We all know WordPress, the software, is free and great for beginners, hobby bloggers, and even serious businesses. The platform is supplemented by hundreds and thousands of plugins, themes, and extensions built by developers from around the globe. There are thousands of free plugins and themes on WordPress, that can easily be used as alternatives to the pricey versions. This makes the life of many website owners easy!
But here’s the thing, from time to time, even the average non-tech guy needs to run premium (paid) plugins to get those extra benefits and functions for their site. A good number of users opt to run these premium solutions nulled, i.e. free software from a non-verified source. This, however, is highly discouraged because it costs your site a lot more than it gives back.
Note: This article is not directed against the use of nulled software for trial purposes. Rather it’s more of a word of caution with respect to running non-licensed plugins taken down from unverified sites on live sites.
What Role Do Nulled WordPress Plugins and Themes Play in Piracy?
Nulled WordPress themes and plugins, altered by hackers and shared freely across various platforms, serve malicious purposes such as redirecting sites to spam, injecting ads, and collecting user information for spam emails. These unauthorized distributions have significant repercussions like:
- Impact on Developers and Companies: Legitimate creators face financial losses as nulled themes and plugins undermine the hard work and investment put into premium products.
- Illegality: The use of nulled themes and plugins is illegal, constituting piracy by utilizing premium products without proper purchase or licensing. Legal consequences can follow.
- Malicious Code Insertion: Hackers often inject harmful code into nulled themes and plugins, compromising website security, causing malfunctions, or enabling unauthorized access.
- Piracy Consequences: Engaging in piracy through the use of nulled themes and plugins can lead to severe penalties, including legal actions against individuals or entities caught using pirated products.
- Website Vulnerability: Nulled themes and plugins expose websites to vulnerabilities due to the lack of official updates and security patches, making sites more susceptible to cyber threats.
- Financial Consequences: While nulled themes may seem like a cost-saving option, the potential legal and website damage risks can result in significant financial consequences over time.
Using nulled WordPress themes and plugins not only violates legal and ethical standards but also poses serious risks to website security and functionality. Acquiring and using legitimate, licensed products is crucial to avoid the potential consequences associated with pirated materials.
Why Is It Attractive to Use Nulled WordPress Themes and Plugins?
Despite the clear understanding that using nulled WordPress themes and plugins is illegal, there remains a high demand for them. Let's quickly explore the reasons behind users' preference for nulled themes and plugins.
Cost-Free Access: The primary reason is the free availability of nulled themes and plugins. Users can download, install, and use them without the need to purchase a license, and they are readily accessible on numerous websites.
Access to Premium Features: Nulled themes and plugins serve as cracked versions of premium counterparts. By integrating them into your website, you gain unrestricted access to all the exclusive features that would typically require a premium license.
No Usage Restrictions: While premium licenses for WordPress themes or plugins often impose limitations on the number of websites they can be used for, nulled themes and plugins have no such restrictions, allowing for unlimited use across multiple sites.
Consider the Motives of Nulled Software Providers
Before we delve into the consequences for users using pirated versions, let's consider what nulled hosts are obtaining from distributing paid plugins freely. Nulled plugins and themes are, for the vast majority of times, given out by individuals who cannot be identified through unsecured sites.
The sites where they allow you to download free premium WordPress plugins and themes are for the most part unprofessional or broken. And even if it is a popular website, you cannot specifically identify the individuals running it because nulled providers simply do no work like normal businesses.
These anonymous providers tend to inject codes and scripts in the nulled versions. When you use these on your site, these codes infect your files covertly.
Unknown to you, the provider has probably also injected scripts and codes to run his own ads on your site. Or fill it with spam links, pop-ups, and banners that – all of which can cause your site to freeze or crash suddenly. It also makes the site incredibly annoying and slow for visitors who may quickly become disinterested and leave. Thus increasing your bounce rate.
Want to Speed Up Your Website? Read our guide on how to speed up the WordPress website.
In addition, these providers can even steal your personal data like names, IDs email addresses, and payment information.
