ver the past few years, WordPress has become one of the most important and powerful content management systems ever, and millions use it to create and design websites online in an easy way and without the need for any programming skills or experience.
One of the most prominent elements of success in the WordPress platform is the great quantity and diversity of templates and plugins that can be installed on the site, which include different designs, tools, and features. Templates and add-ons are divided into free and paid modules. Paid add-ons and templates are characterized by having broader options for achieving professionalism in website design.
Therefore, many website owners may resort to searching for paid templates and add-ons, but they have been pirated and published on the Internet for free to anyone. Some website owners use the tools published in this way, such as using pirated copies of Windows, out of ignorance of the harm that these tools may cause. In this article, we will highlight ten reasons why you should never use pirated WordPress themes and plugins.
1.Pirated templates may contain malicious codes
When you search for WordPress templates from an unofficial source on the Internet, you will find many sources and sites that offer you to purchase paid templates and plugins for less than their traditional price. You may find many paid templates and plugins spread across the Internet completely free of charge, as you can download and install them on your site without Pay no subscription at all.
It seems good and profitable at first glance and saves you some money, but these pirated templates and add-ons may cause you major problems and errors on your site, which may cost you many times the price of those templates to fix if you had purchased them from their original source.
When installing templates and add-ons from unknown sources, the risk is the presence of malicious code within the source code of those templates. what does that mean? This means that hackers have a hidden key to access your site data and steal it, or perhaps modify or even delete all of your site files or databases. This would be a disaster if you manage a large site that includes financial accounts for customers or users.
In pirated templates and plugins, any experienced person can include malicious codes that enable him to steal your site’s data, in addition to the possibility of placing codes that prevent search engines from accessing your site’s content. The result will be the loss of many visitors to your site and the loss of many potential customers to buy your product.
2. Support piracy operations
When you buy pirated copies of templates and add-ons at a price much lower than their original price, you are actually contributing to supporting pirates who sabotage original programs and systems and plant malicious codes in them to harm or steal from users.
At the same time, you limit the potential profits of developers and programmers who spent a lot of effort and time developing the tool that they sell to users, and this will indirectly affect the development of WordPress plugins and templates in the future.
There are some popular templates and plugins that programmers have been working on developing and improving for years. The question here is: Will the developers continue to improve and update this addition if the majority of users buy pirated versions instead of paid versions? of course no.
3. Lack of technical support from the tool developers
Obtaining technical support from developers of templates and plugins in WordPress is one of the wonderful and essential privileges for website owners. What is meant here by support is obtaining direct assistance in solving problems and errors, and even taking advice on how to use the template or plugin and benefit from all the features it includes.
Imagine that you are facing a problem with your site due to one of the pirated add-ons that you previously installed. In that case, you either resort to Google and start searching for solutions to the problem, or you hire a programmer to fix the problem on your site.
On the other hand, when installing free and paid add-ons on a regular basis, you can easily log in to speak with the add-on’s technical support team directly and ask them for help in solving the problem. Of course, the experts who developed the template or add-on will be able to provide you with the best solutions in record time.
As for pirated templates or add-ons, you will not be able to obtain technical support, and you may encounter some problems that consume a lot of your time and perhaps your money to solve, because you simply do not have the authority to obtain technical support for these pirated templates or add-ons.
4. You will not get updates
One of the most prominent limitations that you will encounter when using pirated plugins and templates is the inability to obtain the updates provided by the developers for those templates and plugins. You may be wondering, is getting the latest updates that important? Well, installing updates to themes and plugins is very important, and the reason is that most of these updates aim to close security vulnerabilities that hackers may use to harm your site.
Therefore, obtaining periodic updates from template and plugin developers puts you in a safe environment, away from any risk of the site being hacked due to vulnerabilities in your site. In addition, updates often include a package of new tools, settings, and features that may help you manage your site effectively and efficiently.
If you want to install these updates even though you have the pirated version of the add-on or template, this is actually possible, but you will need to delete the previous template or add-on and search for the new pirated version of the update, and you will once again enter the maze of danger of installing a malicious pirated copy. In other words, you will not get The update is officially updated and installed automatically, as happens with regular versions.
5. Legal problems
When talking about legal problems related to WordPress themes and plugins, this issue is not very common in reality. This is because almost all WordPress plugins and templates are under a license that allows any user around the world to publish and share the programs with complete freedom.
