A theme is the part of your site you will live with longest. Picking badly is expensive, and the cost usually arrives about a year in, when you want to change something and cannot.
Look at the code, not the demo
Demo sites are marketing. They are built by someone who knows every quirk of the theme, filled with content chosen to flatter it. Your content will not look like that.
- Does it use core blocks, or a proprietary page builder?
- How many plugins does the demo require?
- Is the styling in
theme.json, or scattered through a settings panel?
The page builder question is the one that decides how trapped you are. A theme built on core blocks stores your content as portable block markup. A theme built on a proprietary builder stores it as shortcodes or serialised metadata that only that builder understands. Switch away and your pages become a wall of bracketed nonsense.
This is not hypothetical. Migrating a two hundred page site off a builder is a rebuild, not a migration, and it gets quoted like one.
Multipurpose themes are a trap
A theme that does everything carries the weight of everything. You load the code for the restaurant layout and the real estate listings whether you use them or not.
The sales pitch is that you are buying optionality. What you are actually buying is a settings panel with four hundred options, of which you will use nine, and a support burden for the theme author that guarantees slow releases.
There is a second cost that shows up later. Because a multipurpose theme cannot assume anything about your content, its CSS is written defensively — deeply nested selectors, plenty of !important, overrides for overrides. The first time you want to change something small, you will find yourself fighting it.
A focused theme, or a custom one, ships only what your site does.
Questions worth asking before you buy
Most of these can be answered in ten minutes, and each one has saved a client real money at some point.
- When was the last update, and what was in it? A theme last touched two years ago is a liability regardless of how good it looks.
- Does it declare
theme.json? If so, the Site Editor can style it and you are not locked into a custom options panel. - How many required plugins does it bundle, and are any of them commercial licences you inherit?
- Does the demo content import cleanly, and can you remove it cleanly?
- Is there a changelog you can read without buying first?
Test it with your worst content
Demo content is short, evenly sized, and beautifully photographed. Yours is not. Before committing, put your genuinely awkward content into the theme: the product name that runs to nine words, the team member with no headshot, the blog post that is four paragraphs long with no images.
A theme is not good because it looks good with good content. It is good because it still looks reasonable with bad content.
When to go custom
Custom is worth it when your content model is genuinely yours — custom post types, relationships between them, editorial workflows that no off-the-shelf theme anticipated. It is also worth it when the site is a revenue centre rather than a brochure, because then a second saved at checkout has a number attached to it.
It is not worth it for a five page site that needs to exist by Friday. Buy something focused, keep it updated, and spend the money on the content instead.
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