It is not surprising to come across nulled themes and plugins in WordPress if you are a WordPress developer or a user.
And, if you are using Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress to set up your website, then you are necessarily required to install a theme or template.
WordPress themes are basically the templates that are used to determine the appearance or layout of your website. In case you want to change how your WordPress sites look at the front end, then change your theme. You can use these themes to build numerous websites such as magazine sites, informational sites, travel blogs, technological sites, and e-commerce sites, and so on.
There are several themes in WordPress, some of them are free while others are premium. The pricing of premium themes may vary. In most cases, premium themes are worth every penny spent.
Undoubtedly, every website owner wants to have an outstanding and attractive theme for the efficient marketing of the services.
Premium WordPress themes are those themes that have been proficiently designed and coded. They comprehend advanced features, functional and additional services, and are usually sold for a fixed price.
What is Nulled WordPress Theme?
Premium themes are costly while free themes are not dazzling and impressive enough to attract users. This is the reason why a lot of users go for a nulled theme.
Intermittently, third-party enterprises or individuals pirate these premium themes and give them out at relatively low costs, or even for free unethically on the internet. These pirated themes are known as nulled WordPress themes. Similarly, nulled WordPress plugins can be defined as pirated copies of premium plugins that sold for less.
The negative outcome of a nulled WordPress theme or plugin on your website far exceeds its advantages. Not only good WordPress companies lose money, but it also compromises the security and integrity of the website using these nulled WordPress themes and plugins. Even your site’s SEO can be adversely affected by nulled themes and plugins. You definitely tend you gain a lot more using a real theme and plugin rather than a nulled version.
More than ten thousand nulled themes are downloaded every day for WordPress sites but you also have to know that these nulled versions affect your websites. It’s a better idea to opt for a free theme if you cannot afford a premium theme or plugin than going for nulled ones. Using nulled WordPress themes and plugins supposedly will cost you less but you will have to face the consequences. These nulled WordPress themes and plugins are often the reasons why your websites get hacked.
General Public License
From the definition of Wikipedia, General Public License (GPL), also known as GNU GPL is a series of widely-used free software licenses that guarantees end-users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software.
The people redistributing nulled themes and plugins insist that because WordPress and any extractive works like plugins and themes are licensed under GPL, it is totally fine to duplicate and allocate it to users. Nulled themes are created by revising the original .zip file of the theme so that you can use them without acquiring the license key.
WordPress is also released under the GPL license, which means that WordPress is open-source software that can be used, modified, and extended by anyone.
If you come to notice that a GPL theme or plugin is “licensed for 4 times” they are not saying you cannot deploy code to 12 sites, instead, they are saying that you will only get support, bug fixes, and updates for 4 of your sites.
Are you considering using nulled WordPress themes or plugins?
If yes, then go through the reasons why you should avoid using nulled versions of WordPress themes and plugins and then make a wise decision.
Reasons not to use Nulled WordPress Theme
There is no doubt that premium WordPress themes and plugins are expensive but does that undeniably defend the use of nulled WordPress themes and plugins? It’s a big NO.
Here are some of the reasons why you should avoid using nulled WordPress themes and plugins.
1. WordPress Security and Privacy
Well, the security of the website is the topmost priority among WordPress users, which is the reason why people prefer using an SSL certificate, genuine hosting provider, etc. But you are completely unknown about how adversely the nulled themes and plugins affect the security. Apparently, WordPress sites are more likely prone to attackers as they are the largest and most popular CMS. And, no wonder it has become a target for attackers.
WordPress’s core software is safe as the WordPress developers consistently update it to patch up any security frailties. You need to take part in keeping your WordPress blog or website safe despite those efforts. The suppliers of nulled themes and plugins hack the original premium themes using some nasty and malicious coding. These nulled themes generally have backdoors from where the hackers can enter into the website and infect them when you use these nulled versions of themes and plugins.
Some nulled theme suppliers deliberately keep the back door so that they can make use of your website to get backlinks to their sites. And, all this happens without your knowledge. It does not end here, they can also redirect your site to spam links, push ads on your website, bring down your site, gain third party access to your admin section and wholly hack it to demand a ransom.
Even the SSL security that you install for the privacy of confidential information that visitors submit on your site can be of no use if you have nulled themes installed. The malicious code can allow hackers to steal the private information of your users, which may include contacts, usernames, passwords, email addresses, etc.
Thus, nulled WordPress themes and plugins should be avoided as they are very risky for the security and privacy of your WordPress site.
2. Effect on Websites’ SEO
Pirated WordPress themes and plugins can ruin your WordPress website completely as they can add spam links to your website or hijack your users and redirect them to bad websites.
While you leave no stone unturned to rank high on search engines like Google and Bing, the nulled themes and plugins adversely affect the SEO of your website. Since the nulled themes contain spam links and malicious code, attackers can redirect visitors to other websites which can cause them harm. As a result, users will not visit your website again.
And yet to mention, the clustered environment and the spammy links shrink the readability of the site causing poor user experience. Those websites which contain malicious content are ranked lower in search engines. Your site will not be optimized even if you are using thousands of SEO tricks and strategies if you are used pirated themes for your website.
Hackers use specific tools to recognize unguarded high ranking sites and then introduce spam links, unnecessary content, and unwanted keywords to the high ranking pages. As a result, the attacker’s website ranks better in search engines.
Google webmaster tools are capable of detecting malware easily and when malicious content is found on your website, the ranking would drop badly. Also, anyone who tries to load your website will receive a warning to avoid your site. In the worst scenario, your website may never appear on Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
On one hand, you may have to spend months to recover your site’s SEO rankings and may even have to start building a new website from scratch on the other hand.
