Category: Case Study

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Are Themeforest Theme Authors Making More Money with New Pricing?

As part of the evolution of WordPress themes, Theme Authors on Themeforest Marketplace are experimenting with new pricing. You can see the price jump from $59 to $225 for a regular license of a premium WordPress theme. Authors are suggesting that they are checking the water with these experiments. These new pricing schemes started in September 2016 when Themeforest allowed WordPress theme authors to set their own price. Now it’s more than a month, so I thought sharing a sales performance report^ based on number of sales with new pricing schemes will be a good idea. Based on this report (and the upcoming ones), theme authors can make a good decision about the pricing.

PILE Theme (price changed from $59 to $225)

PILE theme by Pixelgrade got so much attention because of the very first sharp increase in price. Theme’s author changed pricing from $59 to $225 on September 22, 2016. Here is the timeline showing development related to price change and number of sales for PILE theme on Themeforest.

  • Total Sales till Sep 21 with price set as $59 – 1,584
  • On Sep 22, Price Increased to $225 from $59
  • Number of Sales in First 30 Days after Price Increase – 25
  • Total Earning* in first 30 Days – (25 x 225) = $5,625
  • Number of Sales between October 22 and November 03, 2016 – 6
  • Based on no. of sales till now, expected number of Sales in 2’nd month – 18
  • Expected Revenue from PILE Theme in 2’nd month of Increase – (18 x 225) = $4,050

*Earnings and revenue are from total sales and not the earnings of the author only as Envato will keep a cut out of it.

Note that, before increasing the price to $225 on Sep 22, the number of sales in last 30 Days i.e. between Aug 22 and Sep 22 with price tag of $59 was 77. It converts to the fact that last 30 days earning from PILE theme with $59 was $4,543.

So based on the above information, we can conclude that in first 30 days with the new price of $225, the number of sales obviously tumbled down by 67% but the earning increased by 24%. After that, the number of sales dropped again by 28% in the next month and so the earnings by 28%. One should note that a good coverage on popular WordPress news portal and blogs about PILE theme price increase helped the sale in first 30 days.

PILE Theme Sales Report

With the first report of PILE theme, we can conclude that the earnings are going to remain same but number of support requests will definitely go down as the total number of new customers have dropped.

5 Themes by Theme Author – Meydjer
(Price changed from $46 to $199)

Meydjer is a theme author on Themeforest with 5 premium WordPress themes named – Avamia, Eacero, MegaPholio, Axiom and Eagle. He increased the price of all his themes to $199 from $46 or $59 on September 24, 2016. As per the data extracted from archives, he is also not seeing any jump in revenue as he only managed to sell 1 or 2 copies of his themes in last 40 days.

Automotive Car Dealership WordPress Theme
(Price changed from $64 to $79)

Automotive WordPress theme is another case where theme author changed the price from $64 to $79. Based on the data extracted from Internet, the number of sales dropped by 20% but revenue remained almost same. This theme authors used to sell 170 to 200 copies per month before changing the price on Oct. 3, 2016. After the change in price, the number of sales in first 30 days are 136. It means, there is around 20 – 25% drop in number of sales per month but because of the increase of $15 in theme price, the total revenue of 30 days remained almost same.

Conclusion

Based on the first report, it appears that the author driven pricing is good for the marketplace as well as the authors. Theme authors are getting less customers but the revenue remained almost same. Less customers means lesser support requests. Lesser support requests means better support to existing customers. But one should keep in mind that pricing is an important factor for a business. One can see a WordPress theme priced at 1 Million dollar on Themeforest, that is not going to help the author. And similarly, setting a very low price is also not going to help as that will increase number of customers and so will increase the pressure of maintaining a good after sale support and ratings. Here is what a community moderator on Enveto forums said,

So, end and end, pricing is a great tool for SERIOUS authors, and a great suicide tool for jokers. Either way, the marketplace and serious authors WIN

I hope the second report in next 30 days will give better picture of this new change on Themeforest marketplace.

^Sales Performance Report Data

Themeforest shares the number of sales for each theme on theme’s page. This report is based on the data available in public domain about the themes. For the past sales data, you can use Internet Archives pages to extract the archived version of the theme’s page and cross verify the data.

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Visual Page Builder for WordPress Creates More Problems than It Solves

Online Market is full of DIY (Do It Yourself) visual page builder for WordPress CMS. Popular ones like Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, Avada Fusion Builder etc. are having thousands of downloads. It means lot many people are using these plugins or probably themes with which these builders are shipped with. In this article, I am trying to find out whether the page builders are solving a short term problem or may create long term issue on your WordPress site.

