If you are a relatively new blogger, I bet you’ve Googled “free wordpress themes” to search for that great looking theme to match your niche. Am I right? Before you make a huge mistake with your new blog, read on to discover when free WordPress themes are not free.
This very blog started out as a free theme. It not only came with a free theme but also a dozen blog posts. How cool was that to have an instant WordPress website. I found out later that when something is too good to be true, it usually is.
I recently sat in on a WordPress security webinar with Regina Smola and Cindy Bidar. These weekly webinars come with my membership in their recently launched SafeWP. This particular webinar was about the dangers of free WordPress themes.
I thought I knew a lot about this subject but they taught me a thing or two!
It used to be that web developers would create free themes as an advertisement for their web development services. The thinking was that if you liked their free themes, then you would be more likely to hire them for custom work.
Along the way some developers discovered that they could make more money by selling backlinks to other websites and deliver those backlinks by embedding them in their free themes. For more information on what a backlink is, read Backlinks are Key to Getting Traffic to Your Blog.
Here’s one of the examples that Regina & Cindy showed on their webinar. They found a website on the first page of Google for free themes. The home page of that website is filled with great looking screenshots of their themes. Click on the image below to enlarge one of the themes.
Pretty nice looking theme, heh?
Well, let’s look a little closer. I took a screenshot of the footer as well. I had to highlight the text because it was practically the same color as the background which made it difficult to see.
It might have been difficult for readers to see but the search engines can definitely see it.
So you might say, “Well, you can just find that in the code and delete it.” You would think so, but it was deeply embedded in the code and then encoded so that it looked like gibberish within an interior file. And to make matters worse, if you tried to delete the code in the footer, it killed the whole theme!
There were other themes they reviewed on the webinar where the links were not as plain as SUVs but rather promoting drugs and other such things. If you Google the phrase in the footer above, you’ll find thousands of websites that unknowingly have it in their footer.
Here’s an excerpt from the webinar. [Warning… it’s a little bit geeky :) ]
The lesson here is…
Be aware of what you are getting especially if it is free, whether it be free WordPress themes, plugins or any other software. If you want a free theme, try to stick to the ones in the WordPress.org directory because at least they have looked at them. Read the terms of service because many developers require that a link back to their own site must remain in exchange for giving it away.
I also highly recommend keeping up with WordPress security issues and an easy way to do that is to subscribe to a service like SafeWP where they do all the heavy lifting for you. Use coupon code MYBONUSBLOG to get one month free to try it out with no strings attached.
