Template or custom-built: what does your business actually need?

A template is a finished website you fill in with your own text and photos. Custom means the site is written for your business from nothing. Most advice on this question comes from someone selling one of the two, so here is the version with the uncomfortable part left in.

A template is genuinely the right call when your needs are ordinary and you need to be online next week: a single page, your services, your hours, a way to contact you. If that is the whole job, paying for custom work buys you very little.

What a template actually costs you shows up months later. You want a section the layout does not have. Your booking flow almost fits, but not quite, so your staff keep patching the gap by hand. And your homepage looks like six competitors' homepages, because it is literally the same file with different photos — which is a strange thing to discover after paying to look different.

Custom earns its price when at least one of these is true: your customers decide by looking at your work, your booking or ordering process has rules of its own, what you sell does not fit a standard catalogue, or your visitors arrive on phones and patchy connections. That last one is not a detail — a custom site ships only the code it uses, so it loads in a fraction of the time, and slow pages lose people before they read a word.

The honest trade-off: custom takes longer to start and costs more up front. A template is live sooner and cheaper on day one. What you are really choosing is whether you shape the website around your business, or your business around the website.

We build every site in code, so we are not neutral. But we will tell you on the call if what you need does not justify it — a client who was oversold does not stay a client.