What to check before you buy a WordPress theme for an affiliate site

A theme for an ordinary WordPress blog is a layer of presentation: swap it on a Tuesday afternoon and your posts are still posts. A theme for an affiliate site is rarely that. It usually carries the operator records, the rating fields, the bonus records and the comparison tables, which means it holds your content model and not only your colours. Replacing it two years later is a migration, not a redesign.

So the questions worth asking are narrower than a feature list: what was actually measured, what you get back if you leave, and which claims the seller can show you evidence for. Here is the checklist we would use ourselves, and it applies to our theme as much as anyone’s.

Work out who owns your data

Themes in the WordPress.org directory are not allowed to register custom post types, taxonomies or blocks. The theme review requirements call that plugin territory, on the reasoning that a theme is presentation and your content should survive a change of theme.

Almost every commercial affiliate theme breaks that rule, ours among them, because the alternative is selling you a theme and a plugin and hoping they agree. So the useful question is not whether a theme registers post types, but what you are left holding if you stop using it. Ask before you buy:

• Which content will live in post types the theme registers, and which in ordinary posts and pages.
• Whether Tools → Export covers those post types, so a standard export is not empty.
• Whether the extra fields are plain post meta another tool could read, or something proprietary.
• What the answer is to “we have changed theme” — a documented route, or a shrug.

Check what it is tested against, not what it says it supports

“Compatible with the latest PHP” is not a fact you can check. The versions a theme is tested on are. Where PHP stands this month, from php.net’s own support page:

PHP branch	Status in October 2026
8.0 and 8.1	End of life — no security fixes at all
8.2	Security fixes only, and those end on 31 December 2026
8.3, 8.4 and 8.5	Actively supported

WordPress itself recommends “PHP version 8.3 or greater”. A theme whose highest tested version is already end of life tells you how closely the project is kept up. Ask which versions the build runs against — PokaTheme is tested on PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 — and treat a missing Requires PHP header in style.css as a project that has not decided.

Ask to see the checks that run on every release. “Fully compatible” on a sales page is not one of them.

Ask what the performance numbers measured

Nearly every theme shows a screenshot of a 100 in Lighthouse, and it is almost never the site you will end up with. It was measured on the demo, with the seller’s images, no plugins and a page cache in front of it.

Lighthouse is also a lab test, and what Google reports is field data: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 s or less, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 ms or less, Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less, for at least 75% of visits. INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024, so a performance page still citing FID has not been rewritten in two years.

The better question is what a review page with twenty operators weighs, in requests and uncompressed bytes, and whether anything in the release process checks it. That is what we gate in CI — page weight rather than timings, because bytes do not move between runs. Our own figure is 100 / 100 on mobile on our test pages, and those are probe fixtures on a development rig rather than a customer’s site. Every seller’s number deserves that footnote.

Look at how the listings are actually built

Comparison tables, top-ten lists and bonus tables are where an affiliate site earns, and two problems hide in them.

The first is layout shift. A table that reflows when a font or a logo arrives moves everything underneath it, and script-inserted banners do the same. Open a demo in a phone-sized window and watch the top of a review page while it loads.

The second is whether the listings are real. Some pattern libraries are effectively pictures: you insert a section and fill it in by hand, so every ranking change becomes an editing job on every page. Others insert blocks that query your own records, so changing a rating updates the listing everywhere. Ask which. PokaTheme ships 37 patterns and 15 blocks, each also available as a shortcode, and its listing patterns query.

Decide how you will change it before you need to

Any theme sold for WordPress has to be GPL-compatible, which is what gives you the right to modify it, but that right is worth little if the route is unclear. The order you want is Additional CSS for small things, the theme’s own settings for whatever it exposes, and a child theme for templates and functions.

• Is a child theme in the download, built from the current release? Not a given: the one in our own 4.1.8 download had last been rebuilt in June 2022. v5 builds it from the release.
• Are colours and typography exposed as settings or style variations? PokaTheme has eight, and switching one does not mean re-importing a demo.
• Are the hooks documented, and is there a deprecation policy? Ours is that v4 shortcodes, block names and hooks keep working for the whole of 5.x.
• Does it clear the accessibility floor? Skip links, keyboard navigation and a visible focus indicator are required of directory themes. Tab through a demo, then measure button contrast in the style variation you will actually ship rather than the one in the screenshot.

Read the compliance and disclosure story carefully

For a gambling or finance affiliate site this is not decoration. Check which parts the theme does and which you are expected to bolt on:

• An affiliate disclosure on the pages that need it, not only in the footer.
• Outbound affiliate links carrying rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Google’s spam policies are explicit that it is not a violation to have such links as long as they are qualified.
• Where relevant, an age statement, responsible-gambling links and a licence display. PokaTheme has six compliance presets; the generic one deliberately omits the licence display, and the age is a field because it is 18 in most markets and 19 in Ontario.

Google defines thin affiliation as affiliate content copied from the merchant with nothing added. No theme fixes that for you.

Ask what the licence buys, and what stops

• How many sites it covers.
• How long updates and support run, what renewal costs, and what stops when it lapses — usually updates and support rather than the theme itself.
• Whether you can read the support forum before buying, which tells you what breaks.
• What the last three releases contained. A changelog of version bumps reads differently from one that names what changed.

Ours are on the FAQ; PokaTheme is 58€.

Six questions to send a seller

1. Which post types and taxonomies does the theme register, and does Tools → Export cover them?
2. Which PHP versions does your release process test against?
3. What does a review page with twenty operators weigh, and do you check it on every release?
4. Do the listing patterns query my records, or do I fill them in by hand?
5. Is a child theme included, built from the current release?
6. What does renewal cost, and what stops when it lapses?

Anyone who can answer all six in a paragraph each is worth a closer look. To see the answers on finished sites, the demos are five complete sites, and the documentation is worth reading before you buy rather than after. Two of these checks are written up in detail in how we took jQuery out of PokaTheme 5 and bonuses as real records. If you want a second opinion on a theme you are weighing up, get in touch — we will answer these about any theme, not only ours.