Do you need a custom website, or is a template enough?

This gets framed as a status question — custom is premium, templates are cheap — when it's really a fit question. Plenty of businesses genuinely don't need a custom build yet, and plenty of businesses are actively losing customers to a template that's quietly working against them. The trick is telling which one you are.

What a template actually gets you

Speed and a low upfront cost, full stop. That's a real advantage if you're validating an idea, need something live this week, or have a genuinely simple, low-stakes site. The trade-offs show up later: everyone on the same theme looks the same, most page builders ship far more code than the page needs (which shows up as slower load times), and real customisation almost always means fighting the template rather than building with it.

What custom actually gets you

A site built for exactly what your business does — not the nearest generic template feature. That means real performance (nothing loads that doesn't need to), a design that can't be mistaken for a competitor's, and a codebase that can grow with you instead of hitting a wall the moment you need something the theme doesn't support. The cost is a bigger upfront investment and a longer build.

Five questions worth asking yourself

• Is your website how most customers first judge whether to trust you? If yes, generic costs you more than it saves.
• Do you need something specific the template can't do — a configurator, a real booking flow, a non-standard layout?
• Is your current site (template or otherwise) actually slow, or hard for you to update yourselves?
• Are you validating a new idea, or scaling a business that already works?
• Would you notice — or would your customers — if a competitor were running the exact same theme?

When a template is genuinely the right call

If you're pre-revenue and testing whether an idea has legs, spending real money on a custom build before you know the business works is backwards. A template bought this afternoon, launched this week, is the correct decision in that situation — not a compromise. Custom makes sense once the site is a growth lever, not an experiment.