Templates are cheaper up front. Here is what that trade actually costs you later, and when a template is genuinely fine.
We build custom sites and no templates, so you would expect us to argue against them. We are going to do something more useful and tell you when a template is the right answer, because sometimes it plainly is, and knowing which situation you are in saves you money either way.
A template is a finished site with the content taken out. Someone designed and built it once, then sold it to a few thousand people who each drop in their own words and photos.
That is a genuinely good deal. The design work is spread across thousands of buyers, so it costs you almost nothing. The trade is that you are fitting your business into a shape someone chose without knowing you existed.
The ceiling arrives sooner than you think. Templates handle what they were built for beautifully and everything else badly. The first time you want something slightly outside the shape, you discover the change is either impossible, or expensive enough to have paid for a chunk of custom work.
You carry weight you never use. A template has to serve everyone, so it ships with every feature anyone might want. Your visitors download all of it. That is a real cost in speed, and speed is a real cost in enquiries, which we go into in why site speed is a sales problem.
Plugins multiply. The template does not do the thing, so you add a plugin. Then another. Each one is code from a stranger, updating on its own schedule, occasionally conflicting with the others. This is how a site that worked fine in March breaks in September with nobody having touched it.
You look like everyone else. Less important than people claim, but not nothing. If your competitors bought the same popular template, a prospect comparing you side by side will notice something they cannot name.
Changing it means fighting it. The most expensive version of a template is the one you keep bending. Every override fights the original design, and eventually maintaining the workarounds costs more than a clean build would have.
All of that said, here is when we would tell you to save your money.
Your site is a business card. Customers already know who you are and just need your number and address. A template does that perfectly well.
You are testing an idea. If you do not yet know whether the business works, do not commission a custom site. Get something up cheaply, find out, and build properly once you know what you need.
Your budget is genuinely tight. A decent template beats a bad custom build every time. If the choice is a good template or the cheapest developer you can find, take the template.
Your needs are completely standard. Some businesses really do fit the shape. If nothing about how you work is unusual, the shape will fit.
A template is cheaper on day one and gets relatively more expensive over time, as workarounds accumulate and plugins pile up. A custom build costs more on day one and gets relatively cheaper, because it does exactly what you need and nothing else, so there is less to maintain and less to fight.
Where those two lines cross depends on how long you keep the site and how much it changes. For a site you will replace in two years and barely touch, the template wins. For a site that is part of how you win work and will evolve as the business does, custom usually wins, and the gap widens the longer you keep it.
Every site we build is written from scratch. No template, no page builder, no plugin stack. That means the code is exactly what your site needs, nothing more, and when you want to change something we change it rather than working around someone else's decision.
It also means we are more expensive than a template, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. What we would ask is that you compare the total over the life of the site rather than the number on day one.
If you are currently on a builder and wondering whether to move, when to move off Wix, Squarespace or WordPress covers the signs and how a migration actually works.