Template or custom? An honest way to decide

We build custom websites, so you’d expect us to argue that templates are bad. We’re not going to, because it isn’t true and you’d catch us.

Let’s clear out the bad arguments first.

Three arguments against templates that don’t hold up

“Templates are slow.” They used to be. Squarespace and Framer sites in 2026 routinely score well on Core Web Vitals. A badly built custom site is slower than a good template, and there are a lot of badly built custom sites. If someone leads with this, ask them to show you measurements.

“Templates are bad for SEO.” Google doesn’t know or care what built your page. Modern builders emit clean HTML, handle sitemaps, and let you edit title tags and meta descriptions. What actually hurts you is thin content, no structure, and no local presence — all of which you can get wrong on a custom site just as easily.

“You’ll look like everyone else.” Sometimes true, mostly overstated. Most visitors have never seen the theme you’re using. Nobody has ever failed to book a plumber because they recognised the layout.

So if the common arguments are weak, what’s the real one?

The question that actually decides it

Is your website a brochure, or is it part of how the business runs?

That’s it. That’s the whole decision.

A brochure explains who you are, proves you’re real, and gives someone a way to get in touch. It’s a static thing. Its job is finished the moment someone picks up the phone. For a brochure, a template is not a compromise — it’s the correct tool. You’d be paying a studio for judgement you genuinely don’t need.

But some websites are load-bearing. They take bookings against real availability. They quote jobs based on how you actually price. They log customers in. They hold inventory. They generate hundreds of pages from structured data so you can rank for every service in every city you serve. Your staff open them daily.

That’s not a brochure. That’s software with a marketing site attached, and templates handle it badly — not because they’re bad, but because they were built for the other thing.

The signs you’ve hit the ceiling

You’re probably past the point where a template serves you if:

• You’re paying for three or four plugins to do one thing, and each one is a separate subscription and a separate thing that can break.
• You’ve stopped asking “how should this work?” and started asking “what will the builder let me do?”
• Your content has structure — services, locations, staff, case studies — and you’re maintaining it by copying and pasting pages.
• Something important about how your business works can’t be expressed on the site, so you’ve stopped trying.
• You need it to talk to software you already run, and the answer is a third-party connector with a monthly fee.
• You want to rank for “[service] in [city]” across a dozen combinations, and building those pages by hand has become a job.

Notice none of those are aesthetic. When people outgrow a template, it’s almost never because it stopped looking good.

The lock-in question

This is the one genuine structural difference, and it’s worth understanding before you’re on the wrong side of it.

A template site lives on the platform it was built for. Leaving means rebuilding. Not exporting — rebuilding. The platform is not being malicious; your site is simply made of their components, and their components don’t exist anywhere else.

A custom site is built on standard, widely-used tools, and the code is yours. It runs on any host that supports them. If you fall out with whoever built it, you hand the code to someone else and they carry on.

Whether that matters depends entirely on how long you expect to keep the site and how much of your business runs through it. For a five-page brochure you’ll replace in three years anyway — it doesn’t matter much. For a booking system your staff use every day — it matters enormously.

What we’d actually tell you

If you called us tomorrow and described a five-page site for a two-person business with no booking, no accounts and no plans to change, we’d tell you to buy a good template and spend the difference on photography and Google Business Profile. That’s not modesty; it’s that we’d rather give you a useful answer than a project we know will disappoint you.

If you described something with moving parts — where the honest answer to “what should this do?” takes more than a sentence — then we’d want to talk properly.

The deciding question was never budget. It’s whether your website is something you show people, or something your business runs on.