There are countless tutorials on how to install an Envato theme. Upload the zip, activate it, install the required plugins, import the demo and you are done. An afternoon of work, if all goes well. But installing the theme is not your main concern. Keeping it alive is.

I spent some time reading through the comment sections of popular themes on ThemeForest, and through the WordPress support forums. The same stories keep coming back, theme after theme.

What happens after the install

An update breaks something. A translation suddenly disappears. A white gap appears above the header. A product carousel stops sliding. The mobile menu ignores its settings. Nobody touched anything, but the latest theme update did.

The bundled plugins cannot be updated. Your theme came with Slider Revolution or WPBakery, but you never got a license for them. WordPress keeps nagging about updates you cannot install. You have to wait until the theme author includes the new version in a theme update, or email support and ask for it. Meanwhile, that outdated plugin might be a security risk. This is not a theoretical problem: years ago a vulnerability in a bundled Slider Revolution got hundreds of thousands of websites hacked.

Support runs out. You get six months of support with your purchase. After that you can pay to extend it, or you are on your own. And if you downloaded the theme through Envato Elements, you get no item support at all.

The license is tied to a domain. Move your site, rebuild it or lose access to an old installation, and your purchase code is suddenly ‘already in use’. Hope you can still reach the author to reset it.

Your host upgrades PHP. Older themes do not like that. Your site throws a critical error and you are left digging through config files on a Sunday afternoon.

The theme gets abandoned. Authors move on to their next theme. The old one keeps selling, but the updates get thinner and thinner.

None of this means you did something wrong. This is simply what multi-purpose themes are: huge piles of code, plugins and options that all need to keep working together, forever.

I can take away all that fuss

I convert WordPress websites to Hugo, a static site generator. Your site keeps its design, but loses the database, the plugins, the license codes and the updates. What remains is plain, fast HTML that simply keeps working. You edit your text and images in my CMS, without being able to accidentally break the design.

Did you buy an Envato theme and are you tired of babysitting it? Let me know what you pay now, and I will tell you what I can do for you.

()  Joost van der Schee