Professional Template VS Custom Website – Which One Is The Best?

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It is better to choose a cheap template for your website or ask a professional designer to create a custom website design it for you. This seemingly small choice can have a serious impact on your business. So, what are the pros and cons we will see today. We can say up front that saving a few thousand on getting started can cost you tens to hundreds of thousands in a lump sum. So let’s get to it.

In web design for online businesses and stores, WordPress has been and will continue to be, a force to be reckoned with. Whether you are designing a mobile-friendly online store, an interactive restaurant menu, or a hotel website with a state-of-the-art booking system.

As of today, this tool has experienced millions of downloads and seems to be the go-to online content hosting interface for developers, small businesses, and mega corporations everywhere. Of course, if you are at all familiar with commercial web design, this should not come as a surprise to you.

Thanks to its cost-effective business model and an endless range of plugins geared at e-commerce applications, WordPress is an excellent and robust resource. With its unmatched capabilities, user-oriented operation, and prime open-source facilities, no other platform does it like WP.

For bare-bones client-side design, WordPress is also popular for the sheer variety of themes and website templates for all manner of businesses. But web design isn’t just about aesthetics. Rather than ready-made themes, custom WordPress templates are the future when it comes down to it.

Why Does Your Website Need A Theme?

For many businesses, a website or online store is meant to convey the same purpose via the web as the actual store or establishment does in the physical realm. For that reason, making a good first impression is an important step, and a theme or template helps accomplish precisely that.

In web design, a “theme” basically serves as the foundation of a website’s core front-end aesthetics and overall layout, including color schemes, font styles, arrangement of features, etc. However, theme files are made from variously structured combinations of text and images as well as coding files in formats like CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.

Depending on the environment that you wish to create with your online site, your theme is central to the design of your website. WordPress provides thousands of templates for blogs, restaurants, digital agencies, web stores, and other businesses.

For WordPress designers, there are two main ways of getting a theme for their websites. The first one involves buying or freely downloading a compatible template or file from any one of hundreds of online resources.

As a shortcut, this technique is a favorite for beginners. However, pre-existing themes are not the most favorable choice for comprehensive web design. Some themes can be edited by coding experts, but even that approach has its limits.

From a practical point of view, WordPress templates must be tailored to suit a website’s brand, goals, and vibe it is going for. With that in mind, many businesses hire web development experts to plan their own bespoke WordPress template design.

Why A Custom Website Design Is The Way To Go

For digital services, as with all other exchanges, an emphasis on client-oriented results is always a positive approach. Pre-made website themes are not conducive to that, which is why they are not a popular choice among web experts who know better.

The following reasons are why custom-made WordPress templates are the optimal choice in web design.

1. Work Around Your Theme, Not The Other Way Around

For many businesses and enterprises, the transition from brick-and-mortar to online is not always the easiest. What helps in this endeavor, especially in the case of established players with recognition, is maintaining the integrity of your brand in this new environment.

Custom WordPress template design helps ensure that you can mold your website and its features to accommodate your business assets. This includes keeping your graphics, company goals, and important slogans intact. Not only that but adjustable templates can sometimes be made to amplify your message with a little tweaking here and there.

On the other hand, if you come across an existing WordPress theme, it’s best not to settle on it right away. You might think that the visuals associated with this template are completely in line with your business. But judging a book by its cover has never been a particularly smart tactic, and the same is true here.

Brand identity is extremely valuable to any enterprise, and it is not to be taken lightly or for granted. Even a professionally designed, an expensive theme might not necessarily respect or uphold the vision that your company prioritizes.

With that in mind, before going about selecting a theme or template, it is imperative that you familiarize yourself with your company’s objectives and long-term commercial intentions.

For instance, if your company sells a particular set or subset of goods and services to the public, does the theme improve or hinder its chances of doing so? If there is any doubt in that area, you are better off with the custom design.

Additionally, you have to know about the type of content to be featured on your site. How valuable is it to your brand and operation, and how positively or negatively does the theme affect it?

And most importantly, there is the issue of user experience. Even if your oven-ready template is designed to support your company image, does it work for the people? If the implementation of this theme has an unfavorable impact on the user-friendliness of your website, it is not worth it.

Answering all these questions is important in choosing a suitable theme. You’re allowed to spend your valuable time doing that. However, the more recommended course of action would be to outsource your specific design needs to an expert in web development and WordPress.

2. While Others Blend In, Make Yourself Seen with a Custom Website Design

Many pre-existing WordPress themes have a certain commercial flair about them. This isn’t inherently a bad reflection on its prospects for an online business. But being available for everyone to use means that businesses that use these templates do not stand much chance of being taken seriously as individual players.

A key rule in the highly competitive realm of e-commerce is to make yourself unique and memorable. That isn’t just because of copyright laws. To attract traffic and be recognized as a worthy contender, you need to occupy your own niche and stand out where others fail to do so.

