, hosting, marketing, meta, mobile, plugins, polyglots support, theme review tied to training, and it just talks about all of the things that have been happening. So, if you’re interested in any of those areas and just want some more information – I’m not gonna read through this whole thing – but there’s a link in the show notes for Episode No. 398 that will give you updates and let you know what’s happening in the WordPress space.

The other thing that I found on WP Tavern this week is there is a theme shop called Array launches a free Gutenberg-ready atomic block theme on WordPress.org. That is a mouthful, but Mike McAlister and the team over at Array themes have embraced Gutenberg and is one of the first shops on the scene with a free WordPress theme designed specifically to work with the new Editor. And the Atomics Block theme – that’s what they’re calling it – is now available on WordPress.org with minimal styling and seamless support for core content and media blocks. So, if you’re looking for a new theme, this is one.

We’re gonna be talking about theme today, but this is a free plugin or a free theme that’s already set to go with Guttenberg – the latest and greatest update that’s coming out in WordPress 5.0 – which should be next month. Maybe in September we’ll see that. But if you’re interested and checking that out, there’s a link in the show notes for that as well. And then, is there a plugin for that? There’s always a plugin for that. There’s thousands, tens of thousands, of plugins in the WordPress repository. This one is a simple plugin. It is a very small plugin, but it is a plugin called Customizer Refresh. And sometimes you need to refresh the customizer preview.

Maybe you’ve made some changes with CSS and you just need to refresh or whatever that looks like or whatever the case may be that you would need a refresh button and that’s what this plugin does. It adds a little refresh button right next to the publish button at the top of the customizer and it gives you the ability to refresh and take a look at the new page load for your site. And so if you need something like this, head on over to the WordPress repository and search for Customizer Refresh and you’ll find it right there. Alright, moving right along today – like I said – we are gonna be talking about the themes and what should we do? Should we buy a premium theme? Should we use a free theme on the WordPress repository? Should we Google and find a free theme or should we have something custom made?

So, there’s lots of different things to think about and I just want to run down some of the reasons or some comparisons on whether to use a premium theme or a custom theme or even we can start with a free theme. Free themes are out there and they are great if they have some of the features you’re looking for. A lot of the things that I look for in a website – and this is my personal preference – is because I’m not a designer, I look for a theme that has the most design elements that I’m looking for or that I require or want to have in my theme and I look for a theme if I’m gonna purchase one with the most amount of those things so that I don’t have to do a lot of custom programming or design-related things.

So, if you want a pretty simple website – if you don’t have a lot of bells or whistles or need a lot of requirements and can basically just want a place to post your content and it doesn’t really matter what you’re looking for in a site – then I think a free WordPress theme on the WordPress repository is going to be perfect. I recommend a free WordPress theme from Google search absolutely never. I know that there are some good ones out there.

A few years ago, it was a thing that there was malicious code added to themes that you’d find when you Googled free WordPress theme and so we don’t want to do that. if we are looking for a free theme, head on over to the WordPress repository and search for theme and then – in there – they have a filter that you can go in and you can say, “Oh, well I’m looking for this color” or “I want two columns” or “I want some of these other features” and it will find and filter out the content there. The reason that I recommend downloading these from the WordPress repository is because all of those are seen before they are approved. They’re looked over by the theme review team and they make sure that there’s no malicious code in there, there’s no backlinks to the user’s site or the theme owner’s site and whatnot. So, they’re very reputable and they work well.

They just usually don’t have a lot of bells and whistles built in. Usually, things are only you can make changes in the customizer and there’s just you’re not gonna do a lot of customizations. They may have one or two different page layout options, but there’s just not gonna be a lot in there when it comes to a free WordPress theme. You might want to go with a premium WordPress theme if you need maybe a small website or have a very limited budget or you have lack of design or development skills or you don’t want to pay or you don’t have the inspiration to try to figure out what you’re looking for. Maybe you found a theme and you’re pretty excited about it right out of the box or maybe you don’t plan to have any functionality updates in the future.

Those are some of the just kind of the baseline ideas of when a premium WordPress theme would work. You might want to go with the customer WordPress theme if you feel that your site deserves a unique design and it has to fulfill specific aesthetics or functionality requests, if there’s no theme that fits your needs without modifications. You may want to update your site with a new functionality at a later date. You want to make sure the site is optimized for page loading speed and quality and any such issues could easily be resolved later on. You want to make sure all of that’s taken care of. You want a lean admin dashboard where just the options for you or your client to need to customize later.

So, those are – again – some of the overarching things, the overarching kind of recap or precap – I don't know. It’s not a recap when you say it at the beginning of the show, but those are some of the things to think about as we talk through this conversation today. And so one of the things is we’re at the 30 percent mark with WordPress. There’s lots of website that are using WordPress themes out there. There’s a lot of premium themes that are out there that do a great job and they can help you get a website set up nice and easy and quick and fast, but then it also depends on you know you don’t want to have hundreds of thousands of sites using the exact, same theme and so all the sites on the internet look the same.

