What Is The Difference Between Template And Custom Website? Which One Should You Choose?

When you decide to invest your money into a new website, important questions arise: “Should I invest my money into a custom-made or template-based website? Which one is more suitable for my business and what are the differences?”.

It is not an easy task to answer these questions since everyone’s business goals and audience are different. In this article, we’ll display the main advantages and disadvantages of both and hopefully, help you get your answers.

What are the main differences between a custom-made or template-based website?

Choosing a template-based website is cheaper and you’ll have your website set fast but it probably won’t fit your needs perfectly. When you have a template site there’s a big chance that your competitor or someone in different businesses already have the same website filled with their content. Related to this, a major problem is a challenge to make a template to look alike your company’s brand – features that differentiate your goods or services from your competitors. As time passes, and your business grows, due to these limitations, you’ll probably have to add some new features to the template and this will, in the end, probably cost more than making the custom website from scratch.

Although custom sites are not as cheap as template sites, they have multiple advantages that will help you grow a successful business in this competitive market. Some of these advantages are prior, in-depth, analysis of your business that will help you reestablish your business goals if necessary, unique design, personalized features, SEO ready website and other.

Further in this article, you’ll be able to read more about the benefits of a custom-made website.

Planning Before Designing

Before designers start to make mockups for a website, clients usually have to fill out a questionnaire about their business and have a few meetings before this step. A lot of CEOs or project managers at this point realize that they don’t have all the answers and that they will have to sit with their team and come up with the right ones.

During this period clients have time to think about their business goals, plans, the audience they want to reach and ways they want (or need) the website to function. This helps clients to crystallize their business values and establish how to achieve all that through their online presence.

This way we create a website strategically in a way to drive users towards conversion, optimizing the ability to get potential clients – leads.

Unique Design in Accordance with Your Brand

Do you know what is usually the most important room in one’s office?

It is the lobby or the hallway of the office. The reason for this is the fact that potential clients form an initial opinion about the company in a moment when they walk into office space. But, nowadays, the office is probably not the first thing clients see; it is the company website. This is the reason why you should treat your website as your office space and make sure it reflects your values in the best possible manner.

Custom-built site is tailored solely towards your business needs; every aspect of the design is made in the best interest of your future business development. Going custom is great if you already have some offline and online branding materials because you can adjust your website look and feel to your brand story. The site should look like it belongs to your company, in other words, users should be able to recognize your brand even if you don’t have your brand name or logo displayed on the web. A website template imposes too many restrictions on your ability to distinguish your brand to stand out from the competition.

Personalized Features

The template-based site might seem like an acceptable solution for your current business needs…but what if your company begins to grow?

One of the most important benefits of a custom website is the fact that you can build personalized features your business needs. All those features don’t have to be created at first launch…observe your user’s behavior and try to learn what features they are interested in.

Site complexity can grow as your business grows. This way you will provide your users with a unique, personalized experience that builds trust and brand loyalty – benefits that don’t have a price tag.

Another important functionality is the responsiveness of the site – the ability of the website to render well on a variety of devices and screens sizes. Not all templates are designed to be fully responsive which means that a certain template works great on desktops but not as well on mobile devices. Since both, mobile and desktop traffic are equally important these days, responsiveness is no longer an optional feature of the site. Related to this, keep in mind that mobile-friendly websites rank higher on search engines than websites that are not responsive.

Also if you are planning to do any sort of serious e-commerce, a custom site is a must as well since they are less vulnerable to malicious attacks.

SEO Ready Website

During the process of building a website from scratch, designers and developers usually collaborate with the marketing department since it is crucial to create it in a way to be ready for SEO (search engine optimization) after it is launched. As time passes your website’s code should be updated to increase the longevity of the website. While doing this it is important to be on the lookout for new SEO practices by search engines, Google in particular. This is yet another way that will help you beat your competition and save you money in the long run.

Conclusion

As previously mentioned, web templates can be cheap but they lack distinctiveness and customization. If you look on a website as a business investment then definitely go custom to thrive in a competitive market. Although the investment will probably seem big at first, it is more cost-effective over a long period, especially if you want your business to thrive in the future.

A custom website is built specifically for your needs and it gives room for incorporating your company’s branding into it. This way you will also avoid the possibility of having the same website as someone else. Due to today’s saturated web environment competition is extremely high, so the worst possible thing you can do is blend into the crowd. 

If you are yet not sure which way to go: custom or template… 

contact our team and they will help you decide.