Summary

• It’s not about the themes, those might be good, but the business model is wrong
• The market is simply too big, themes get lost
• There are no simple themes, everything is blown out of proportion

The business model is problematic

I started my career by offering people, especially small business, simple websites. I have shown them a few themes from the Themeforest market, they chose the design they liked and boom, website was done. The problems started, when suddenly, as WordPress do, updates happened. That often meant that the theme had to be updated too. But if the authors did not update their code, the website was broken and I had an angry client.

Now, why would the authors not update their theme? Well, most probably, because I only paid once and most importantly, their theme got lost in a billion other themes, so they were not getting new customers, no money coming in, so why would they spend time on something that doesn’t generate any money.

In the end, after more than 10 years of my career, most of the themes that I bought for my customers back then, are now gone or broken. They simply don’t work anymore.

Themes are crazy complicated – they are slow and they brake

If you check out the themes, you will find out that most of them offer incredible amount of options, tons of demos and whatnot. That looks great if you want to sell the theme and that’s why they are so huge, the problem is, more code, more options, means more probability of failure and slower websites.

That I believe is the reason why there are pretty much no simple minimalist themes, even the ones that call themselves minimalist are always full of animations, complicated design elements etc. Simply because, a simple and easy theme would not sell, it would not be even accepted to the market.

They are often bundled with premium plugins

Now that is one of the worst pains, when it comes to the Themeforest themes. If you get a theme, with for example Bakery builder. Terrible builder, that is a premium plugin, but you don’t get a license for that plugin, there is only code for it. So every time the builder gets updated, which is a lot, then the developers of the theme have to put it in the update of the theme, which you have to download and replace the plugin code. Most often, the developers don’t actually do that, so in the end, your website just breaks and your only option is to buy another license for the builder and hope for the best.

On top of that, the theme might have some special code based on the plugins, so for example, there will be custom blocks made for the builder. So in case the builder gets updated, the developers might have to update their code as well, which of course, they often don’t. It’s simply a tragic story.

Updates are complicated

Unlike free themes from WP repository, you can’t update the theme by clicking on “update theme”. You have to login to your FTP and manually replace the files. If you don’t know how to do that, your website will be a goner, sooner or later. And you might have to do that every time the theme gets updates and the plugins that are bundled with it.

The Freemium is the way

For all the above reasons, I have decided that freemium is the way. You get easy updates, given the themes are on WP repository, the developers have their own websites, that they can promote and of course, they compete with another, but they don’t get lost in a gigantic market.

So from my experience, I have my own website – Minimalio, where I can build my customers base, I don’t compete with anyone on my website, it’s here to stay. I will hopefully make money, by selling extra features with the Premium plugin and I can take care of my own code, that has one purpose only – Minimalist portolio websites.