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WordPress

Tom Tate
Tom Tate
16,016 Points
Posted by Tom Tate
Tom Tate
16,016 Points

How safe are free themes and plugins?

I'm working on a site for a client with a slim budget - the free Virtue theme for Wordpress will cover almost all of her needs. I may need to lightly customize some post types, or a child theme to do a few extra things.

I'm new to Wordpress development - are free themes safe? This theme recommends a Toolkit plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/virtue-toolkit/ which has 200k downloads - presumably this is to build some of the custom post types that are referenced in the theme.

Are themes and plugins like this generally safe? The virtue theme itself has almost half a million downloads - https://wordpress.org/themes/virtue.

Thanks!

Tom

1 Answer

Jordan Bowman
Jordan Bowman
9,439 Points
Jordan Bowman
Jordan Bowman
9,439 Points

Hi Tom,

The answer is "it depends."

There are many free or inexpensive Wordpress themes out there that are completely safe and very well built, so you don't have to be worried just because a theme is free. However, there are also obviously some poorly made ones.

Personally, I only use themes if they're from a reputable source (Wordpress.org is usually a good source :)) and if the reviews are good. Number of downloads is also relevant, but only if it has good reviews along with it. With that in mind, it looks like the Virtue theme would be a good theme – tons of downloads like you said, but it also has 4.9 out of 5 stars, which is great.

As for the plugin (sometimes plugins can be tricky), that doesn't look so good. Lots of downloads (probably just because the Virtue theme recommends it), but it has 2.3 out of 5 stars. Granted, there are only three total reviews (hah), but both of them mention Javascript conflicts which is definitely a common plugin problem. If you can get the same functionality with another plugin, that might be better.