“Premium” is one of the most abused adjectives in the WordPress economy. The honest truth: most $49 themes ship more JavaScript than a modern web app, more CSS than they need and more PHP than they use.

Before you buy a theme — from us or anyone else — run these five quick checks. They’re not exhaustive, but they catch 90% of the problems.

1. Lighthouse score on the demo

Open the live demo of the theme. Run Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse in incognito, with cache disabled, on Mobile, throttled. Don’t trust desktop scores — mobile is where the truth lives.

Acceptable benchmarks for a premium theme:

• Performance ≥ 75 on a freshly installed theme with demo content.
• Accessibility ≥ 90.
• Best Practices = 100.
• SEO ≥ 90.

2. Count the HTTP requests

Open DevTools → Network tab, refresh the page, and check the total request count. A theme that loads more than 80 requests on a homepage is dragging in too many libraries. Common offenders:

• Five different icon font families.
• jQuery + Slick + Owl Carousel + Swiper, all bundled in case you “might use one of them”.
• 4 Google Fonts variants when you’ll only ever use 2.

3. Look at the theme.json

Modern, well-built themes ship a theme.json with proper color palettes, spacing scales, typography and block style variations. If a theme still relies on inline customizer CSS and PHP-generated styles, it was probably built before WordPress 5.9 and hasn’t been modernized.

4. Check the changelog

Every reputable theme shop publishes a changelog. Look for these signals:

• Regular updates at least every 2-3 months.
• Specific entries: “Fixed: header search broken on mobile Safari 17.4” beats “Various improvements”.
• Security entries: real shops disclose security fixes openly.

5. Try the support before you buy

Email pre-sales support with a specific technical question. How they reply tells you more than every customer testimonial put together:

• Who replied — a developer, or a sales VA following a script?
• How long did it take? Under 24 hours is good. Over 72 hours is a red flag for post-purchase support.
• Did they answer your specific question, or did they paste a generic FAQ link?

“You’re not buying a theme. You’re entering a 5-year working relationship with a vendor. Choose them carefully.”

Our own scores, in full transparency

Every HDNETRO theme runs through the same five-step audit before publication. We publish Lighthouse scores per theme inside each theme’s documentation page. If a theme can’t hit our internal benchmarks, we don’t ship it.