When launching your business online you are faced with many decisions. One of these is whether to go with a template website such as WordPress, or invest in a custom design.
This decision is critical because what you choose can define your business’s performance. It can also influence how your business grows online.
Of course, it may also define your profit margins and affect your bottom line.
Understanding the pros and cons of each option can help you make an informed decision – one that will benefit your business in the long run.
Understanding Custom Vs. Template Web Design
A custom website is one you build from scratch. You hire professional web designers and developers who generate mockups before coding all the features, aspects, and elements of your website from the ground up.
In contrast, a template website comes with many features and elements pre-coded into the design.
It’s more of a drag-and-drop option where, in most cases, you can simply download a theme, make a few changes, and quickly have your site go live.
Custom Vs. Template Web Design: A Comparison
Website templates are built using website builders and aim to make web building easier for people with no coding experience or knowledge.
However, as simple as these websites may be, they have their limitations. It is because of these limitations that many established businesses often choose custom-built websites, even if that means investing a large sum of money upfront.
Here’s a quick rundown of how custom and template design websites compare against each other to empower you to make the right choice:
Uniqueness
The online world is saturated with businesses, which are vying for one thing and one thing alone: customer attention.
The only way your business can stand out and win that fleeting customer attention is if it appears unique in a sea of businesses that all seem to be selling the same thing.
Using a pre-built website does little to help your business stand out.
Website design templates are built for a larger audience. Therefore, most websites that use a design template tend to look the same.
In some cases, using a web design template can make your website look exactly like that of the competitor you so want to stand apart from. This is not the case with custom web design.
When building a custom website, everything is designed and added to the website from scratch. From color to layout, navigation, and design, everything is coded according to your business’s requirements and preferences.
This helps you ensure that your business can stand out and have a more identifiable and unique digital footprint.
Customization
Website templates allow for customization, but the level of customization comes nowhere near that of a custom-designed website.
You can edit the header, change the color theme, and even add some graphics that you like. However, the layout and a lot of the backend features remain the same.
This limits the degree of personalization your business can incorporate in its online user experience.
With 61% of consumers more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences, customization is not an area you want to slack off on.
When building a custom website, you can work alongside professional developers who can code highly personalized features into the website.
You can implement a design that aligns with your target audience’s unique needs and challenges to offer an unmatched and intuitive user experience.
Going the custom-built route can help you launch a website that is designed to help make your users’ journey easier.
Design templates are more generic and meant to serve larger, more general audiences, so it can be hard to hone in on a particular audience group’s preferences.
SEO
While there are many ways you can get traffic to your site, currently 53% of all web traffic comes from organic search. Although, more traffic from LLMs is to be anticipated as search changes.
SEO is essential for visibility across organic search and potential inclusion in LLMs
While website templates, especially the ones using WordPress, have excellent plugins to help SEO, they work well only if the website is small and has a limited number of pages and functionality.
If your website grows with your business, its SEO requirements may get more complex. Most website template builders limit access to a website’s HTML, JavaScript, and other backend functionalities.
These limitations restrict the level to which you can optimize your website.
As a result, a website template may struggle to achieve any sustained visibility and custom-built websites can be better optimized, especially for bigger, more established businesses.
When building a custom website, you can work with the developer to apply SEO best practices to the site.
As the website grows, you can continue to monitor optimization to achieve and maintain the visibility in search engines and LLMs.
Performance
A slow-loading website can drive users away. Not just that, decreased website load speeds can also drag a website down in the search results and reduce organic traffic.
Website templates are often notorious for poorer performance and slower load speeds. This is because they use various plugins to deliver all the functionality that the business needs.
These plugins add more code to the website’s backend. With bloated code, the website struggles to load fast and is more likely to deliver a poorer experience.
With a custom website, you have the liberty to only code features your business truly needs and use speed optimization tactics like code minification to make sure the bloated code does not impact the site’s load speed.
Website Security
Websites can store sensitive data and crucial assets. So, website security remains a priority you don’t want to compromise on.
Website templates often offer poorer security compared to custom-designed websites.
The reason? Plugins. Again.
96% of WordPress vulnerabilities are related to plugins.
Plugins often have security vulnerabilities that offer backdoor pathways for malicious actors to exploit.
Moreover, most of the website templates are built using popular website builders and leverage popular plugins. This in itself makes the site an easy target for hackers.
As a comparison, if you use a reputable and experienced coder, a custom website is usually safer if the developer writes good code covering all necessary security measures to mitigate any security vulnerabilities.
Custom-coded websites are also unique in terms of code. This uniqueness also makes them more secure and harder to hack.
Scalability
Every business that intends to grow requires a website that can grow when the business does.
Website templates may not have the flexibility to grow with your business. As your business grows, its needs may evolve.
With a website template, you may struggle to integrate new APIs, add new features, and offer better functionalities on the website.
Custom-designed websites are more scalable since all the features and elements can be coded into the website to accommodate a business’s growing needs.
Your business may do just fine with a website template in the beginning, but as it grows, you may have to shift to a custom website. Transitioning to a new website may then be time and resource-intensive.
Budget
As amazing as custom websites are, they are expensive. You need to hire professional designers, developers, and quality assurance specialists – the entire team – to take your project from concept to launch.
This can be expensive and require a huge upfront cost.
Forking out a sizable amount upfront can be challenging for small business owners and start-up founders. In this case, going for a website template may make more sense.
Website templates do not require a huge budget. They can be built and launched easily, even if you are bootstrapped for cash and can invest only a couple of hundred dollars.
Time To Go Live
A custom website is built in phases. Therefore, it can take from several weeks to even months before your custom-designed website is ready to go live.
In contrast, website templates can be built and launched within hours. You don’t have to spend so much time working on the concept, design, navigation, etc.
Technical Expertise
Building and maintaining a custom-designed website requires coding knowledge and technical expertise. You cannot just DIY it.
Because of this, having a custom-coded website requires that you regularly work with professional web developers to keep your website up to date, backed up, and maintained.
Website templates are no-code solutions for people with little to no technical expertise. You can easily build and update a templated website even if you have never written a single line of code in your life.
Making The Right Choice
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether you should choose a templated website or invest in a custom-designed website.
Your choice depends on a lot of factors, including your business goals, budget, available resources, etc.
You can choose a custom website if you:
- Have the money for the upfront cost of custom web development.
- Don’t mind putting in a few weeks or months into the project.
- Can hire or work with web developers for regular maintenance and updates.
- Need a scalable solution that accommodates your business’s growing needs without compromising on performance.
- Want a website that helps reinforce your brand identity and allows your business to stand out from the crowd.
A website template can work for you if you:
- Are working with a limited budget.
- Don’t mind your website looking similar to the competitors.
- Can make regular updates and install all the patches to avoid security vulnerabilities.
- Don’t need too many plugins for added features and functionalities.
- Want to go live quickly.
- Are not expecting your business to scale beyond a few pages and some very basic features.
If you run an ecommerce store, a job board, a flight directory, or anything with advanced features and more than 10 pages, a custom solution may work best for you.
However, if you only need a website for your blog, portfolio, or to maintain a basic online presence, then a template web design may make the most sense, given its cost-effectiveness and simplicity.
More Resources:
- The 10 Best Website Builders To Consider
- Website Development: In-Depth Guide For Beginners
- WordPress SEO Guide: Everything You Need To Know
Featured Image: N Universe/Shutterstock
