Have you ever wondered what would happen if you didn’t renew your WordPress licenses (that plugin or theme license)? Will your WordPress website break? With your plugins stop working? I answer that question today. Thank you to Kerry for asking for the audience.
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton, and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. Today, I’m gonna be addressing a great question brought to us by one of the fans on the YouTube channel. Kerry W. asks,
“Will I lose my content or will my plugins break if I decide to not renew my license for themes or plugins?”
It’s a really great question, and a lot of us do invest in premium products, and I wanna get to the answer right now.
Renewing Your WordPress Licenses
Hey y’all. So everybody knows that free is always in the budget, and that’s great to have, but sometimes you wanna reach out there and maybe get a more improved features or functionality. Maybe you wanna invest in a really solid theme like Divi, and invest in something that’s really gonna be robust and great for you to use, but do you have to renew that license? Do you have to pay that fee every year? The truth is yes.
Will your theme break? No, not necessarily. Will your plugins stop working? No, not necessarily, but what will happen is that theme author, or the plugin authors, might issue an update saying, “Hey, we’ve found a security vulnerability. “You must update.” Or “Hey, we’ve figured out a better way to do something. “You need to go ahead and update.” And they’ll notify you of that, but if you have not renewed that license, your license has expired, you will not have access to get in there and get that most recent version of that product.
That’s a problem because overtime, as your website does grow older and older online, that can become a vulnerability for your site to be hacked or for things to break. So it’s really important that you budget ahead, that you think about, “Okay, I understand that I’m gonna invest in this premium theme, and every year after that it’s gonna cost me this amount of money.”
If you’re billing these for clients, be sure to roll that expense over to them. What you’ll want to do is have a conversation with them and say, “Hey, you know what? The first of every year you’re gonna be renewing your domain name, you’ll be paying for your hosting and you’ll also have some license fees.” Let them know, ahead of time, that that’s gonna be the monetary commitment so that they’re not surprised whenever you roll out the invoice to ’em.
It’s something that you can just tell them, “This keeps your website functioning correctly and running securely. It’s a necessary fee.”
Hey, if you like this type of content, please stick around. Like the video. Subscribe to my channel ’cause every Wednesday I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your marketing inside the world of WordPress, and I have over 400 other videos, here on this YouTube channel, totally for free. Go dig around. Look, search around. I’ve got things on search engine optimization, social media marketing, all sorts of stuff with WordPress, how to improve your content, how to improve your conversion, all sorts of cool ideas on here. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have your own question like Kerry did, be sure to comment in the thread below.
I’ll do my best to answer the question, or give me a tweet. I’ll talk to y’all soon. Bye everyone.