Why People Install a Page Builder?

The basic feature of any page builder is to allow you create a nice looking, multi-column pages with different elements without writing any piece of code. If you are a non-technical person, still you can use the drag and drop method to create nice landing pages with these builders. Visual Composer plugin is having limited elements whereas Divi builder comes with more elements including Pricing Table, Multiple Circle Counter etc.

So basically people who are not comfortable with coding or don’t want to invest time on designing a landing page, use page builders. It helps in putting call to action button, maps, accordion text, sliders, multi-column feature showcase by just dragging these modules and configuring the same.

What are the problems of using a Page Builder?

There is no doubt that a Page Builder makes life easy for newbies or people who do not want to hire someone for designing a page. But at the same time there are few important cons of using a page builder. For example,

  • Compatibility Issues with other plugins
  • Theme Compatibility Issue
  • Page Load Time
  • Not Future Proof

Now I will explain each points individually.

Compatibility Issues with other plugins

Page builders are one of the most reported plugins for compatibility issues. When Elegant Themes released Divi 3.0 recently with Visual Page Builder, many Divi users reported compatibility issues with other plugins. Divi Team released 5 updates in just 10 days and mostly to fix the compatibility issues with third-party plugins.

Theme Compatibility Issues

If you are using a Page Builder which was shipped along with the theme, you may find less compatibility issues between the builder and theme. Developers test the scenario in most caes before releasing the theme to make the builder more compatible. For example, Avada theme is having less compatibility issues with Fusion Builder. But in most cases, people use a Page Builder Plugin on their old WordPress theme of course because of the benefits of a builder. It is very common ti find people reporting about CSS or JS conflicts on their site.

Not all themes are compatible with Visual Page Builders and they may break the pages because of the JS and CSS conflicts.

Page Load Speed and Time

All the fancy things come with a price. Page Builders allow you to create a nice landing page but at the same time, it loads multiple scripts and functions on the page too. Everything that you drag and drop creates a shortcode and it takes time and effort from server side to execute the same and load the page. For every 1 second that your page takes to load, you lose 7% visitors on your site. There are certain ways to make your WordPress site fast but still, these page builders can be a culprit behind your slow page load speed.

Not Future Proof. What If.

Think of a scenario when the Page Builder you are using is no more. All the Page builders put multiple shortcode inside the page content area. If the developer of the particular page builder that you are using is not in business anymore and stops releasing updates, what will happen to the pages created using that Page builder. Initially you will start facing compatibility issues and then it will start breaking the page. You can not just copy and paste the content as it must be full of shortcodes. One should check the “Text” tab of the editor to see the exact content of the page created using Page builder. You will find too much HTML for a simple content area.

I have seen people creating posts using a Page builder to make that look good. What if you have hundreds of such posts on your blog and you start facing issues with the Page builder. That situation may create panic for you and in that case, probably you will have to hire a developer.

Founder of Easy Digital Downloads and WP Affiliate, Pippin Williamson feels that almost all the Page Builder WordPress plugins are terrible and creates more problems than solving one.

Syed Balkhi, founder of WP Beginners and OptinMonster came in defence of Page Builders by saying that Page Builders are solution for those who want to build pages by themselves without hiring a developer.

Read the complete conversation between Pippin, Syed, Brian Gardner and Nathan Rice here,

Should I Use a Page builder?

A nice landing page converts very well, its a known fact. If you don’t have budget to hire a developer to create such a page, you can use a Page builder to start with. Once you start getting good conversion and revenue with the page, hire someone and get out of the Page builder plugin. For blog posts, never use a Page Builder. Utilize the features available in WordPress editor to create a nice blog posts but do not depend on a Page builder for posts.

Page Load Time is very important, so install these recommended plugins to make your site load faster. Also make sure that you check all the pages created with Page builder once you update the plugin or theme.

Update

Lot of discussion happened on the Advance WordPress group on Facebook and also received many comments on this topic. I really like to thank community members for discussing this thread positively and putting your views in ethical ways. Based on the discussion, Beaver Builder seems to the best Visual Page Builder for WordPress as of now. It doesn’t populate the content area with shortcode which will help in migrating the content to other platform or even you can discontinue using Beaver Builder anytime. Apart from that, Beaver Builder is also recommended in terms of performance as compared to other Page Builders for WordPress.