However, in some cases, site owners encounter malicious pirated versions to which the hackers have added significant changes to the software structure of the add-on or template, which may draw the attention of the company or official body developing the add-on, and your site may end up being reported to the competent authorities for using that modified version of their product.
6. Exploiting your site for external links and poor user experience
One of the most common problems that users of pirated templates suffer from is noticing that comments appear automatically on all articles on their site. These comments contain external links to other sites that are not related to the content of the site.
This is caused by some malicious code that hackers place inside the template or plugin code. The purpose of this is to get external links to those sites to strengthen them in Google search. But this may cause inconvenience to your site visitors, in addition to some SEO problems for you.
One of the problems that also results from installing pirated templates in some cases is that external links are automatically opened for visitors to your site. This has a major negative impact on the user experience on your site, and the visitor may end up leaving your site to escape those annoying external links.
7.Pirated templates may harm your website and business’s online reputation
Imagine that you own a website for your business , which has a prestigious status and specializes in publishing professional and ethical content for a specific segment of the audience, and at the same time you are using a pirated and illegal WordPress template or plugin. In this case, when the news of your site’s use of pirated add-ons is discovered or spreads, this will affect the reputation and public confidence in the content you provide due to its lack of ethics and lack of professionalism.
8. Inability to request special modifications to your site
In many plugins and templates, you can contact technical support to make a specific modification or add a special feature only to your site. You can request a feature that suits the content of your site and provides the ability to show some options that are not available in the template by default.
However, if the template you are using is pirated and you do not have the regular purchase license for it, you will not be able to obtain these custom modifications and you will not be able to request these services from the developers, which you may desperately need if you own a large site, as you need some modifications that make you distinctive. In front of your visitors and audience.
9. Provides free copies of WordPress templates
One of the most important reasons that prevent you from using pirated templates is the presence of a very large number of free WordPress templates , where you can choose the free template that is appropriate for your site’s field of specialization, and later when your site flourishes and the audience expands and begins to achieve satisfactory financial returns, then you can purchase templates or copies. The paid ones provide you with many distinctive options that are not found in the free versions.
You can enter the official WordPress plugins store and you will find a large and distinctive package of free WordPress plugins from which you can choose what suits your site. In most cases, you can fulfill your request through the official free versions, and you will not need to search for paid, pirated versions most of the time, as you will find everything you are looking for in the free versions.
10. Email paid theme developers to get a discount
The main and perhaps the only reason for getting pirated themes and plugins is the inability to pay for a paid theme. In this case, before taking the risk and downloading the pirated version, you can write to the developers of the add-on or template you want to obtain and request a special discount for you to officially purchase the add-on or template.
In most cases, template and add-on developers offer discounts and encouraging offers to customers while reducing the price of the add-on or service, so that website owners have the opportunity to obtain regular copies and avoid the negative repercussions that may occur from purchasing or obtaining pirated copies.
Why aren’t sites that sell pirated WordPress themes or plugins banned?
Now that we have mentioned to you 10 reasons why you should not use pirated templates and plugins, and how you can protect yourself and your site from the risks resulting from them, we will answer an important question that comes to the minds of many, which is: Why are the sites that sell and display pirated templates not closed and blocked?
There are dozens of sites that offer pirated add-ons and templates completely free of charge, and some of them offer them for sale at a price much lower than the real price of the official template or add-on.
In fact, the existence of these sites is not directly in violation of the law, because the WordPress system, as a general content management system, is subject to an international license called the GPL. This license gives freedom to any user, regardless of his background or intentions, to modify, modify, develop, and even republish or sell the WordPress platform and all Its plugins and templates, whether free or paid, and share them freely.
Therefore, publishing paid templates is legal according to the WordPress GPL , but sometimes when hackers start making malicious modifications and modifications to the source code of templates and plugins, the matter becomes illegal and the template developer can sue the party behind those modifications.
WordPress being subject to the GPL license does not mean that you can trust all the templates and plugins spread across the Internet, because many of them may have been modified and malicious code placed inside them, and thus they can cause you a lot of harm, as we explained in the previous ten points.
Conclusion
It may be tempting to get many paid themes and plugins for free through illegal piracy sites, but always remember that there is a price for everything. Even pirated plugins and themes have their price, and you may have to pay a high price to use them on your site.
So think carefully before you adopt any of the pirated templates and add-ons on your site. We have detailed in our article ten reasons that push you away from risking your site’s data and the trust of your customers and visitors. You will find, if you analyze the matter well, that purchasing paid templates and add-ons legally or adopting the free versions will be much better. The future of your site in the short and long term
