Selling WordPress premium themes is a huge market. It highly depends on the meaning of what ‘premium theme’ is or… should be? What are the criteria for WP theme to be named as ‘premium’? Highly subjective, right? I remember the times when authors were competing for adding more page templates in a single theme. Then the first visual page builder has been introduced to the community, and many authors have started adding support of it to their themes. Suddenly has become an era of themes with built-in visual builders. Those are really ‘true premium’ themes, right? I disagree.
No matter what functionality is added to the theme, their real value is in its visual appearance. Even WP themes with built-in visual builders have many pre-built templates which you can choose from any time you struggle with creating something appealing. Am I right? I have an experience of selling premium themes and must say that not less than 50% of positive (overwhelmingly positive 😉 ) reviews were for themes’ visual appearance. Even if your theme lacks some functionality, you may expect to get sales if it is genuinely aesthetical and appealing.
Even if your theme lacks some functionality, you may expect to get sales if it is genuinely aesthetical and appealing.
Now we have a lot of visual page builders; everybody can start creating its site, and they do that. I have seen the examples many times. I am not impressed. Sorry, but this is true. Most of the freelance-developers cannot create something awe-inspiring. Studios and agencies still in demand of good designers who has a taste and can create an excellent design before implementing it in a visual builder. The market for premium themes is still vast and vital in the eco-system. Theme authors add support of different page builders to their WordPress themes, and it looks like more builders are in the wild – more support of them should be added to each item. However, it does not seem to me as the right strategy.
I have a better solution. Before packing themes with a lot of functionality, let’s remind what ‘theme’ really is – it is a presentational unit. Not something that creates custom post types or adds custom fields or enables hundreds of Google Fonts. Not at all. Instead of packing the theme with all of that additional functionality, let’s create simple (technically) WP themes and emphasize on the visual appearance, their astonishing design!
Back to roots. WP ‘theme’ is a presentational unit. Sell a design, not a functionality.
How? Use visual page builders! Oh.. they cannot correctly handle this yet? Force them to add such a feature! 🙂 This is what I call ‘the future of premium WP themes’ – selling visual builder’s configs! Custom post types can be created in Pods or Toolset; custom meta fields can be easily added in ACF etc. This or that plugin can add every significant feature. They do the job. They were created for non-tech savvy… designers, of course! Visual page builders are tools to bring everything together. But designers are those who can use such tools properly and drive the web. We have to create a possibility for them to become a standalone (truly standalone, not just “a companion in a small team of developers”!) players on the market of premium WordPress themes.
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