Should I start creating and selling premium WordPress themes?

We’ve been in the WordPress theme industry since 2011 but started using it a lot earlier. During all these years, it was interesting to follow the “boom” of WordPress themes and the rapid expansion of this great CMS.

It’s 2024, and everyone creates WordPress themes and sells them in different marketplaces or shops. Hundreds of individual WP theme shops and thousands of theme authors are on major marketplaces.

You’ve probably noticed that the WordPress theme market is supra-saturated. If you’re thinking about jumping in this industry, you should think twice. Of course, if you have outstanding designs and plenty of advanced features + you can take care of support, you can try it. In any case, it’s a very crowded area, and the demand seems to gradually decrease. Let’s analyze some data to understand what is happening:

WordPress is currently powering 43% of all websites on web. This means that one in four websites uses WordPress as its primary CMS. Impressive, isn’t it? But, let’s have a look at web search trends for major CMSs and see how WordPress is performing there:

As you can see, WordPress is still going strong, while other CMSs have significantly decreased search trends, except Wix (which is not a CMS but a site builder).

Now, let’s examine search trends for WordPress themes. Demand should be high since most site owners change their themes once every 1 – 2 years. However, the trend is going down, and this might be due to different factors: a supersaturated market, increased competition, seasonal factors, etc.

Here, you can see that the peak of searches occurred between 2010 and 2012, and the current interest is at the same rate as in 2007 – 2008, when the WordPress theme “boom” started. Moreover, the term “responsive WordPress theme” is not so popular anymore (that’s because responsive design is already a standard).

Let’s move forward and see what’s happening on major marketplaces and theme shops.

Themeforest

As usual, we’ll start with the most controversial site – Themeforest. Currently, they offer 11,263 premium WordPress themes. In August 2014, their Alexa rank was 93, meaning it was in the world’s top 100 most visited sites. Their rank is 367, and many elite authors reported a significant decrease in their sales numbers, corresponding with general traffic trends. In addition, it’s very hard to list your theme there: you have to wait at least 35 days to get your WP theme reviewed, and it could take around 2-3 months to get it listed. If you have a huge, all-in-one WP theme or something unique, you can try it. Otherwise, simply ignore it, it’s a waste of time. It’s not a reliable source of income anymore.

Mojomarketplace

It was a good alternative and a real competitor of Themeforest until they were acquired by Endurance International Group (the owner of Bluehost, Host Gator, iPage, and others). They integrated their service with Endurance’s infrastructure, and after that, nobody heard from them (except for the launch of a new website and brand called Mojo marketplace). Currently, they offer around 900 premium WP themes, and to list your themes, there is a hassle (sometimes you can feel like they don’t have any stuff there).

Creative Market

These guys are doing pretty well, as they focus on other kinds of assets like fonts, icons, UI kits, presentations, mockups, etc. They have an aggressive marketing strategy and are backed by a strong brand (Autodesk). They offer 2,857 WordPress themes for different categories, but you can’t see the number of sales for each theme. You’ll not get much sales here, as they focus on bundles and creative stuff.

WP theme shops

As we mentioned, hundreds of independent WP theme shops provide more or less unique and nice themes. Elegantthemes, Woothemes, iThemes, PageLines are just a few of them. These guys started in 2008 and 2009 and focused on niche themes, their own frameworks, e-commerce solutions, and other useful stuff. Most of premium theme shops provide up to 80 WP themes via different pricing models: subscription fee, one time fee, bundles, etc. If you’re a site owner or design agency you can stick with the one you like (things to look at: design, support, features, team, community, feedback, etc.) and use their products to make a living or just to change the appearance of your sites.

If we summarize, there are an impressive 15K premium WordPress themes in the market. If you’re already selling WP themes, consider diversifying your income sources (plugins, support, services, etc.). If you’re considering starting to design and sell themes, think twice unless you have something amazing to show the world.