Thus, filling your inbox with spam mail, hijacking your site or stealing your money. Again, these people are difficult to track down with names or locations, so if you want to charge them or file a case, it would probably be impossible.
Why Users Should Restrict From Using WordPress Nulled Plugins and Themes
Now let's get into details about why we suggest users to abandon using pirated WordPress nulled solutions:
- You're precluded from having a valid license
- You don't receive updates of the software
- No access to new features
- Makes your site unsecured and vulnerable
- Support is not available
- Susceptible to attacks from malware, spyware & hackers
- Loss of personal data and information
- Affects your SEO negatively
- Developers lose money
You're Precluded from Having a Valid License
When you forego paying for a premium plugin or theme you don't get to have a valid and unique license key.
This essentially also makes you an unethical user of that solution because you're not listed as a verified customer in that company's registrar. Since you did not purchase it from the authentic website or from the developer of the plugin/theme, your contact and details are not with the company.
Which also means the company has no register and track of you. You become an unverified user consuming a copyrighted product unlawfully.
You Don't Receive Updates on the Software
Active developers of WordPress themes and plugins regularly release updated versions that improve the performance and operation of your site. With each release comes a variety of developments: bug fixes, tweaks, security patches, and new features.
But when you install a nulled theme or plugin on your WordPress site, you forsake this extremely essential service that is available to licensed premium users.
Consequently, as a non-verified customer with outdated plugins, you will end up with a buggy and insecure website that will break down time.
Secondly, WordPress itself releases updated versions of its core platform. For best performance, you should always run the latest versions of WordPress. Similarly important is ensuring that the plugins, themes, and extensions you're using are also compatible with the latest version.
If you only update your WordPress core but keep using nulled versions, it still won't help if your plugins and themes remain outdated and incompatible with the WordPress core. Consequently, your website may start malfunctioning or even break down.
If you're running a marketplace, for instance, it becomes absolutely essential, for this reason, to keep your WordPress store updated. Keeping WordPress, your plugins and themes updated ensures that your site loads faster stays free of bugs, and is secured.
No Access to New Features
When you've opted out of automatic updates, you also don't get access to all the new features and functions from the developer. The new features can add more functionalities to your website, augment your performance, and bring you more traffic and sales. These are things that you wouldn't even know have been released unless you subscribed to their newsletter or blog.
Makes Your Site Unsecured and Vulnerable
When we start a website or business, our first concern is to set it up right so that visitors can navigate easily and be attracted enough to spend time on the site. But what happens if your users are unable to smoothly browse through your site? What if it crashes every few seconds? And what if the user is constantly bombarded with unwanted obstructions, and annoying pop-ups, that hinder him from using the site?
That's exactly what happens when you run a WordPress site with nulled plugins and themes.
Why does this happen? Nulled software often comes with malicious codes and scripts injected into them, which undoubtedly affect the proper functioning of your website.
These harmful codes and scripts are also known to spread across the site through files in hidden and mysterious ways that are very difficult to catch, detect, and resolve for the amateur person. Even an expert would charge a hell lot of your time and money to clean up infected files and fix these dangerous attacks.
Using pirated plugins and themes also makes your site vulnerable to attacks from hackers and malware. Since you don't get updates of the new releases, the pirated product is bound to become buggy and outdated. This causes your site to be buggy as well and susceptible to malicious attacks.
Read: How to Remove Malware from WordPress Site .
Support is not Available
Premium plugins often come with a lot of features and settings that can be difficult to configure for the average user.
For many pro plugins, documentation, and tutorials are only available for licensed users. Free 24/7 support from dedicated customer representatives by the developer's company is available to validly licensed users.
Though free version users are eligible to get some amount of support through tickets and email, nulled plugin users are left stranded from getting assisted because they don't have a valid license proving ownership of the plugin.
So if you're running nulled versions, you're left on your own. You won't be eligible to seek out the developers when you need help.
What can be worse than this? And if you're thinking about seeking assistance from elsewhere, it might cost you time, energy, and let's not forget, money as well. If the outsider you're seeking is not experienced with WordPress themes and plugins, he may even cause your site to break with wrong fixes, leaving things worse for you than better.
