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A great deal of WordPress themes are licensed under the GPL, which to many, means they should always be free. While I agree that free themes are great and truly promote learning a great piece of open source software like WordPress, there are very real dangers and downsides to getting themes distributed by someone other than the original author/creator.

Potential for Being Hacked

The biggest issue with downloading themes from untrusted or secondary sources is the issue of software security. Because WordPress themes can interact directly with the WordPress database, you are entrusting your theme distributor with the safety of your entire database. One such account was posted on WordPress-Templates.com:

My friend once got a pirated theme and uploaded it on his host. The blog worked fine for few days, but one morning he was shocked to see his blog was hacked! That was a nightmare for him. He was hosting many sites and blogs on that hosting account. All the data was lost, even the MySQL database was modified with malicious code. He did not have a backup. The hosting company ordered him to remove all the files and reset his hosting as the remaining files could be infected too. There is no way to identify each and every infected files, and so he had to remove everything. All his work done for years and in one night was gone. All to save a few dollars.

No Theme Support

If you're not a decent WordPress themer, downloading a commercial theme from a third-party source can be a huge pain to work with. In most cases, you spend more time trying to figure out problems that have been solved a dozen times already on that theme's support forum or you just have a list of questions that you just need to get answers for. A lot of people end up buying the theme after the fact having wasted numerous hours trying to figure things out on their own.

Outdated Themes

Another issue is keeping up with theme releases. Since you are not receiving updates from the original creator of the theme, you could not only be missing out on new features, but on compatibility with future versions of WordPress, which could lead to security vulnerabilities if you are unable to upgrade to the latest version. Oh, and if there are bugs in the theme you are using, which is highly probable, you will need to take care of them on your own.

So What Have We Learned Today?

Well, we learned that downloading themes from shady websites or bittorrent is a bad idea for three reasons, all of them good enough on their own. We also learned that passing on spending $20-$80 on a WordPress theme could end up cost hundreds of dollars in your own time wasted trying to figure things out that have already been figured out.