What Is a Pre-Made WordPress Theme and How Does It Differ from a Custom Theme?

Like many others who like to have a website alongside their main job (whether as an employee or a freelancer) so it can generate income for them around the clock, I also wanted to quickly and effortlessly have a website and start earning money from the very next morning—without knowing even a bit of programming.

For a long time, I was looking for a developer to pay and ask to design a stunning website for me, until one of my friends said, “Why don’t you build your site with WordPress?” Completely unaware, I went to Google and searched, “What is WordPress?” Yes, there was a time when even I, the writer, didn’t know what WordPress was; but now I have a very beautiful and efficient WordPress website. And in the end, this is where I landed: Mihan WordPress website.

How Did WordPress Enter the Picture?

After I became familiar with WordPress, I realized that nothing in this content management system is complicated; whenever you run into any issue, it feels like a plugin has already been created to solve it. As I went further, I noticed that many websites had been built with WordPress, but one fundamental problem still remained.

The story is this: to have an attractive website, you have two options ahead of you:

• Use a ready-made WordPress theme.
• Use a custom theme.

Later on, I’ll talk in detail about the differences between these two and guide you through this very dilemma of “ready-made WordPress theme or custom theme.”

What Is a Ready-Made WordPress Theme?

To build my website, I had two options: either hire a developer to create a custom-designed theme for my site, or search for a stylish ready-made WordPress theme myself—one that is not only clean and elegant in design, but also gives me the flexibility, like a Linux operating system, to make any changes I might want in the future.

You can find these themes on both local and international websites; for example, ThemeForest and the WordPress repository offer free ready-made WordPress themes.

But anyway, where should we start? A free theme, a paid ready-made theme, or a custom theme?

Free, Paid Ready-Made, or Custom Theme?

Before anything else, let’s clarify this three-way choice, because your roadmap starts right here. Below, I’ll break down each option separately so you’ll know which one suits whom.

Free Theme

The most important question I always had when starting any business was how much I needed to budget. So, to keep things simple and costs low, I first installed a free WordPress theme. I was thrilled that “I have a website,” and happy that it could be found with a simple search and people could enjoy its content.

A couple of months passed using this free theme until one of my friends said, “Hami, don’t you want to improve your site’s visual appearance?” I said I did, but these free themes weren’t properly localized into Persian; everything was messy, and it was impossible to create a sleek, polished look with them. He laughed and said I needed to loosen the purse strings and buy a ready-made WordPress theme. Over the past four years, I’ve bought and used around eight professional ready-made WordPress themes—and I kept getting fed up.

There were designs you couldn’t modify, slow themes where you had to wait at least 10 seconds to enter each section, responsive issues flagged in Search Console, and a thousand other headaches—until I became completely tired of having a website.

So let me sum up this section: if you’re just starting out and don’t have much capital to invest in a custom-designed theme, a free ready-made theme can somewhat meet your needs, especially if it supports Elementor. In that sense, it’s not a bad option. But as I said, for someone who wants to move forward seriously, it quickly falls short.

Premium Localized Ready-Made Templates

Another type of ready-made templates is the premium ones. To obtain them, you need to pay a fee. Compared to the free versions, these templates offer more features, which is definitely a positive advantage. The good news is that it is possible to purchase these templates from within Iran.

Here’s something you should keep in mind: some websites sell localized ready-made WordPress templates (which we definitely do not recommend, especially copied templates), while others, such as Mihan WordPress, focus on a single template and continuously improve and upgrade it.

As for the cost, don’t worry; ready-made WordPress templates are not that expensive nowadays, and you can purchase one at a reasonable price. Most other ready-made templates cost around 1,500,000 tomans, and the Ahura template is slightly higher at 2,000,000 tomans. However, considering the extensive features, support, and updates it provides, this price difference is fully justified and ultimately makes it much more cost-effective.

A friendly recommendation: it’s better to choose Iran-made templates so you don’t run into problems when working with them, and most importantly, so the template matches the preferences and character of Iranian users. For example, Iranian templates have implemented right-to-left formatting from the ground up.

Custom Theme

Naturally, no one is unaware of the advantages of a custom WordPress theme. We all know that simply having a specialized theme that uses elements specific to your business and is unique creates a major advantage for your branding.

However, you should know that designing a custom theme can cost around 200 million rials. First, a graphic designer needs to design your website, then a UX designer reviews it, and finally, you have to find a skilled developer to implement everything properly.

These are exactly the major concerns you have to deal with when designing a WordPress theme. Now imagine how great it would be if someone truly understood your needs and, while addressing them, used the best graphic designs and provided top-tier support to add anything you want to the theme.

The good news is that such an option exists. The Ahura WordPress ready-made theme has addressed these exact concerns and assembled a very strong team dedicated solely to researching and developing this one theme. Before we talk more about Ahura, let’s get to know ready-made themes a bit better.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Ready-Made WordPress Themes

As mentioned, WordPress provides ready-made themes, and free themes can meet your needs to some extent. However, to help you make a clearer decision, let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses of ready-made themes side by side.

One important point you must take seriously is that your website’s theme is essentially your website’s credibility. A significant part of attracting an audience and building trust depends on the appearance users see the first time they visit your site. The problem is that ready-made and free WordPress themes are easily accessible to everyone, and the theme you choose may also be used by dozens of other websites. This can harm your site’s credibility and make it no longer unique.

