September 10, 2025

Stockholm Syndrome with WP

The Stockholm Wordpress theme, available on Envato, recently caught my eye. It has an astonishing 35k sales and has some very nice looking examples. However, I noticed a lot of one star reviews in the last few months.

According to the reviews the theme is lacking support, is not properly responsive and is full of bugs. Yet, the makers must have earned 35k times 69 dollar… so more than 2 million dollar. How can this possibly (still) be bad?

Well… the lack of support was clear from the reviews: long, complex installation manuals with plenty of room for error. The installation has 15(!) steps and each step contains multiple actions.

Next up: the responsiveness. These problems were more subtle. I dived into the examples and found some weird glitches at larger screen sizes (>1600px). It seems like most examples were only tested on laptop screens, or even worse: the page builder is unable to accomodate larger screen sizes.

Finally, people complained a lot about bugs. This is not specific to this theme, in my opinion. Wordpress breaks, we all know that. You need a lot of technical know-how to keep it running over time, as you need to manage plugin updates, PHP versions, license renewals, the disabling of new features and/or enabling of legacy modes. If you add the poor security of Wordpress to that, you have enough ammunition for one star reviews.

Nevertheless, a lot of people keep using software like this. This amazes me. I think of this as the perfect example of Stockholm Syndrome.

()  Joost van der Schee