Devin Price, who owns and operates the WordPress commercial theme shop DevPress, announced that he is retiring his best selling theme, Zenith. I asked Price why he’s retiring his best product.
“Retirement may not be the best term. It’s more like introducing the new year’s model and stopping production on the previous one. The designs match pretty close, but there were a lot of under the hood updates I wanted to do that would have broken child themes and created compatibility issues for existing customers.”
The HTML markup in Zelda is almost entirely rewritten. “If I was a customer who had spent hours making customizations through a child theme, I would be sorely disappointed when I clicked that auto-update button. Whereas, introducing a new version let’s the user decide whether to switch or not.” Price said. He plans on supporting Zenith for another year to give customers an opportunity to decide whether or not to switch to the new theme.
Price gives more insight into his strategy within the comments of an article written by Tom McFarlin on planned obsolescence of WordPress themes.
I think planned obsolescence or ‘theme retirement’ is a really good option for theme shops. Big updates (like converting a theme to be responsive, or using new development techniques like icon fonts) is sometimes really difficult to do in a way that won’t break child themes.
We’re using a mix of the ‘Fork It’ and ‘Retire It’ options at DevPress. The ‘Cascade’ theme will become ‘Cascadia’ (for example) and we’ll make the new theme available for free to all customers who purchased the free version. Less popular themes will just be retired as we add new themes to take their place.
Although theme shops are able to retire themes and set up redirects to newer versions, retiring a theme is not as easy to do on the WordPress theme directory. According to Price, “You can request a takedown and release a theme under a different name, but there’s no way to 301 redirect the established traffic to the new spot.” Not only does a theme author lose traffic, but they also can’t push out critical updates for retired themes.
DevPress isn’t the first theme shop to use a retirement strategy. Since 2012, WooThemes has retired 92 themes. Array also retires themes, but offers them for free with no support. A theme retirement strategy makes sense from a business perspective, but as a customer, I expect themes I buy to stick around for a year or more.
As a customer, what do you think about commercial theme companies retiring themes? For commercial theme shops, how does such a strategy help your business?
While we’ve (Array) certainly retired themes in the past, I wouldn’t say we’ve ever retired them on a “regular basis.” This would imply that it’s part of our collection’s cycle, but in reality, we’ve only retired themes circumstantially in the past. As we’ve transitioned and grown, it made sense to focus on the themes that gained the most traction and were favored by our customer base.
Every theme company operates differently, but I would venture to say that everyone wants to make sure they’re operating as optimally as possible. For some, this means rolling out new features, others may refocus their efforts on improving existing themes and some may retire themes. There isn’t one particular approach that fits every theme provider.
At any rate, it’s important to make sure you support retired themes until they’ve fulfilled their obligations to a user. If you’ve sold a year of support with the theme, you should honor that commitment if you want to retain and build trust from your customers.