I have been in the web industry for more than 5 years now. It’s one of the job descriptions where you need to stay updated with the latest happenings. Despite the new stack of technologies, we witnessed and learned about the ponzi scams, PHP malicious code, Blackhat SEO, and some of the dirty hacks.
What I guess so far, you have landed to this blog post to learn and make a firm decision about the most discouraging product – Nulled WordPress themes. If you don’t know much more about it, then let me clarify this issue for you all in our next section.
Stick around!
What is Nulled WordPress Themes
As you already know, to kick off with a WordPress site you need niche-specific themes that should resonate with your business. If we talk about premium themes then we can see a wide range of features and quality themes that help you to run your site perfectly.
For that, you need to pay a specific amount and against that, you get a license that allows you to install it on a single WordPress website. And that’s how the theme creators protect the copyright issues.
Since the dark web has become popular for breaking the rules and medium to find free WordPress themes. Now, what happens with Nulled WordPress themes? Initially, these themes are also premium and licensed themes but their license gets removed illegally and makes it available to anyone to use them for free.
You must be wondering, why to buy a premium theme when Nulled themes are already available for free?!
Well, first it’s immorally not the right thing to do and in the end, by taking such a move you might need to pay a heavy price. Why and how? That’s the crux of the entire discussion.
Reasons: Why You Should Not Use Nulled WordPress Themes?
So, the following are some convincing points that express, you shouldn’t use Nulled WordPress themes at any cost.
Let’s dive in!
1. WordPress Security & Privacy Issues
A fact that we are all aware of is that WordPress is one of the famous CMS with a market share of 38% of all websites. There is no surprise that it is always on the list of hackers to breach the security loopholes.
Standalone, WordPress is a secure system that regularly releases updates with improved security patches. But still, you need to work around it to ensure that your WordPress site or blog is secure for users.
Following are some quick tips that help you to prevent malicious traffic and brute force attacks.
- You shouldn’t use the Nulled WordPress theme
- Use themes and plugins that are supported by WordPress
- Configure a valid SSL certificate
- Host your WordPress application on a managed and reliable hosting provider
- Always maintain a website backup
- Use 2FA for WordPress admin login
Nulled WordPress themes contain malicious hidden scripts that become vulnerable and steal information from your WordPress site and make it available to hackers on the dark web.
And the information could be your customers’ username, email address, passwords, or transaction details. The main reason for not using Nulled WordPress themes is that you won’t be able to know that your site is under attack and it seems unnoticed as your website is functioning properly.
2. Malicious Code & Cryptojacking
While Nulled themes sound really lucrative to people especially when they are new to digital marketing. They think that they are saving a lot of money by using a nulled theme instead of paying for its license. In fact, this can backfire immediately because most nulled themes have malicious software installed that can use your website as a link farm, for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and for collecting user data through keyloggers. In some cases, hackers can use your web server as a launchpad for launching DDoS attacks on their opponents. You don’t want your website to become a battleground, do you?
3. Bad for SEO
The nulled WordPress themes can disturb your ranking and visibility of your website. The reason is Nulled WordPress themes add spammy links to your WordPress website, where it redirects the users to unpleasant resources which affects the user-experience. Ultimately, that’s how you can lose the credibility of your WordPress websites.
User-experience is one of the important factors and plays a vital role in terms of SEO. Therefore, it affects SEO performance. Now the question is, can we easily detect such activities and the answer is no because when you log in to your WordPress, you won’t be redirected as the IP is the same.
So what’s the solution? Hire expert WordPress developers and avoid using Nulled WordPress themes.
4. Legal Issues
Nulled WordPress themes can lead you to be notified by a lawsuit. Let me explain, how? Over the internet, you may find tons of open-source applications and software in which you can play around and help the community to grow.
But that’s not the case with Nulled themes – they can be mixed-source where it means some parts of the code are protected by the legal copyright team. So, if you’re using Nulled themes, you don’t have the complete right to use the code and that’s how you can get into legal action.
5. No Support from Theme Creators
One of the major advantages of buying premium themes is that the provider supports you all the way. And that’s not the case with Nulled WordPress themes, neither you don’t have the access to contact the developer. Hence, you are left with the option of premium themes where you can avail full support from the developers and complete access to the tutorials.
