Regardless of the type of business you are running, having a functional, intuitive, and attractive website is a prerequisite for your brand to be taken seriously by consumers. Most people do thorough online research before committing to a purchase or subscription service. Even if you are running a news portal or a personal portfolio website, your website’s experience will shape your credibility and perception among visitors.
WordPress is the content management system (CMS) of choice for a huge chunk of website owners. To build a website, WordPress users have the option of choosing pre-made themes along with templates, or to choose custom web development, which is a more intensive and customized solution. There are benefits and tradeoffs when making either choice.
Suppose you are a small—to medium-sized business owner or a corporate decision-maker and you’re wondering which web development route is best for your business goals. In that case, we’ve conducted this extensive analysis to help you decide. Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
I. A WordPress Refinement: Pre-Built Themes & Templates
Pre-made themes are a series of files, which include templates, that determine how a website is displayed on the frontend, or on the user’s end. A theme controls the appearance and functionality of the entire website, whereas templates control specific pieces of content, such as a landing page with the navigation menu removed, or a blog post with featured image, or a post-conversion Thank You page.
WordPress was not the first CMS to implement pre-made themes and templates; Geocities, Blogger, Drupal, and Joomla all had pre-built theme deployment earlier on. However, it is WordPress which has taken the concept to the next level by making custom themes and templates more accessible, and customizable. WordPress attracted a large number of developers to work on custom templates and themes, which has turned into a community.
Any WordPress developer can get a free or premium theme from WordPress.org or 3rd party providers. Here are the key features of pre-made themes and templates:
- Easily search an extensive catalog of free and premium themes and templates
- Easily get a live preview of the various templates, install a theme, and activate the theme
- Easily alter the theme style or individually change the palettes or typography
Usually, small business owners go for pre-made themes and templates for their websites. Other users include bloggers, technology startups, and personal portfolio websites from professionals, photographers, or artists.
II. Pre-Made Themes and Templates: The Good and the Bad
Given that most websites online are built with WordPress, and most WordPress websites deploy pre-made themes and templates, it must have significant upsides for many users. Here are the major attractions of pre-made WordPress templates:
- Cost-Effective Solution: Deploying a pre-made free theme with templates completely eliminates the cost of web development. Deploying a premium theme comes at a price, usually less than $100, and the developer or WordPress development agency provides subsequent updates and ongoing technical support.
- Faster Deployment: Pre-made templates can be deployed quite fast on your website. The major time consumption would be browsing the catalog of available themes and templates, checking their live previews, discussing the options with your team, and finally, choosing a theme. As we said earlier, the installation and deployment takes mere minutes.
- User-Friendly Solution: A website owner doesn’t need much technical know-how to deploy pre-built templates on their website. Block themes are easiest for manipulating design and content elements on the webpages, with drag-and-drop options.
- Developer Support: Pre-Built themes and templates usually receive regular updates and technical support from developers.
- It’s not all a bed of roses, though. Like one hits a plateau in one’s fitness journey after a while, WordPress pre-made templates also start feeling limited in many aspects once your website is up and running.
- Limited Customization: Pre-made themes will come with pre-made templates. This means any custom post types you define will not have the accompanying templates for you to deploy. You would need to add a custom template, which entails knowledge of PHP and HTML. You would also need to know about conditional tags, functions and hooks, and template tags—a handful!
- Bloating: Many features of the pre-made template you are deploying may be irrelevant to your use case. This unnecessary code would be slowing your website down.
- Dime a Dozen: Whether it’s a free or premium template, hundreds to tens of thousands may have deployed the same templates as you. This really makes your business a part of the clutter instead of a unique brand that offers something valuable.
Now, let’s discuss the alternative to pre-made templates.
III. Custom Web Development: Like a Finely-Tailored Dress
This is essentially handing over the responsibility of building your template and entire website to a WordPress developer, whether in-house or freelancer or a WordPress development agency. The agency or developer will first connect with you to understand your business’s values, mission, products or services, or your goals in creating the website. Then, they will conduct a wireframing exercise and present you with some proposed designs. Once you approve the designs and site structure, the technical development work will begin.
You will get a website built from scratch just for your business. You have control of every element and functionality on the website. The plugins your WordPress development agency chooses to include will be carefully chosen with the intended goals of the website in mind. Your website won’t be slow and clunky, and it will stand out as a truly original space on the internet.
Small and medium enterprises, plus corporations that value brand equity, tend to go for custom web development. If you have any specific functionality requirements that can’t be fulfilled by the available repository of templates, that is another sign you need a custom solution.
IV. Custom Web Development: Worth It
Your website is as important to your personal, service, or retail brand as a professional appearance and a physical storefront. Even if you have a physical store, it’s likely that most people will decide whether to visit or purchase your offerings or hire you based on your website. Check out the list of some of the top benefits of custom web development:
- Alignment with Brand Guidelines: In brand management, it’s extremely important to establish a clear brand identity. Only then can a brand build recall and recognition in the target market’s minds. Custom web development will allow you to tailor your site 100% to your brand voice, values, and strategy. An example of a WordPress website is Nike.com, which fits perfectly into the brand’s identity.
- Customized Functionality: You may require integrations with 3rd party payment gateways, plugins, or custom APIs. You might need a specific type of product description page, to set your WooCommerce store apart from competitors. You might have a food blog where you want to present the ingredients and recipes creatively. No matter what it is, let your WordPress development agency know, and they’ll get it done on your custom WordPress template.
- Airtight Security: Because your templates’ code is customized to you, and exclusive such that no other website in the world is using it, you are much safer from being targeted by hackers. A security loophole discovered in a mass-market WordPress template will leave all websites using it vulnerable, but hackers are unlikely to be able to break through a custom coded template.
- Better SEO: As the site structure, WordPress templates, the PHP and HTML code is made exclusively for your website, custom templates are inherently better than a generic pre-made template in terms of SEO. The less time you have to waste on SEO optimization after a website launch, the more you can focus on your core business and customer relationship management.
A couple of challenges associated with custom templates are:
- The initial costs to deploy these templates are higher
- Development time is longer; hence, it has to be factored into the Go-to-Market plan
Wrapping Up – Go for Custom Template Development
We hope you found this comparison between pre-made WordPress templates and custom web development helpful. If you have a small budget for your website, pre-made templates are your recommended option. However, if you want to run a business, effectively promote your professional skills to companies or clients, or run an e-commerce store, it is highly recommended to go for custom web development to maximize the alignment of your brand with your WordPress templates.
Author Bio: Zain Imran is a technical Content Strategist for WPExperts.io. He is an Electronics Engineer with an MBA who enjoys relating technologies to business operations and outcomes. Researching and writing technical content is his passion. Apart from work, Zain enjoys sports, exercise and fitness, and gaming.
