I entered into WordPress Theme development field several years ago. In the first three years I provided the customization service to my clients, and then I joined Envato Market and sell my WordPress Themes on Themeforest since 2013. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings over the years and sometimes I feel confused, so I just want to discuss about what the future of niche themes is on Themeforest.
My impression is that more and more multiple purpose WordPress themes are selling on Themeforest, these themes looks omnipotent, developers provides many powerful options for their end-users, but I think too many options probably make the theme difficult to use, especially for the novices. The other hand, I often doubt that whether there is a future for the single themes which are focus on a specific field, let’s say niche themes. Sometimes the niche themes only sounds great and looks unique, but in fact, it’s hard to beat those multiple purpose themes, just look at the weekly top sellers on themeforest, the whole page is almost occupied by these multiple purpose themes or one page themes. It is not clear why this should be. After analyzed, I found for the most part, many theme buyers are the WordPress / Web developers, but they are not the real end-users, they just purchase the theme and customize it for their client. Obviously, the multiple purpose themes are more commonly used than the niche themes, and they will also help the developer to save costs on purchased the themes (Actually some developers will use one theme on the multiple project without purchase the license again).
So, what’s the next? This is why I said I often feel confused about the future of niche themes, especially sell on Themeforest. Now I only know that maybe the niche theme sellers should have more powerful marketing ability, any other good suggestion? We can discuss with each other below.