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This is How I Found Perfect WordPress Theme for My Requirement!

Searching WordPress Themes

WordPress is truly awesome that allows you to build a beautiful website easily with absolutely no technical knowledge. As there are so many options that are available to build a beautiful site, so it definitely becomes very difficult to make the choice that is best suitable.

To share my personal experience with you guys the job was pretty difficult. I really love to pen down my thoughts and share it with others and get their feedback. One of my good friend suggested me to start my own personal blogging website where everything can be tracked very easily. Initially I was bit hesitant to start my own fully fledged site, but due to the motivation and encouragement I got from my friends I finally made up my mind to do so. I decided to choose WordPress for my personal blogging website and I am really proud of my decision as almost half of all new websites run on WordPress which is really amazing. More over it is an open source that too available for free.

Challenges faced in creating a website:

Though everything was ready in my mind, the way my site should look and its content but there were some big hurdles that I had to cross to reach my goal. And those hurdles comprised of:

  • Getting Hosting: Getting a good hosting for your site is really very important, so a wise choice is to be made while making the selection for it.
  • Setting a budget: Being a start up it is good to know about the budget that you have and the way it should be invested. It is always advised to start with a low pace and when you get some profits from it than definitely you can invest more.
  • Establishing your place for Search Engines: Getting a rank for the search engines is the core and important part for building a website. So the site should be designed in such a way by keeping SEO in mind and it should be SEO optimized.
  • Building Content : For any of the blogging website, content can be considered as its backbone. So it is good to plan and categorized the content that is to be published.
  • First impression: Looks and Home page plays a vital role in diverting traffic to your site. So design and present the site in such a way that will attract more visitors to your site.

WordPress Themes- Enhancing the look of the site:

The success of any of the WordPress site development depends largely on the themes that you are choosing. So it is very important to have a close look on the theme that will be best suited for the site that you are building. Some of the important factors that can be considered while selecting the theme includes:

  • Clean look: The look of the website always depends on the first page. This can be easily achieved by selecting the right WordPress Theme that is best suited for the site that is build by you.
  • Easy to customize: It is very important that the theme which is selected by you should be easy to customize as per the requirements and should provide with the theme options to do so. This will avoid to make any changes with the code or CSS.
  • Responsive: The theme that is to be selected is to be responsive that will allow the visitors to easily access the site from anywhere. This can be considered as a very important feature for selecting of the right theme.
  • Loading Speed: The performance of any of the theme depends on the quality of the code, so the page loading speed of the website depends on the the theme that one is using.
  • SEO: It is mandatory that the theme is to be designed by keeping SEO in mind, so to have a better results on the search engines the code of the theme is to be SEO optimized.
  • Additional features: It is good to have the theme that provides you with some additional plugins and theme options that will ease the work and definitely help in enhancing the look of the site.

PurposeThemes: The real Savior:

There are so many WordPress Themes available under so many theme clubs and authors. To name a few of them is Themeforest, StudioPress, Themify, Press75 and still many more…. I was in real confusion and frustrated to find the right theme by considering all the factors that are mentioned above. To be frank with you I really thought that I should hire a person with immense knowledge who will check these factors and find the best theme for me… LOL 🙂 I know the pains that I took initially to just find the theme for my blogging site. I still remember one day while searching the theme for my site I came across Fable theme by Elegant themes. You won’t believe what I found was totally amazing. I came across PurposeThemes which was a central place for all the themes from all the theme authors, various categories, features. Gosh! This was what I needed!There are about 526 themes available just for the blogging category.

PurposeThemes is an ocean of WordPress Themes Click To Tweet

It consisted of:

  • Themes listed based on different categories
  • ptScore given to each of the theme based on Design, Speed, Responsiveness, Ease of Customization, SEO, Security and Pricing.
  • ptReview for some of the famous themes given by experts after evaluating.
  • Comparison between different themes
  • Each theme comprising of description, offers section, attributes and the related theme.
  • User reviews along with their scoring.
  • And the related theme for the one you are searching.

This was like WOW! Why would somebody invest so much time in searching different platforms when there is everything under a single roof.

I will really appreciate the efforts that is put forth by the team in listing mostly all the themes and thus saving our time and efforts. Also a person with basic technical knowledge and who is not a developer will find it the best way to choose the best theme. I will surely recommend all the WordPress users to have a look on PurposeThemes and feel free to share their views, just as I did!