That cheap WordPress theme is going to cost you far more than you paid for it

Your developer has gone quiet. Your site is breaking in ways nobody can explain. And somewhere in the wreckage is a £49 marketplace theme that seemed like a perfectly sensible decision at the time. I've walked into this situation more times than I can count and every single time, the cost of fixing it is higher than building it right would have been. I've been working with WordPress since the early days. I've watched the ecosystem grow, and I've watched the problems that come with it compound. The marketplace model: buy a theme, bolt on some plugins, hand it to a developer who treats it like a jigsaw is one of the most reliable ways to end up with a website that looks fine for eighteen months and then quietly falls apart. The theme stops getting updated. A plugin gets abandoned. The developer who assembled it has moved on and genuinely doesn't care what happens next. You're left holding something nobody fully understands, including you. I know the pitch is tempting. "All-in-one solution, less than a hundred quid, everything you need." What you're actually buying is someone else's assumptions about what a website should do, packaged up and sold to thousands of businesses with completely different needs. The more popular the theme, the bigger the target it paints on your site. The more plugins stacked on top, the more things that can break independently of each other and do. The developers who sell you this aren't always wrong, they're just not invested in what happens next. Some of them are perfectly competent. The problem isn't skill, it's the model. Build it, invoice it, move on. Your site's long-term stability is nobody's job once that invoice is paid. I've spent the last two months fixing sites for businesses whose previous developers had done exactly this, taken the money, delivered something that worked on launch day, and disappeared. The clients weren't stupid. They just didn't know what questions to ask. When I build something, I build it so it can be maintained, extended, and handed off cleanly. I want the person who comes after me, whether that's me in three years or someone else, to be able to understand exactly what's there and why. That costs more upfront. Over three years, it costs significantly less. And it means your primary source of income isn't held together by a plugin its original developer stopped updating in 2022. Before you hire anyone, ask them to show you something they built from scratch. Ask what the plan is when a plugin loses support. Ask what maintenance looks like in year two. If they can't answer plainly, you have your answer. Cheap now and expensive later is still expensive, it's just less obvious at the time, which is exactly why it keeps happening.