3. Legal issues
As we all know many WordPress themes and plugins are open sources, which means anyone can take the source code and modify and change it as per need. They can even re-package and deliver it as a brand new software. Even though the WordPress themes are plugins are open-source, some of them are still sold with mixed licenses. What is means is that some parts of the code are protected by copyright laws and if you are making use of a nulled WordPress theme or plugin, then you are not legally permitted to do so.
Duplicated WordPress themes or plugins can further result in loss of data, stealing of data, or allocation of illegal materials. You may end up paying a large sum of money to lawyers as all of these can drag you to legal proceedings.
The best way to not into any of these troubles is to purchase premium WordPress themes and plugins directly from the developers. You would not have to bother about being hit by a lawsuit if you avoid nulled WordPress themes and plugins.
4. No access to automatic updates
Most WordPress themes and plugins release new versions frequently to enhance the security of the platform, fix bugs, improve performances, add new features and, close security issues. But if you are using the nulled WordPress theme or plugin, you will not receive any updates as they don’t possess a valid license key. This can be the major cause leading to website hacking as the hackers are well known about the vulnerabilities in outdated versions.
There are several benefits of using genuine WordPress themes and plugins and of them is that you will receive regular updates. You won’t be able to improve performance without updating WordPress with newer versions. It is a different case with the nulled version as you won’t be notified of any updates since they don’t possess a valid license key.
You will be left with an outdated theme or plugin which further leads to security issues. Not only that, but you will also not have any idea about new updates which could aid in attracting more traffic or money.
Without a valid license key, you will have to update extensions manually every time there is a new release. Doesn’t it sound boring? To me, it does.
What if the developer releases an urgent security fix, but you don’t get notified of it until a few weeks later? Outdated versions are prone to attackers. It means you are letting your website to open an unnecessary risk if you are not able to promptly act upon with those new updates.
Well, using a nulled WordPress theme or plugin would end up being more problematic.
5. No Support and Documentation from WordPress Developers
Whenever you purchase services associated with computers and websites then the support from the service providers and warranty for those services is mandatory for you. Even the most experienced WordPress users need support and documentation to properly use premium WordPress themes and plugins. But, in the case of nulled themes and plugins, nobody is responsible to provide you with support for the issues you face while using themes.
The developers spend most of their time providing assistance and creating documentation for their users. And some might even hire support specialists to answer the queries of users and add new tutorials frequently to make it easy for users. But it is just the opposite if you are using nulled versions. Neither you can ask for help from developers nor can you get access to documentation and tutorials as they are only available to customers using valid premium themes.
So, what if you are stuck with an issue that can only be helped by the developer? How would you come out of it? Yeah, that is the reason you should avoid being in such a difficult position.
Though you can get access to all features of premium themes in nulled versions, you are all on your own if you encounter any issue with the product. You won’t even save money and time this way as you will be lingering around with a single issue for a long time which has been solved by the developer in a few minutes.
6. Discourages Innovative Developers
The premium WordPress themes and plugins are the outcome of dedication, hard work, coding, and designing skills of a theme developer. They spend a lot of time and a large sum of money to develop such outstanding and appealing themes. Not only this much, but they also need to have a website, prepare documentation, make tutorial videos, hire people, or assign experts to support the users and much more to have a successful theme.
Well, this is not the case with nulled WordPress themes and plugins.
The theme developers do not get anything in return if you use the pirated copy of that theme. Therefore, such innovative developers can be discouraged in order to build impressive and beautiful WordPress themes. Though it might seem to be a tiny piece of code to someone it is all possible due to the hard work, dedication, determination, skill, and talent of a developer. And hence, by using nulled themes, the developers are being deprived of the money that they deserve.
Developers end up losing money if you make use of pirated versions of WordPress themes and plugins. These unethical exercises may discourage developers from producing creative and new innovative products that can be advantageous to millions of users.
7. You have no idea what else is in the code
You have no idea what else is hidden in the code if you download a WordPress theme or plugin from other sources than a developer or a trusted repository like WordPress.org. It could even contain malicious code. Such code leads to the insertion of their own nasty payloads, like injected links for SEO, or even more deadliest activities.
You won’t come to know what is being hidden in the code until and unless you have time and knowledge to thoroughly read the code. So, it can be trusted if you obtain a theme or plugin from third party sites as they could be pirated copies of WordPress themes and plugins.
You need to download and install WordPress themes and plugins only from trusted sources to avoid consequences.
8. Ample Availability of Free Substitutes
You don’t necessarily need to use nulled WordPress themes and plugins because even if you can’t afford to go for premium themes, you can always opt to any of the free themes among several alternatives. There is always more than one free theme that is well suited for your website.
In fact, several premium WordPress plugins have limited free versions in order to help you get started. Similarly, there are many WordPress themes that are also free of cost. It’s just that you won’t have the accessibility to customize all of its features.
There are thousands of free themes and plugins in WordPress.org. You can select any theme that is appropriate for your website. And, some of them are even way better than premium themes. Most eminently, you can use them legally with no load on your standards and being abode by the terms and conditions of the WordPress community.
Conclusion
Just because nulled extensions are legal does not mean it’s a good idea to use them at your WordPress website.
The malicious code may outspread across different files to camouflage itself which indeed, makes detection very difficult when your site has been attacked. The use of genuine software has several benefits not forgetting search engine optimizations.
No one wants to spend more money to have their work done and it’s natural. But, you might end up paying heavy prices by using nulled software as they are not genuine and trustworthy.
You can check out free business themes in WordPress, free blog themes in WordPress, and news and magazine themes in WordPress.
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