Why a Custom Web Design is so Much More Effective Than a Template

All clients expect companies to have a website. Often, they look for a business website to learn more about the company before becoming a potential client. Therefore, it’s important to establish a professional online presence for your company. One easy way you can achieve this is through having a well designed, fast-loading website

When it comes to choosing a method to create your website, there are two main choices and that’s between a custom web design and a third party template. 

What’s a templated web design?

This is a pre-designed theme that’s available to many businesses. It tends to be cheaper and comes with dummy content that you replace with your own. You may find many websites use the same theme, they all look very similar, and your business could end up looking like your competitors.

What’s a custom web design?

As the name suggests, a custom web design is unique to your business, enabling your company to stand out. To develop it, you will have collaborated with a web designer who will base it around your main goals and to fit your business. 

5 reasons why a custom web design is so much more effective than a template?

Better representation of your brand:

As the name suggests, your site would be based on a template. There would be no originality in it. If anything, you only had to change the images and a few pieces of text to make it your own. While it’s not entirely a bad idea to use templates, there are many others following the same route. As a result, your business lacks its own identity online. The worst part is that you cannot change the theme or colours in some templates which can be very restrictive longer term.

Custom web design on the other hand, allows customisation at all stages of web development. Therefore, you have the chance to portray your business objectives throughout your whole website. Whether it’s custom features, colours, images, fonts or even the general layout, you have a the ability to personalise them. According to stats nearly 50% of people claim that good web design is a crucial factor in determining business credibility. 

Professional landing pages:

Landing pages play a crucial role in your website and business in general. They enable you to promote specific user interactions you want your visitors to take. As such, with the help of a landing page it’s much easier to achieve your business objective. 

There’s more to landing pages than meets the eye. Besides supporting your business goal as the primary role, they also help with conversions. They help your business generate insights and data that you can leverage for marketing campaigns. Other benefits include growing the email subscription list, improving credibility and promoting brand awareness. 

To best leverage these benefits, you’ll need a custom web design. It allows you to personalise your landing pages and express authenticity. For instance, you can design it according to the buyer’s journey, location, specific user behaviour, or target specific clients. 

Display authority:

Custom web design has a direct impact on how your target audience views your brand. For starters, the presentation of your site matters a lot. Unfortunately, if you do use a template you don’t have any influence on what the template site should look like, that’s one way you stand to lose potential clients. 

On the other hand, a custom web design can also influence your site’s rank on search engines. As you know, the higher your site ranks, the more you stand out as an authority in your industry. Thanks to customisation, you can influence the SEO index. 

It’s a crucial to create SEO content to achieve better positions on search engines. A site that’s been optimised with SEO in mind, can also help you achieve that rank faster. To get this right, you must choose an experienced web design agency.

Greater functionality:

Custom templates allow you to design a website that’s responsive to various platforms or devices. According to Iron Paper, New York, findings show you can increase your sales by 60% with a mobile responsive site.

While this is an option for custom web design, it’s not always on template designs. That being said, some of the website templates only support specific platforms or devices. And while some of these templates are well established, they may not evolve with technology. 

Also, not all templates are compatible with all the browsers available. Most importantly, you must test its compatibility with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, among others. Since these browsers are continuously evolving with technology, the designer needs to keep up as well. Staying up to date with the latest technological trends is crucial to beat your competitors. 

There are more than 3 billion online users in the world. And of these, 40% of them use mobile for browsing. Therefore, if you don’t have a responsive site, you’ll lose access to over one billion online users. 

Faster pagepeed:

The pagespeed of your site is the time your web page takes to fully load in the browser for visitors to access the content. In today’s age of super-fast internet, consumers have high expectations when they visit your site. For starters, your page load speed is critical to them. It determines whether they’ll stick around or navigate to your competitors websites. Several factors can lead to a slow page speed.

Luckily, you can fix most of them if you have a well built custom website. When you outsource WordPress web development, a qualified developer can optimise your site to load quicker. Unfortunately, this is not something you can easily do with templated websites. 

Getting Started 

At the end of the day, it’s up to you and your personal preference but your business needs must play a crucial part in making the right decision. As we’ve outlined, there are many more benefits in choosing a custom web design instead of a template. If you’re planning to build your business into a leading brand, a custom web design is crucial start. 

To conclude, if you are interested in investing in a custom web design, then consider using the services of a Design Agency. With their expertise, you can create a site that reflects your business and do well in Search Engines.