My personal experiences maintaining premium themes as WordPress Developer wasn’t great. The time it saved on development phases outweighed the ongoing maintenance and SEO in the longer term. If you want to build a brochure website fast, premium themes are a great option.
So what are the hidden costs around Premium WordPress themes. Let me cover some main costs involved around premium themes.
Recurring fees
Most of the premium themes have recurring renewal fees for updates and support. Though very minimal, it’s still the extra fee that you have to think about.
You might avoid paying fees for updates and support, but might end up with issues around security and compatibility.
Higher maintenance cost
Depending upon who is maintaining your website and how frequently it's done, the cost of maintenance is relatively high when it comes to premium themes.
As premium themes come with some heavily maintained codes along with extra plugins in some cases, you will be running extra time and effort for maintenance. When it goes wrong with premium themes, things can go horribly wrong. This is one of the two main reasons why I opted out using premium themes.
I won't be talking about the security issues here, as I will guess maintenance will be part of your security strategies. This can be a separate topic to discuss.
SEO consequences
This is the second reason I opted out using premium themes. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of agencies around Australia use premium themes as part of their SEO strategy, and get good rankings. But honestly they do it for commercial purposes, even admitting if they could go using premium themes. It's mainly around the client budget.
Technical SEO when using premium themes can be tough. Though in recent years, with advancement around wordpress web hosting and some amazing plugins, things have improved a lot. But still I think it provides a big gap in Technical SEO compared to custom built themes.
If you are using WordPress with premium themes and SEO is part of your strategies, it might be worth auditing your website for WordPress SEO.
Dissecting premium themes with respect to SEO can be a long topic but will leave it here. I will discuss about this topic in other articles.