With premium themes, it is often the case where multiple companies end up going for the same theme, often with few adjustments or differences between them. Again, the templates themselves might look good. But the lack of originality proves to be a disadvantage to these businesses who should have opted for something more creative and fresh.

And worse still, even the cheaper templates don’t necessarily guarantee improved business prospects due to that very reason. As a result, none of them are even remotely worth the few dollars you paid for them.

On the other hand, custom design for WordPress or WooCommerse themes gives online businesses a certain distinction and competitive flair. This alone makes for a better first impression and, with the right investment and personalization, actively improves your site’s chances of performing as an enterprise.

3. Offers Safety In Custom Website Design

Cybersecurity is a sensitive issue for major online players everywhere, and a lot of it has to do with the lack of safety with online files. Turns out, that theme files for web design are not safe from this dilemma.

Given the ease by which malware can be incorporated into a website just through the template, it’s not surprising that simply going about a suspicious website looking for a theme is a bad idea. In fact, WordPress sites have been the subject of quite a few cases of criminal activity and cyber attacks due to this exact type of negligence.

Sometimes you come across a “free” template and think that it’s too good to be true. Quite often, it certainly is because incorporating malicious codes into template files makes it easier to infect a whole website. The theme might have been free of cost, but that doesn’t mean a price wasn’t paid here.

Being hand-crafted by reliable professionals, custom WordPress templates don’t have this issue and are a safer investment for online businesses.

4. Google Wants You To Make An Effort

Ready-made WordPress templates might look good but they aren’t always optimized to help a website perform better in search rankings.

Some of the qualities that search engine crawlers look for in a website for indexing include:

• User-friendliness
• Mobile-first design
• Proper maintenance
• Website performance and speed
• Media optimization

If your website uses an existing template, it might be too late when you discover that it doesn’t tick all of these boxes. For that reason, you need to ditch premium theme files for a more SEO-friendly alternative.

Custom WordPress templates offer developers much more flexibility. That includes incorporating code and file settings that are much more compatible with Google’s constantly changing SEO guidelines – see our article about Google Ecommerce Site Audit Tool.

Plus, you can integrate keywords, perform security checks, test for mobile compatibility, and confirm all other necessary steps to ensure that your site is ideal for the best SERP positions. All that just by going with a personalized theme.

5. Better Web Page Capabilities

One of the most serious drawbacks of ill-chosen themes for any website is the effect that it will have on your website’s loading speed. Overloaded, unnecessary features can hamper a site’s loading, which is not a good look for any commercial website.

This is especially a major issue with themes that have built-in plugins. Sometimes, these plugins are important for the website’s functioning, and no other form of software will do. But plugins are often the major cause of lagging web pages, especially for WordPress sites.

Slow websites are the kryptonite to your online business as nothing contributes to the loss of traffic and conversions quite as fast as this. And the drop in loading speeds is particularly evident on mobile sites as well due to the lack of processing power and bandwidth.

As your website loses traffic, search engines are less inclined to index it for better SERP rankings because of how few people are interested in it.

Custom WordPress templates are not plagued by this issue. With the right design and features, you can make sure that your chosen theme only adds necessary features and even supports speed-boosting enhancements through code and media optimization.

This leads to an overall lighter web design where server overloading has no impact on site performance.

6. Business and Developer Oriented

Even the best themes suffer from some type of issues with compatibility, updates, maintenance, etc. In such a case, it is helpful to seek support, and the best way to do that is to contact the template’s designer.

But this type of immediate assistance might not be readily available. With frequently used themes, that is even more of an issue as multiple help requests might make yours less likely to receive a response.

As a business, custom template design helps ensure that you get firsthand assistance from a professional since they’re the ones who provided their service to you in the first place. Therefore, as part of their agreement, they’re more obligated to help you in your hour of need.

7. Allowing Updates without Hindrance

WordPress themes are particularly sought after by designers due to the perks that come with regular updates. These include routine maintenance, improved site performance, and reliable cybersecurity.

Premium themes might not offer this facility to developers and online business owners with the same enthusiasm. In fact, many commercial themes are already outdated before they even get downloaded.

Properly maintained and custom-made WordPress themes can be designed to receive notifications much more readily and thoroughly. This makes them and services that specialize in them a valuable commodity to online businesses.

In Closing

As stated in the discussion, we’ve pointed out some key factors to having a custom design template for websites. A custom WordPress template is a way to go due to its friendly, responsive, and unique features.

Services like WeLoveWeb that design a site can find flexibility while setting up a theme no matter the niche, it always satisfies a user who owns it due to customization. Web themes are not very effective due to their limited features. On the contrary, custom web designs have too much for the owners, designers, and most importantly for the audience.

Fortunately, they enjoy stupendous customization features and can do whatever with the themes as per their will. Undoubtedly, custom WordPress themes are easily accessible, manageable, and indexable due to their SEO-friendly qualities. You have no chance to skip these logical features that make custom designs highly favored in the market despite stiff competition.