Before You Pay for a Theme or Builder: The Free 10-Minute Test We Ran on Our Own Site

Don’t pay for a theme you will have to fix

If you are choosing between a free theme, a paid theme and a funnel builder for your first affiliate site, the feature lists all look alike, and the fear is paying for a year and finding out too late. One thing the feature lists never show: whether the template’s own buttons and menus work for every reader. If its buttons are too faint to read or too small to tap on a phone, every page you build inherits the problem, and readers leave before they reach your affiliate link.

You can check this for free, in about ten minutes, on the template’s demo page, before you pay or inside the refund window. We ran the same test on every page of this site on 2026-10-22. Our own template failed it in places we did not expect, so below is what it caught, what we changed, and the short version to run on any theme or builder you are considering.

Three questions, three free checks

• Can every reader read it? A free automated checker (the one built into Chrome’s Lighthouse) read all 70 pages of our site at laptop and phone width, 140 checks in all, looking for faint text and missing labels.
• Can people use it without a mouse? On 9 kinds of page we pressed the Tab key from the top and watched where it went: 180 steps in all.
• Do the buttons work on a phone? We tapped the middle of every button, 1,445 in all, to make sure nothing invisible sat on top of it.

The tables below show what the checks found and what we changed.

What it found and what we changed

Most of what the scan flagged earlier in the day was colour contrast: text that is too close in brightness to its background. The accessibility guideline most sites follow asks for at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text; higher means easier to read. Our template’s brand colours looked fine to us and still failed:

Two other problems came from layout, not colour. Wide tables could not be scrolled with the keyboard, so we made each table area focusable. And small links in lists and menus were less than 24 pixels tall, the smallest tap target the guideline allows, so we gave them more height. The tap test also caught a real bug: on phones, an invisible link stretched over a card covered our homepage’s main button, so a tap went to the wrong page.

Results after the fixes

Run the same test on a template before you buy

1. Open the template’s live demo in Chrome, on a page that has buttons, a form and a table if it offers one.
2. Run Lighthouse (right-click, Inspect, then the Lighthouse tab) and read the Accessibility section. Contrast and small tap targets show up there with the exact element.
3. Press Tab from the top of the page. You should see a clear outline move from link to link. If the outline vanishes, keyboard users cannot follow it.
4. Shrink the window to phone width and tap the main button: nothing should cover it, and form fields should be wide enough to type an email address.
5. Check the colours you will use, not only the demo’s. If you change the button colour to your brand, test that colour with white text; a bright red or green often fails.

If two templates pass equally, choose on price at renewal and the features you need. If one fails on contrast, you can usually fix it with a darker button colour, which is a two-minute change; a template that loses the keyboard outline is harder to fix without code.

We ran the same test on five free template demos

To see what a beginner would actually be choosing between, we ran the same automated check and the Tab-key test on the public demo page of four popular free WordPress themes and one Systeme.io template, on 2026-10-22. Each demo is the vendor’s own page; we only loaded it and pressed Tab.

How to read this: most issues are faint text in the demo’s sample colours, which you would change anyway, so a high number is a warning to test your own colours, not a reason to rule a theme out. Missing button labels and a focus outline that disappears are harder to fix without code, so weigh those more. One demo page each is a small sample, and our outline check only detects an outline or shadow, so a theme that shows focus another way may be counted as missing.

Where this fits in your tool decision

On a starting budget of a couple of hundred dollars, the expensive mistake is not the theme price; it is the hours or the freelancer you pay later to fix a template that fights you. So add this test to the comparison you are already making:

• Choosing a funnel builder such as Systeme.io or ClickFunnels? Run the test on one of each builder’s own templates during the free plan or trial. Our ClickFunnels vs Systeme.io comparison has the dated prices.
• Choosing WordPress hosting such as Bluehost or Hostinger? The host does not decide this, the theme does, so test the theme demo, and compare the hosts on renewal price and support in Bluehost vs Hostinger. When we checked their own pricing pages on 22 October 2026, Hostinger Premium was $2.49 a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99, and Bluehost Starter $3.99 a month on a 36-month term, renewing at $9.99. Both need the whole term paid up front, so test inside the refund window.
• Already bought? The test still tells you what to fix first, and most fixes are a darker button colour.

Limitations

• Automated scans catch only part of the problems. They cannot judge whether a link’s words make sense out of context or whether an image description is useful.
• No screen-reader test with a real user yet. We checked structure and keyboard use ourselves; we have not had a screen-reader user review the site.
• One day’s snapshot. Every new page or colour can break a rule again, which is why we run the scan on each release.

Questions people ask

Is the accessibility test free?

Yes. Lighthouse is built into Chrome, and axe-core is open source. Everything on this page used free tools.

Does a perfect score mean a site is accessible?

No. It means the automated rules pass. Keyboard use, clear wording and real-user testing still matter.

Can I fix contrast without changing my brand?

Usually yes: a slightly darker shade of the same colour often passes. Our green went from #16963b to #127a31.