I have spent years building premium WordPress themes. The most popular one I worked on as lead developer has five figure sales. The thing that surprised me the whole time was not the numbers. It was how the people I built it with thought about the work. Their approach had almost nothing in common with how I build themes for my own studio, and for a long stretch, theirs quietly beat mine.
- Sales count
- a cover, not a product
- What it hides
- docs, support, updates
- Real signal
- the infrastructure
The logic that wins on a marketplace
Give customers real control over their own site, past changing a font and an accent color? No. Waste of time. Better to draw a landing page that is guaranteed to sell the product.
Build or connect a proper support system, so people have a decent way to reach us? Waste of time, email is fine. Better idea: spam referral links across every low-reputation site on the internet, with invented feature lists and pure marketing language, aimed at people who do not really understand what they are buying.
A licensing system to deal with piracy? No time for that. We need to ship three more themes by copying the layout of this one, to make up for the conversions we are losing to nulled copies.
It worked. Every time, it worked better than the ecosystem I kept trying to build. Right up until it did not.
The rules changed, and the number died with them
Those same people are now complaining that the feeding trough got taken away. The thousands of sales stopped meaning anything the moment the game changed, because that number was never measuring what buyers thought it was measuring.
Picture the typical top seller. It still ships its documentation as raw HTML files on a bare server, with an interface from the 2000s. Support comes by email. Plugins and themes update by hand, downloading ZIPs. But the cover is gorgeous. For years the gorgeous cover was enough, and then one day the rules moved and everyone realized nobody cares about the cover anymore.
What to look at instead
If you are the one buying, stop reading the sales count. Ignore the landing page, ignore the promises, ignore the badge. Look at what is around the theme you are about to pay for.
- The documentation. A maintained site you can search, or a folder of HTML files nobody has opened since 2013?
- The support channel. A real system with a history you can look at, or one email address and a promise.
- Updates. Do they arrive in your dashboard, or do you download a ZIP and overwrite files by hand?
- The license. Is there any infrastructure behind the product, or is the product file the whole offer?
Do that and you get a near perfect preview of the quality of both the product and the support you are signing up for.
You cannot sell an expensive watch out of a train station kiosk with the receipt printed on toilet paper. You cannot serve good food on dirty dishes. The wrapper around the thing tells you what the thing is, every time.
The wrapper around the thing tells you what the thing is, every time.
Why this is a WordPress problem specifically
WordPress was never a high quality space, and that is a big part of why the CMS, and PHP along with it, ended up treated as the low end next to other technologies. Not because the tools cannot be used well. Because for years the platform was easy enough that a certain kind of person never had to get any better, and could sell to people who could not tell the difference.
ThemeForest is full of top sellers that do not survive a second look. They sit on top because Envato sat in its own swamp for years and made no move toward real moderation, or toward promoting anyone new. Why surface a fresh author when ALL-IN-ONE MULTIPURPOSE BEST EVER THEME 2010 still books a hundred sales a week on its own? The number keeps the old thing on top, and the number is the whole problem. I will not pretend to wish that arrangement, or the marketplace that built it, a long life.
Which brings it back to the one thing worth trusting. A niche theme from an author who actually maintains infrastructure, and puts visible effort into it, will almost always serve you better than a theme with thousands of sales and nothing whatsoever around it. The sales count tells you the wrapper worked. It tells you nothing about what is inside.
Last updated
