That cheap WordPress theme is going to cost you far more than you paid for it

I've lost count of the number of times I've been called in to fix a site that started life as a £49 marketplace theme. It's usually the same shape of problem: the developer's gone quiet, the site's breaking in ways nobody can quite explain, and underneath it all sits a theme (the ready-made design and layout you drop your content into) that seemed like a perfectly sensible buy at the time. And every time, sorting it out costs more than building it properly would have in the first place.

I've been working with WordPress since the early days, and I've watched the ecosystem and the problems that come with it grow in tandem. The marketplace model, where you buy a theme, bolt on a few plugins (a plugin is just a bolt-on that adds a feature), and hand the lot to a developer who treats it like a jigsaw, is one of the more reliable ways to end up with a site that looks fine for eighteen months and then quietly falls apart.

Here's how it tends to go. The theme stops getting updates, then a plugin gets abandoned by whoever wrote it, and the developer who assembled the whole thing has long since moved on and isn't thinking about what happens next. So you're left holding something nobody fully understands, yourself included.

And I get the appeal, the pitch is a good one. All-in-one solution, less than a hundred quid, everything you need. But what you're actually buying is someone else's idea of what a website should do, packaged up and sold to thousands of businesses with completely different needs. The more popular the theme, the bigger the target it paints on your site, because a popular theme is exactly where an attacker goes looking (one weakness gets them into thousands of sites at once). Stack enough plugins on top and you simply have more moving parts, each able to break on its own. Which they do.

The developers who sell you this aren't villains. Plenty of them are perfectly competent. The trouble is the model they work to: they build the thing, send the invoice, and that's the end of their involvement. Nobody owns the long-term stability of your site once the money's changed hands. I've spent a good chunk of the last couple of months doing nothing but this, fixing sites for businesses whose previous developer took the money, delivered something that worked on launch day, and disappeared. None of them were daft; they just hadn't been told which questions to ask.

When I build something, I build it so the next person can maintain and extend it without a load of guesswork, whether that next person is me in three years or someone else entirely. It costs more upfront, and over three years it costs a good deal less. It also means the thing your business actually runs on isn't propped up by a plugin whose author quietly stopped updating it a long time ago.

So before you hire anyone, get them to show you something they built from scratch rather than bought and assembled, and ask what the plan is when a plugin loses support, and what maintenance looks like in year two rather than just on launch day. If they can't answer that plainly, you've learnt what you needed to know before spending a penny. Most of the businesses I get called in to help weren't careless, they just didn't know those were the questions to ask, and once they do, they tend not to make the same mistake twice.