When a business reaches out to me for a new website, it's almost never just about the website. Sure, they might say, “Our site looks outdated,” or “We’re not getting traffic,” but underneath that is usually something deeper. Maybe it’s a lack of clarity in their messaging. Or a misalignment between who they are and how they’re showing up online. As someone who’s part web designer, part branding therapist, I’ve learned that approaching online presence holistically—through the lens of strategy, psychology, and tech—is the key to internet success.
One of the most common crossroads business owners find themselves at is deciding whether to use a website template or invest in a custom build. In 2025, this conversation is more nuanced than ever. With Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace, and other platforms offering increasingly powerful design systems, balancing cost, uniqueness, user experience, and scalability has become both easier and more complex at the same time.
So let’s talk about it. What follows is an honest, detailed breakdown of the template vs. custom website decision. We’re going deeper than features and pricing. We’re getting into how this decision intersects with your business model, identity, and growth strategy.
This isn’t just a technical decision. It's often a statement about where your business is and where it’s going.
A website template is a pre-designed layout that you populate with your own content: images, text, colors, etc. They often come with pre-set pages like Home, About, and Contact, and can be adjusted within the guardrails of the platform they’re built for.
Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and Webflow Templates offer thousands of options. These are especially attractive to startups, solopreneurs, and local service businesses who want something polished, fast, and budget-friendly.
A custom site is built from the ground up. While a designer might use a framework or system (like Webflow CMS or WordPress with ACF), the design, layout, structure, and often even the backend architecture are tailored specifically to your brand, goals, and content strategy.
Think of templates like nicely staged apartments—move-in ready, clean, functional. A custom site? That's architecture. You're collaborating with a designer to build something that fits your business like a glove.
Cost is often the starting point in this discussion, but many clients don’t realize what those costs are funding.
Using a template saves on time and labor. With many plug-and-play tools, a website can be up and running within days. Templates for Squarespace or Wix sometimes require little to no coding experience. Templates on Webflow or WordPress can still be complex, but even those can significantly reduce the hours required compared to a fully custom build.
Example: A health coaching business I worked with last year had a $1.5K budget. We used a tailored Webflow template that I modified just enough to make it feel branded. She got a fast, functional site launched in under three weeks. Her website wasn't entirely unique, but for someone new to business, it was the right move. It gave her confidence and an online “home” to direct people to.
Custom websites cost more, sometimes significantly more. But that cost isn't arbitrary. It usually includes discovery sessions, brand positioning work, wireframing, user testing, search engine optimization, mobile optimization, and often content collaboration.
I recently worked with an e-commerce brand out of Nashville that had outgrown their Shopify site. They were suffering from low retention and high cart abandonment. We did a full discovery process, reimagined their navigation, integrated detailed product filtering, and implemented conversion-focused UX design. The project came in just under $12K and took 10 weeks. Within three months, their bounce rate dropped by 38%, and repeat purchases rose by 24% quarter-over-quarter. That’s the power of a site aligned with business goals and consumer behavior.
How much does your brand’s individuality matter? The answer varies by industry, competition, and ambition.
Templates are like renting a costume. They might fit decently, and you can accessorize, but it’s never truly you.
One fitness studio client chose a popular Squarespace theme. It looked amazing. Sleek, bold, modern. The trouble? Her studio was boutique, cozy, and earthy. The aesthetic mismatch confused potential clients. The studio felt like one thing in person but another online. We ended up pivoting to a redesigned WordPress site that better reflected the soulful, community-driven energy of her classes.
Custom web design is, ultimately, a branding exercise. With custom, everything from typography rhythm to image pacing to the flow of information is consciously chosen to tell your story.
In 2023, I collaborated with a law firm that wanted to break the “stiff” stereotype. During strategy, we realized their niche—intellectual property protection for creatives—gave them room to be more expressive and minimal. The website we built was intentionally artistic, showing sketches, whiteboards, and founder portraits in t-shirts rather than suits. That authenticity drew tremendous loyalty from their ideal clients and continues to do so.
When thinking long-term, it’s not just about launch day. It’s about how gracefully your site evolves over months and years.
Many templates—even the well-designed ones—are hard to tweak beyond a certain point. Adding new sections, embedding third-party apps, or optimizing for performance can get tricky or even impossible depending on the platform.
Take Squarespace. It’s beautiful and accessible, but many business owners get frustrated down the road. One landscaping company I helped had built their entire profile on a template they chose back in 2016. By 2022, they couldn’t add services in the format they wanted, couldn’t integrate new scheduling tools, and SEO was suffering. We transitioned them to a Webflow CMS solution, keeping the DIY-editability they liked but giving them the flexibility to evolve.
Custom web builds, done right, don’t just give you a website—they give you a CMS (Content Management System) tuned to your workflow. You can keep content updated, launch new landing pages, and adjust your marketing funnel without breaking things.
In Webflow, I often build custom editing experiences for clients using rich text fields, toggles, and style management so they control what matters without getting lost. WordPress with ACF can perform similarly. The extra effort upfront leads to major savings and peace of mind long-term.
Visibility in search matters for almost every business. So how does your choice between template and custom impact SEO?
Template-based sites often carry excess code or CSS meant to accommodate all possible users. This can slow down load time, especially on mobile. Not to mention, many people using templates ignore structural SEO best practices—metadata, heading structure, URL slugs—because the template doesn't guide them well.
Google’s recent updates to link and content ranking best practices make it clear: fast, well-structured content with helpful context wins. If your platform isn’t giving you the freedom to meet those conditions, your visibility suffers.
With custom design, SEO isn’t an afterthought—it’s foundational. Page speed, indexability, UX flow, schema markup, and keyword strategy can all be built into the architecture.
We applied this approach for a law firm in Franklin that got 70% of their leads from search. After rebuilding their site with semantic structure and local schema, they saw a 53% increase in search impressions in just 6 weeks. Custom = control. Control = results.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand people are emotional decision-makers.
Templates present a linear expectation of how users should engage with your site. But every business has a different conversion goal, and different users need different nudges.
I helped a local wedding photographer who had a beautiful DIY template site. But the booking flow required five clicks to get to her inquiry form. We removed friction by placing calls-to-action higher and embedding easy toggle galleries. Her leads doubled within a month. UX wasn’t about redesigning—it was about understanding user behavior.
With a custom build, we map the journey with intention. We study where users drop off. We build in trust-building moments—testimonials, awards, press. We alter the layout based on analytics. A template site might show your work. A custom site makes visitors feel like they’re part of your brand story.
Let’s not forget: templates are the right answer sometimes. Not everyone needs to swing for the fences.
In these cases, grab a Webflow or Squarespace template and go. Just make sure you’re clear about your branding and messaging before you hit publish.
These are the green lights for a custom approach:
In these cases, a custom site is more than a tool—it’s the front lobby to your business. Make it count.
Choosing between a template and a custom site isn’t just about looks or money. It’s about alignment. Templates are better than ever—and they’re often the right answer for early-stage businesses or ones that don’t rely on their online presence as a driver of growth.
But once you know who you are, and you’re serious about telling that story clearly and consistently? Custom becomes the better investment. It’s not about bells and whistles. It’s about serving your visitors better. Showing up as the best version of your business in every interaction. Building something that scales with you.
As someone who’s built websites for therapists, lawyers, coaches, ecomm brands, nonprofit teams, and everything in between, I can tell you confidently: the best websites are the ones that feel like they belong to the people behind them. And that—whichever path you take—is the goal worth aiming for.
Copyright © Zach Sean Web Design