For this reason, if you have an online store with many products, or if your website receives a high volume of daily visitors, we do not recommend using free ready-made themes. These themes often do not provide complete features and may have various shortcomings that fail to meet users’ needs and lead to dissatisfaction. In such cases, it’s better to establish a stronger user interface—meaning your site’s theme should include features that truly cover your users’ needs.

To have a summary of this section all in one place, the table below will help you:

The Story of Persianized Themes and ThemeForest

In addition to wordpress.org, there is another website called themeforest.net that offers ready-made themes. This website can be considered a reputable source for obtaining various professional themes from around the world. If you would like to use professional and feature-rich themes for your website, I recommend definitely visiting this site and learning more about its themes.

Of course, these professional themes aren’t free either, and to use them you need to purchase your desired theme. Likewise, you have to bypass sanctions and make a payment in dollars. Because of this significant cost, many people simply can’t afford to buy these professional foreign themes and look for a way to get their desired theme at a lower price.

This is where certain websites enter the scene—sites that purchase professional themes from themeforest.net and resell them to you at a much lower price. At first glance, it may seem economical, but it comes with many disadvantages:

• They may have made changes to the theme for their own promotional purposes, which could cause issues for your entire website.
• You can’t be sure they actually purchased the original version from the main site and are providing it to you.
• You will no longer have access to the updates provided by themeforest.net.

If you plan to purchase and localize a theme into Persian, it’s better to obtain the original license. As mentioned in the section about ready-made themes, the paid version can be a good choice, but one drawback is that the theme is designed in English and doesn’t support right-to-left text. To address this, some people take ready-made professional themes and make modifications to them—what is commonly referred to as “Persianizing the theme.” However, as the saying goes, when there are too many cooks, the soup ends up either too salty or tasteless.

Fortunately, with the growth of web programming literacy in Iran, you no longer need to worry about theme quality. Many Iranian websites successfully use Iranian-developed themes, regularly receive official updates, and keep their sites up to date. For example, the professional multipurpose Ahura theme provides all updates based on issues and feedback from users and buyers, which makes it one of the best themes you can use.

So the conclusion of this section:

Either purchase the theme from the original website, or choose themes developed by Iranian creators.

Which Theme Is Suitable for Your Website?

Now that we’ve talked about ready-made WordPress themes and explained the best way to use them, let’s see how to choose the right one from among these ready-made options. First of all, ready-made themes are generally divided into two main categories:

• Ready-made WordPress themes for simple content
• Ready-made WordPress themes for process-based activities

Below, I will explain each of them:

Providing Simple Content with a Ready-Made WordPress Theme

This type of theme is useful when you simply want to publish content on your website that includes text and images. Usually, people who are new to this field and do not have much experience working online use these kinds of themes. Whenever your content consists only of images and text, these themes are definitely suitable for you. These themes do not use any plugins to perform processes such as selling products.

Providing Process Functionality in a Ready-Made WordPress Theme

A ready-made WordPress theme designed for handling processes is a theme that, in addition to the usual and standard features of a theme, also enables the execution of a specific process. For example, if you sell a product on your website, or if you want users to register or have memberships on your site, such themes are suitable for you. In fact, whenever your website is expected to function like an automation system and take responsibility for carrying out these processes, it is necessary to use ready-made WordPress themes that offer process functionality.

Page Builders in Ready-Made WordPress Themes

Elementor is a drag-and-drop website building and editing plugin that allows you to apply any visual changes to your site. However, you should know that to create these changes, you need to purchase ready-made elements and widgets so you can build a beautiful website with them.

The problem is that these elements are in English, and their localized Persian versions are not very practical; as a result, your website design may become disrupted. We considered this issue when designing the Ahura theme, and instead of making you dependent on external elements, we add a set of dedicated theme elements with every update so you can have your own customized Ahura.

Ahura Ready-Made WordPress Theme

Whatever concern or problem you have, it has either been solved in Ahura or is in the process of being solved.

Do you want a beautiful, affordable theme that satisfies your sense of aesthetics with its creativity? Or maybe it’s important to you that your theme is optimized for Google and has high speed? Or perhaps, like me, you’d love to change every part of your website but don’t know programming and can’t easily build the exact site you have in mind.

Each of these concerns becomes a thing of the past by installing the Ahura ready-made WordPress theme. Do you want your website to look luxurious and professional? Would you like it to support Elementor so you can apply any changes you want? Are you looking for a strong support team to share your issues with and then see those same issues resolved in future updates? Ahura was built for exactly these reasons.

If you’d like to get to know this product better, you can enter the product page through the button below.

Conclusion

Well, we’ve come a long way together. We started from the day I didn’t even know what WordPress was, and now we’ve reached the point where we know that to have a good-looking and efficient website, we have three options ahead of us: a free theme, a paid ready-made theme, or a custom theme.

If I want to summarize it: a free theme isn’t bad for getting started and for simple websites, but it quickly becomes limiting. A custom theme is excellent, but it comes with a heavy cost that not everyone can afford. Between these two, a paid Iranian ready-made theme is the golden middle ground; it doesn’t empty your wallet, it’s RTL and fully localized in Persian, and it comes with proper updates and solid support.

After buying and testing around 8 themes and going through a lot of trouble, I finally realized the best approach is either to buy the theme from its official website or go with reputable Iranian developers. If you’re looking for a multipurpose theme that solves all these concerns in one place, Ahura was made exactly for this. Now the choice is yours; we already have the roadmap. Wishing you success and victory 🙂

Editorial Staff

This content is produced by the Ertano editorial team. The quality and accuracy of the content have been reviewed and approved by Reza Rad.

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