So, that’s like another thing like, “Oh, you know is there too many people using this premium theme? Can I not customize it quite enough to make it look what I want it to do?” So, that’s when maybe a custom theme would come in – a custom-built WordPress site. So, those are some things that – just kind of as a baseline – that I wanted to cover. Now the differences between a premium theme and a custom theme – and maybe I should have said this first – but the difference is a custom theme is – Back in the day, it used to be called – They used to be the PSD to WordPress. So, that’s like a Photoshop file that somebody would create and then a developer would change that into HTML and then they would change it into a WordPress theme. These are custom-built according to precise design specifications from the clients.

And then there’s theme-based builds where you go and you kind of ask the client or ask yourself, “Okay, what am I looking for in a website?” and then you find the best features that you’re looking for in a premium theme and then you take that and then you use that one off the shelf and then you start plugging in your data and your information and maybe importing posts if you’re doing this from a refresh from a previous theme or whatnot. So, that would be more of what’s under the premium theme. It’s something that you can go out and you buy. You’re talking about $50.00 to $100.00 price point. A premium WordPress theme is basically a prefabricated set of page templates that contain the visual elements of the site and also sometimes have plugins for search and functionality.

So, these themes are built by WordPress developers usually in companies specialized in building themes. Theme Forest and Template Monster are places, Thrive Themes, there are Elegant themes, there’s the Genesis theme, there’s Beaver Builder. There’s a bunch of these other things out there. Avada has one. Divi has one. There are a lot of functionality built into some of these themes – especially some of these ones that have page builders built in, like the Beaver Builder, Divi. Some of the premium themes like the ones at Theme Forest or maybe Thrive Themes, those are more like coloring books. You can only do one thing. Your site’s gonna look pretty much the same. You might be able to change some things here, there; you know change of colors, change some fonts maybe, and whatnot.

The others are more like a Swiss Army knife. So, the Divi theme or Beaver Builder, you can carry the whole thing around and – if you need a corkscrew – you’ve got a corkscrew just like in a Swiss Army knife and if you want to do this, you know you’ve got a knife or you’ve got the toothpick that’s built into the Swiss Army knife. But you basically can customize it to your exact specifications. You can do everything that you need. One of the really interesting parts about a premium theme like Divi – or in some of these other page builders – is I real online – and you know everything that’s online is true – but there was recently someone did an experiment.

They made two sites with the exact, same specifications and requirements and they built one with a Divi theme and they did one custom built and the sites look identical, but the theme-based one – so the Divi one – had 13 times as many lines of CSS to do the exact same thing as a custom WordPress theme did as well. So, that means that for 1,200 lines of CSS in a custom built, it took 16,000 lines of code to do that in CSS. Now, there’s also within these premium themes there’s lots of different options in the dashboard of premium themes. So, sometimes it can add to – it almost makes it feel like WPAdmin – the dashboard feature – has all these new features and setting and configurations and it can make it almost sound like a little bit of a jungle or feel like a jungle and you’re not sure where those settings are.

Is it a WordPress thing? Is it a theme-related thing? And so those are some things to think about when purchasing one of these themes. I mean I absolutely like the ability to be able to customize everything from the admin side, but adding all this information and adding all these settings and checkboxes and configuration things, it just really slows down every WPAdmin page load and it just makes it a little bit longer to navigate through the dashboard. So, that’s something to think about if you’re considering a premium theme. If you are considering a custom theme, this is something that would be something that’s completely unique. It would be completely to you – unto your specifications, of course – and this is something that companies do.

You go through the entire design process kind of like a few episodes ago when I talked about how building a website is like building a house. You sit down and you say all the requirements and “Here’s the things I’m looking for” and then they draw some things out and then they build it. It can take a lot of work. It can be something that it takes a lot of time to get going and setting up, but one of my things that I always recommend when I talk to people about WordPress is WordPress is easy, yes, but to get your website up and running, I think sometimes it’s important to find somebody that can help get your website up and going and your theme laid out exactly the same.

I think a lot of WordPress users get frustrated when they spend hours trying to customize a theme to get it to look exactly the way they want it to when, in reality, if you pay somebody to do that you can manage everything on the backend of WordPress if all of the colors are set up right, all the CSS is set up right. Then, you can just add the features and the settings and the things that’s important to you once your site has been set up. So, I don't think that the PSD to HTML layout or PSD to WordPress theme is really a thing too much anymore. I mean this was something more five, six years ago. But now with responsive design, a lot of things what I see a lot of major WordPress theme companies doing now is wire framing.

So, they’ll go in and they’ll just kind of create a mockup with wire frames and then they’ll have somebody program it and start adding those features in – usually from a mobile design first. So, they’re programming it so it looks good on mobile and then they’re adding the features as they expand into larger versions of the website. So, there’s a couple myths that some people have about custom themes. So, if you purchase a premium theme from Theme Forest or Thrive Themes – again any of these theme shops – they’re gonna roll out regular updates to their themes. And so one of the misconceptions of having a custom theme is that they don’t have this like you have a custom theme that you bought from a developer and – in the next five years – you’re never gonna get an update to that theme unless you pay them money for an update.