Let's not undermine the fact that WordPress plugins and theme developers spend a lot of time creating these products and hiring customer engineers who will provide the best possible support so you can run your website without any hindrance.
These specialists create documentation, tutorials, videos, blogs, and images, answer queries, and requests, and honor user demands. So when you forsake going through the lawful process to use the software, you also prevent yourself from obtaining these supplementary and free services, like support.
Susceptible to Attacks from Malware, Spyware & Hackers
Since you get no updates, new features, protection or support from the developer, your WordPress site becomes extremely vulnerable at this point to attacks from viruses, malware, and worst case scenario, hackers.
Nulled plugins and themes often have malicious code inside that steal information and make them available for hackers.
If you run an online marketplace or membership website, this can be deadly. These malicious codes and scripts can cause confidential information from your site to be stolen. Such as, usernames, passwords, email addresses, credit card numbers and payment data.
Also Read: Dokan Nulled Versions Are Not Safe For Your Website
Loss of Personal Data and Information
Having your customer data lost is one of the worst things that can happen. It compromises the integrity of your website and costs your business to lose its credibility.
The negative effects of nulled plugins and themes are so fast and far-fetched that they are hard to detect while they're happening. And when the harm is done, it's too difficult to turn things back to normal. Stolen personal information is not only deadly for your website, but also for your business.
Your customers can easily lose faith and not trust back your business again. Customer trust is a determining factor in business and losing it costs a brand to suffer in strength and competencies. Theft of personal information brings bad reputation and can even prevent new traffic and sales. The negative effects of running nulled plugins and themes on your WordPress site can even cause your existing customers to run away.
Affects your SEO Negatively
Nulled WordPress themes and plugins also bring down your SEO rankings significantly. The pirated versions have well-hidden codes that add spam links, viruses, and obtrusive pop-ups to your website and redirect users to spammy sites where their information can be hijacked. It may even cause your site to hang and crash several times while users browse. Search engines are quick to catch this and can penalize your site by lowering its search ranking or by de-indexing your site completely.
The countless hours, effort, and smartness you spent to gain a good search ranking will all be outdone by these spam links, annoying pop-ups, and crashes. It may cost you several months to recover your search ranking position. If that doesn't solve it, you may even have to create a new website.
A spammy site also makes your site look less credible for customers, causing more number of people to leave the site without purchasing or taking an action.
Criminal Offense
If you're using free premium WordPress plugins and themes unethically, that in and of itself is an offense liable to be punished under Civil, and even sometimes, Criminal Law, depending on the graveness of the circumstances.
This is especially the case if the developer has copyrighted the codes of his product. Federal Law imposes serious penalties against those charged with piracy and copyright infringement which can lead to civil or criminal lawsuits.
Developers Lose Money
Plugins, themes, extensions and a lot more are a result of a developer's skill, talent, hard work, and education. When you use his copyrighted work unethically, you take away his credit. But there's something more than a nulled software does.
Developers spend a lot of time and money to create these solutions for the benefit of users. They create websites, hire support specialists, buy space on rent to run the company, run social media posts, ads, and a lot more to market their product.
Using nulled software hurts their business and they end up losing money to those who are distributing their copyrighted work for free.
Our Advice: Use nulled plugins or themes, but not for your official site. If you want to test a plugin's or theme's premium version before buying, then you can use a nulled plugin or theme on a demo or test site.
Closing thoughts
Nulled themes and plugins are disastrous for the businesses of both developers and users. It costs your website a lot more than any benefit it yields. Nulled free premium WordPress plugins and themes break your site, bring viruses, insert malicious codes and scripts, make the site slow and vulnerable to hackers and malware, hurts your SEO position, and causes you to lose data. Even developers lose business, money, and enthusiasm to continue creating innovative products.
As an invalid user without a license key, you don't get to obtain support and updated versions. So you're left with a buggy and spammy site which eventually brings down your credibility in the eyes of customers. Loss of trust in business has long-lasting negative effects which are sometimes irreparable.
Have something more to add? Let us know your thoughts in comments!