Beware of Installing Malicious WordPress Themes

Everyone wants a better look for their blog. You might want a theme with good design, a prefect layout, with pleasing colors and more functionalities or widgets. For this you might search trhough the vast amount of web sites offering wordpress themes for free.

For those who are willing to pay for a theme there are some good theme designers for wordpress who offer excellent wordpress themes for a small amount, normally below 50 bucks. But if you don’t want ot pay for a design you will probably opt for searching the web, dreaming about finding a premium them for free download. You can get all the 28 premium themes designed and set for sale by WooThemes available for free donwload as a single package in a third party web ite.

The best part is you will get most of the premium themes for free in some other third party sites. But the question is “Are they reliable?”, “Can you install these themes in your blog without any issues?”.

My answer will be a big “NO”. Being a victim of malicious themes, which after isntalling wiped out my entire blog, I strongly recommend all not to download wordpress themes from third party sites. Most of the themes are available form their creators iste itself.

I recently downladed a them from http://www.bestwpthemes.com/, and installed it in my wordpress site which is hosted with godaddy.com. It got installed successfully and I clicked the activate button and here it goes. The page became blank and nothing was left for me to do. I logged into my hosting account and checked for the files and I can see that some files like wp-load.php, wp-login.php, index.php are missing.

The only thing which was left for me was to reinstall the WordPress blog and do everything from the beginning. While I was lucky having a backup of the blog, I lost only two articles which were not backed up recently.

So guys, take care when you download and intall themes from a third party site. Make sure you have the blog securely backed up before installing these malicisous ( who know which one contains a bad line ) wordpress themes.