Well, so some people think that it’s not as secure to have these custom built sites, that they don’t update, they don’t have those security features built in, but that’s really a misconception. Most of the time, the reason that those themes are updated is because there’s either a bug has been found or if some sort of extra functionality has been added. So, like if say a contact form builder or a contact form – say a contact form builder has built into the theme or something for a gallery is built into the theme and now –all of a sudden – the framework that was used for that gallery is now outdated or there’s a new version that’s fixed some security holes, then that’s when premium themes have updating.

The other myth that’s out there is that custom built sites are more expensive than theme-based sites. This can be true in some cases, but especially if you’re on a very, very tight, restricted budget, it may be best to go with the theme option. But over time, the opposite is generally true. In this case study that I read, it was really interesting that over time some of the costs could be very, very similar. So, if you buy a $50.00 theme and now – all of a sudden – you need some extra work done or this feature of the theme is no longer working and that theme shop is no longer in service or they’re not servicing their themes, it could take a lot of development time to figure out what’s going on inside that theme and strip out that functionality that’s not working and add that functionality back in.

But with a custom theme – when themes are only doing theme type stuff and not any – You know themes, in general, are only supposed to do visuals. They’re only supposed to show the visuals of your content and your information. There should be no built-in feature to change colors on the backend. There should be no feature to add testimonials and all of this extra stuff – these settings that have been added and jammed into these themes. Those aren’t necessarily a good thing. They’re great that they’re there in the fact that it makes it easy to set up. It makes it easy for somebody with limited knowledge can set up a theme and put the information that they want exactly where they want it, but it just makes it very cumbersome and very time consuming when one of those features of that plugin breaks or they want to change to another theme but they’ve got a lot of content.

There are testimonials maybe about content or about their team and stuff and that’s all built into custom post types inside of the theme itself and that’s all saved inside the theme and then – when they move to another theme – all that work is lost. And so over the scope of time in this case study that I read, a company wanted to add just a little bit of extra functionality or something was broken on their website and the premium theme that they happened to use was wired into the theme and didn’t allow the functionality that they needed. So, in the case study, it took 32 hours of recoding the theme to replace it with another plugin. They replaced it with Gravity Forms to add the functionality and – if it was one of the custom built sites – the same request would have taken about four hours. So, it was one-eighth of the cost later to do the work that was needed.

So, I can’t say, or I guess if the question is, “Should I use a premium theme or should I use a custom theme?” The answer is always gonna be it depends. You have to take some considerations. You have to think about the cost. Do you want to have a little bit more upfront cost? That’s going to be around the custom route. You’re gonna spend a little bit of money up front and it’s going to be all you know exactly what you’re gonna get. You’re gonna have that functionality that you need when the site and the project’s over. And then if you want something a little bit less expensive to start with, you can use that premium theme. Get off the ball rolling and a premium theme is a great thing if you’re wanting to try out an idea.

Maybe you’re just trying to get a web presence. You just want to get a website online. A free theme or a premium theme, that would be perfect options for those and you can spend minimum money to see if it’s a good business idea or whatever. Then, if things kind of ramp up or you get featured on Shark Tank or you know you’re gonna be on your local news station or whatever, then you can spend some money to customize and get some of those extra features that you’re looking for. If you’re trying to build a website that is 100 percent determined on – or 100 percent, you want to spend a lot of time focusing on speed and performance.

You want something that’s really fast, really snappy, and is going to load very, very quickly. Then, I don't think that there’s any premium themes that are out there that would really focus on that. So, that would be more of a custom WordPress theme route. Make sure that you’ve pared down all of your code and you only have the essential code that you need to run and to load that website. So, lots to think about when it comes to coming up with this new idea, lots to think about when you’re coming up with your new plan for your WordPress refresh. Now, what am I gonna to do? I don't know. So, there’s some WordPress themes that are out there that I kind of like.

What I typically have done the last couple YourWebsiteEngineer.com refreshes is I have taken a HTML theme – I have found and purchased an HTML theme – then turned it into a WordPress theme, which is kind of like going along the line of a custom WordPress site. Then that way, I only bring in what I need. If I would buy a WordPress theme, it’s gonna have all these options and all this stuff in the backend that I don’t need. Like if I want to change a color, I’m gonna change it within the CSS code and I don’t need a dashboard icon for me to change that information. So, that’s kind of where I’m heading, where I’m going. I think what I’m gonna do is I’m actually going to just clone YourWebsiteEngineer.com from my dev site and make an additional copy and then start making some of the changes.

I know some of the features that I want to add – some of the refreshes and updates – and then maybe I’ll just keep the same theme and then I’ll just start adding and customizing and making those changes inside of the current theme. I don't know. I haven’t really decided. It’s one of those Quarter 3 things that I want to work on and I want to just have a refreshed web presence because I think I launched this site in 2015, which was quite a many a year ago when it comes to website ages. Alright. That’s what I wanted to share this week. Next week, I’ll be hanging out at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia. If you’re in that area, come over and say hi at the WordPress.com booth. That’s where I’ll be hanging out and I’ve got a prerecorded message there or a prerecorded podcast episode for you and so we’ll talk again next week. Take care and bye, bye.