Understandably everything free is sweet, huh? Yes. No one hates free things. I started out once too with free hosting services, themes, plugins and most of the contents crafted on my blog were written by free authors. Basically, everything there was FREE!! It wasn't working out, Yes I had loads of contents (scrapped and perhaps a bit untidy and SEO-less) and I had to figure out a way, not just any other way, but to be serious. I had to spend money on this project if I'm really into it (oh boy how I was really into it). I bought a domain from godaddy for a bargain $3.95 set up a hosting service from domainkingNg for a ridiculous price of under $2 for a full 12 months on. But the turning moment weren't the domain and hosting, it was the THEME. I dumped free wordpress.org themes (which were to be honest a jewel) and decided to buy a premium one. Yes, using free themes is suicidal for your blogging career and here you'll learn why.
Lack of professionalism
Most free themes, one way or the other seriously lack anything professional. Regardless of the top notch content you write, your readers will always be dumping you for that because most free themes have the same header, and you are often left with no control on the logo, footer and header of the themes. The google side of it too is against you, with the need for websites to be mobile friendly and responsive, free themes offer you none of that and you're bound to get wiped off Google's index. I am sure you've come accross themes that makes your index go blank once you try to remodify the header or footer or introduce your own logo to it. Yes, free themes are that frustrating, and a portion of your audience atimes need a little bit of elegance, to feel different when reading content from your blog, a little bit of class, colour. Got me? Malicious Codes
Most free themes either contain a malicious or threatening code, but this might not be visible to you but it appears naked to search engines and Google fumes at such blogs. Presense of affliate links to porn sites, shell codes either in php, css or even the database triggers a penalty. It is however reasonable to check for the presence of such codes using this; TAC- https://wordpress.org/plugins/tac/ The theme authentication checker plugin is from wordpress and it will scan for all malicious codes in your theme. Do give it a try if you are still hesitant on spebding your money on a premium theme and would rather stick to the free one's.! Bye Bye To Support
Most developers of free themes do not offer support, well even if some do, do not expect it to be constant. The lack of support comes at a no suprise to me really as the magnitude of effort they put in to develop something exceptional all for free. Put yourself in their shoes and what would you do? Ofcourse you'll demand money. That's why premium themes developers like elegant themes, themeboy, studiopress premium themes are 24/7 available to customer service if anything goes wrong on your website or blog. Themes are rarely updated.
Updating of themes from developers requires dedication, effort and time. Now tell me how someone will literally spend his time, make efforts and dedicate his work to something that brings him no revenue at all? I don't expect them to, and certainly you don't too. Mind you, themes that are not updated are a source of joy to hackers, as they will exploit different bugs and malicious paths to down your website; thus hindering your efforts---useless!! This is why premium/paid themes are recommended. Paid theme developers work really hard to detect any vulnerability in their scripts, and have time to update it incase of bugs or incompatibility issues. Lesson- Always root for paid themes. Improper SEO
. For your website or blog to rank well in Google, you must make your website adaptable to mobile i.e make your website mobile responsive. This is a very important part of SEO google has introduced from 2014 and beyond. 
For this case, most free themes lack proper seo, albeit if they had one before. The absence of the H1 tag is devastating as it tells what your website or blog is all about. Though using the Yoast SEO plugin in wordpress solves over 83% of the problems, it is better you switch to paid theme. To check if your website has the H1 tag, press CTRL+U and you will be shown thr source codes of the website and to search for it press CTRL+F.
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