What’s actually wrong with building on a template?
A template is built to look acceptable for thousands of different brands at once, which means it’s optimized for nobody specifically. It can’t make a choice your brand needs, because that choice might be wrong for the next buyer who installs it.
Every site I build starts from a blank canvas around the brand, not a theme with new colours. That’s the whole reason to work with one practitioner instead of picking from a marketplace: the site can make choices a generic product never could.
Does a template actually cost you conversions?
Often, through weight rather than looks. Templates ship with CSS and JavaScript for every feature every buyer might want, used or not, and that bloat is exactly what slows a page down past the point visitors tolerate.
I can’t point to a study measuring templates specifically, so I won’t pretend I can. But the load-time math behind it is well established: 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load (Google/SOASTA Research). Every unused line of code a template carries for features you’re not using is weight working against that number.
What do you actually get from custom, beyond looks?
Interactions and constraints a template’s settings panel can’t express, built by the same person who designed them, so nothing gets lost translating a mockup into working code.
Monarch needed a size-gated CTA and exact stock signals, decisions tied to how that specific brand sells. Stripwell needed an industrial packaging catalogue to carry the polish of a consumer brand, which meant designing presentation patterns a packaging-industry template was never built to offer. Neither exists in any theme, because neither brand's problem is generic.
Template vs custom
| Template | Custom | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Thousands of unrelated buyers | One brand, specifically |
| Performance ceiling | Carries unused code for every feature | Only what the site actually uses |
| Can it make a brand-specific call? | Only within preset options | Any call the brand needs |
| Who builds it | Installed, configured | Designed and built together, by one person |
Next step
Tired of fighting a theme’s settings panel? Tell me about your project, and I’ll start from a blank canvas instead.
About the author. Satyam Dubey is the founder of The Design Shop, a one person design and development studio. He has about 10 years in design and has shipped 50+ products.