Anyone who wants to use WordPress for their blog is going to be torn between choosing a free or paid WordPress theme. In most cases, however, a paid theme will be the better option for several reasons. Perhaps one of the most significant such reasons to choose a paid WordPress theme is simply the fact that most are already search engine optimized. Regardless of your blog’s topic, you cannot ignore the free traffic that search engines can send you.

Most people who use a free WordPress theme are stuck setting up many different plugins that are required to properly optimize their blog for the major search engines. Paid themes typically come with many of these features already built in, eliminating the need for any such separate SEO plugins. This is a huge advantage for anyone who wishes to optimize their website to receive as much search engine traffic as possible.

Paid themes also offer incredibly fast load times when compared with most free themes. Paid themes are designed to handle JavaScript, CSS and HTML as efficiently as possible, drastically increasing their load times. In most cases, people developing free WordPress themes do not have the resources necessary to create completely clean code. Since slow load times can cost you visitors, you may not actually be saving any money by using a free theme.

Another top reasons why paid WordPress themes might be worth their cost is the customization capabilities they offer. Many of these themes offer extensive customization options without requiring you to know anything about coding. Free WordPress themes generally do not offer the same level of customization because their creators cannot afford to spend that much time working on a theme for which they are not getting paid.
People also choose paid WordPress themes because of the extra features they offer. The top paid WordPress themes include such features as integration with analytics software and contextual advertising networks. It is easy to keep the plugin count low when a paid theme is used because its features are generally so abundant. Most of the most popular paid WordPress themes offer more features than most single users will even need.
Most paid themes also offer a number of different social sharing options; this makes it easier for readers to share the content they read on your blog, further boosting your readership. Paid themes make it very easy to integrate your website with all of the major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

By choosing to use a paid theme, you can enjoy an enhanced level of security that free themes cannot offer. Your blog is much less likely to be hacked when you have a paid theme installed because the code is more secure and the number of plugins is kept low.

One final, very important reason to take the plunge for a paid WordPress theme is for the updates. Unlike the developers of most free themes, the developers who create paid themes are constantly updating them to ensure that they work with the latest version of WordPress and that their value and functionality is kept as high as possible.