Custom website or template?
Speed to launch versus speed to improve. A template is faster and cheaper to stand up and slower to change; a custom build costs more at the start and stops costing you conversions every month afterwards. Which is right depends on whether the site is a brochure or the business.
What a template actually gives you
A layout somebody already solved, and the speed that comes with it. For a business that needs to exist online this month, that is a real answer, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What you are buying is a set of decisions made in advance by someone who had never heard of your business. That is the trade, and it is fine right up until one of those decisions is the thing standing between a visitor and a purchase.
Where templates cost you
Three places, consistently:
- Speed
- A template carries every feature its author shipped for everyone, whether or not you use it. That arrives as script the browser must download, parse and run, and page speed is both a ranking input and a conversion input.
- Sameness
- If you can recognise the template, so can your customer — and the competitor two tabs over is on it too. In a category where everything looks alike, price becomes the only difference left.
- A ceiling
- The day you learn something real about your buyers, you want to change the page that taught you. On a template, the change you want is frequently the one the template will not make.
What does custom actually mean?
That the page is built around what the business needs a visitor to do, and nothing else is in the way. In practice: a layout designed for your product rather than adapted to it, only the code the page actually uses, and the freedom to change any part of it later without fighting someone else's system.
It should also mean the technical work is finished rather than promised — a performance score of 90 or higher, clean headings, metadata and structured data on every page, a sitemap, and content that is in the HTML rather than locked behind script where neither a search engine nor an AI assistant can read it.
When is a template the right answer?
When the site is a formality. If people find you by word of mouth, buy in person, and the site exists to prove you are real and list a phone number, a template is the correct and adult decision. Spend the money where the customers actually come from.
Custom earns its cost when the site is the sales floor: when traffic is paid for, when the page is what converts it, and when a percentage point of conversion is worth more than the build.
What to ask before you commit
Ask what happens after launch, and listen for whether iteration is included or sold back to you. Ask what the performance target is and whether it is measured. Ask to see the site on a mid-range phone on a normal connection, not a demo on a laptop.
And ask who owns it. A site you cannot leave with is a subscription, whatever it was called on the invoice.