Now suppose that you get stuck at someplace and the theme stops functioning. Your site would be left with a broken UI. You don’t want that to happen, especially when you are getting tons of visitors on your website regularly, do you? It is not just bad for the reputation of your brand but it is also wasting your time that could have been spent well on doing something constructive.
6. Can’t Upgrade WordPress
If you have been working around WordPress then you must be aware that WordPress keeps on releasing the latest versions as mentioned above in the blog. And the purpose of the latest release is to protect the WordPress ecosystem from bugs and enhance the WordPress site’s performance.
However, if you are a part of Nulled WordPress themes, then you won’t leverage this feature and couldn’t update the latest. The reason is simple, due to Nulled themes – WordPress will also not help you in this regard.
7. Hard to Customize Website
WordPress has one major advantage over other CMS platforms and that is that WordPress websites are really simple to manage. You have customizations available at your fingertips that you can use to improve the user experience. However, when you install a nulled theme on your website, it gets really difficult to manage and customize your website layout.
First of all, all options will be locked and you won’t be able to find them on the website. Second of all, your website can break. Nulled themes are not stable. The code on them can easily break if you try to add some customizations. Since you can’t get support from the official team at all, you are on your own in managing the website.
8. No Documentation Available
Whenever you try a new product you need a manual or some sort of documentation to execute or integrate the product. No matter how much working experience you have, it might help you to save your time. That’s the reason WordPress developers create proper documentation. But with Nulled themes, you can’t avail of any such privilege.
9. Discourage Innovation
To Be Honest, It hurts!
It takes time to come up with an idea – apart from that, it requires a great investment of time, skills, and money to develop a single theme. Developing a specific WordPress theme isn’t a piece of cake. Later, if your own developed theme is being distributed for free in the market.
It demotivates the developer and other people to work on new ideas. Unfortunately, we ended up with new startups and tech-innovations.
Opt Other Free Alternatives
What I consider is that there’s no such reason to use Nulled WordPress themes. WordPress is such a great CMS that offers free themes, plus if you need a little more attraction on your site you can use the Free version of Elementor.
Even though, many premium WordPress plugins offer limited free versions to help you get started. Again, there is no WHY to use Nulled WordPress themes.
Here is a list of some cool Free WordPress which you should try. I also personally like them:
- Astra: Astra is one of the fastest WordPress themes available. It is a 100 GTMetrix score that makes it the fastest free theme available online.
- OceanWP: OceanWP offers a lot of customizations for absolutely free that you won’t find with any other WordPress theme. The reason OceanWP does all that is that it wants users to have complete control over their site customizations.
- Hestia: Hestia is a perfect theme for small businesses that want to grow bigger and scale themselves without putting a lot of effort into site management.
- Bento: Bento is a great theme for traveling, tourism, hotel management, and exterior design websites. It can also be used for galleries and portfolio site management.
- SiteOrigin Unwind: SiteOrigin offers a free version for those who are testing its products. The free website has limited features but they are perfect for those who are not looking to expand as of yet.
- Neve: Another great theme for people who are looking to start their business website. With Neve, they can easily get that done for absolutely free.
- Hemingway: Hemingway is for writers and creatives who are looking for a distraction-free theme for their website. Somewhere that allows them to work without much fuss and worry.
- Sydney: Sydney is a great theme for both business and regular users. Whether you want a simple blogging website or a portfolio business website, Sydney can offer templates that fit both choices.
- Shapely: Sometimes you just need a one-pager WordPress theme that you can install on your WordPress website. One-pagers provide a complete overview of services and company info to the user on a single page. The best part about one-pagers is that they are easy to make and that is even easier to load. Users can easily find the information they want without loading the page again.
In a Nutshell!
Nulled WordPress themes aren’t suitable for your business growth, not even for your WordPress security. “They are known to carry malware!” This malicious code isn’t easy to rectify and you could also lose your site data in the hack process. Also, even if they don’t have malicious code, they are limited in features, prone to code breakage, and don’t come with developer support. Why spend time and effort on something that can’t provide you the value that you desire in the long run?
Lastly, I would say a BIG NO to Nulled WordPress themes. If you don’t have a budget to try premium themes then try Free WordPress themes and you won’t regret it.
If you are looking for customizing your WordPress theme and don’t know how to get that done, then don’t worry! My WordPress support team can help you customize your website absolutely free. We will not only customize the theme but also offer your free support. Interested in knowing more about how we do that?
Get in Touch!
