Image by Heraklit WordPress 2.5 came out just under 2 weeks ago, and since then there have been a stream of “Reasons to Upgrade” posts. Well, what about reasons not to upgrade?

The Security Thing

Security is a good reason to upgrade, but it’s not always as good a reason as it might seem. Some blogs over-emphasize the risks of security, to get you to upgrade.

For instance, the normally excellent Weblog Tools Collection wrote about security holes due to free themes, and then said “The moral of this story is that you need to upgrade your WordPress blog now to WordPress 2.5.”

Upgrading to WordPress 2.5 will not solve exploits coming from your theme. You must resort to other measures to do that. As a respected WordPress authority, it wasn’t fair for them to imply otherwise.

Photo by dcJohn. There are a number of aspects of a theme that can get you banned from Google, and other search engines. Deciphering between safe and unsafe themes is not as easy as just looking for a “Sponsored by…” link.
Through using the methods listed below, you will be able to judge whether or not a theme is safe to use.

1 - Download From The Source

Wordpress themes are often free to download, and sometimes free to distribute. It is not difficult for a site to amass a collection of themes, and add their own spam codes to them. For this reason, if you know the site that the theme originally came from, download it from there.