Using pre-made WordPress website templates may seem appealing, but it often results in several challenges that can harm your branding, user experience and overall performance. You first must determine your goals related to time-to-launch, cost of building, and your website building knowledge and expertise. But if you want to know why you should, or rather shouldn’t, use a website template without code, below are some important factors to consider.
First of all, you might ask “what are website templates?”. A website template is a pre-made layout for a website that comes with basic design elements and structure. Think of it as a framework that includes where images, text, and menus go. You can personalize it by adding your own content, but the overall design is already set. While templates are quick and easy to use, they limit how much you can manipulate, customize and make your site look different from others who use the same template.
Secondly, we don’t even know what “experts” (I’m using the term loosely) are building these templates and how they factor in elements such as mobile responsiveness, website platforms, ease of management, and user experience. They might even be built by developers and not designers, or vice versa, not taking both important roles into consideration.
If you’re tried this method already, then you know what I’m talking about. The template looks amazing, then you start dropping in your own colors, images, and text and looks nothing like the original template! This is because often these templates have used professional photos or videos and manipulated them with minimal content or context. The size of the images and length of the content you use is quite different in reality. These sites are built extremely minimally on purpose, so when you actually cater to your needs, it becomes a frustrating experience.
Let’s look at some factors website templates are not considering:
- Limited Customization: Templates are built to serve a broad range of industries, which means they lack the flexibility to address the unique branding and functionality that your business needs. They restrict creativity which can lead to a stagnant, generic site that struggles to stand out from the competition.
- Inconsistent Design: Templates often limit your ability to create a cohesive design that aligns with your brand’s values and vision. Custom fonts, color schemes, and layouts might not be fully supported or adaptable, making it difficult to create a seamless experience across your site.
- Poor User Experience: WordPress templates may not always be designed with user experience in mind. They may have bloated features or irrelevant elements that distract from your brand’s message and slow down your website, frustrating visitors and hurting your credibility, and decreasing conversions.
- Poor Code Quality: Many templates are poorly coded, leading to performance issues, slow loading times, and compatibility problems across different browsers, negatively impacting user experience and SEO.
- Lack of Responsiveness: Not all templates are designed to work well on multiple devices, causing display issues on mobile or tablets. With mobile users growing, this can hurt engagement and ranking.
- Incompatibility with SEO Best Practices: Many templates lack the structure and built-in functionality necessary to fully optimize meta tags, headings, and URLs for optimizing SEO. Without these fundamental SEO elements, search engines will struggle to properly index and rank your website. By opting for a custom design, you ensure that every aspect of your website is optimized for search engines from the ground up.
- Long-term Growth Limitations: As your site expands and requires more functionality, you may find that the template cannot accommodate these new needs without a costly redesign or patchwork of plugins, which can further bloat the code and slow down your site. A custom-built website is designed with your future growth in mind, ensuring it can scale seamlessly as your business evolves.
- Limited Support: Unlike custom sites, templates often come with minimal or no customer support, making it hard to troubleshoot issues effectively when they arise.
While templates may offer an easy and cost-effective solution, they come with long-term consequences that can hinder your investment in time and energy, SEO performance, user engagement, and brand consistency. Investing in a custom website by trusting the experts ensures that your site is branded consistently, well-structured, functional, optimized, unique, and scalable. A custom website design gives you complete control over how your brand is perceived, ensuring it’s professional, memorable, and aligned with your goals, setting your business up for long-term success.
