WHY SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DEVELOP A CUSTOM-MADE WEBSITE OVER A READY-MADE TEMPLATE?
Every business needs an attractive and unique website to create the online impact they need to attract new visitors, and to convert them into new customers. Creating and developing a website that does the trick is the first step. However, before taking this step, you first need to decide on whether you want to develop a custom-made website, or you want to purchase and use one of those ready-made templates provided by website development platforms. Developing a custom-made website has tremendous advantages over a website created using a ready-made template. Let’s take a look at the advantages developing a custom-made website has to offer you!
PRESENT YOUR PERSONAL STORY IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY, AND CREATE A UNIQUE ONLINE PLATFORM THAT HELPS YOU TO STAND OUT
When using a template-based design, you will have to adjust your personal company story, as well as your unique business proposition and your unique selling points to fit the template you ultimately chose to use. This approach has a high chance of limiting your success. From a marketing perspective, it is important to be authentic and to stay true to your personal -and often unique- story in order to stand out and to differentiate yourself from your competitors. With a template-based website your options are limited to the possibilities the ready-made template offers you, and you run the risk of your competitors using a similar theme becoming a dime a dozen. A custom-made website will help you to present your personal story in the best possible way, and to develop a unique online platform that helps you to stand out in the minds of your target group.
FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE
The thousands of templates out there offer a lot of blocks and pieces: home pages, contact forms, maps, FAQ sections, testimonial carousels, and so on, and they all serve their purpose to the best of their abilities.
But what if you need a custom interactive map of a country, so that when a user clicks on a certain area in the map, it shows the cities in that region? This could come handy if you have a presence in multiple locations and need to display custom information about each location. Templates are not equipped to provide this level of customization. And this is just one example. There are hundreds of thousands of specific and personal situations in which your best option is to go for a custom web design.
BETTER USER EXPERIENCE
The better the user experience of your website, the easier it is to generate leads and convert them into your new customers. When opting for a website template, you can run into multiple issues with the user experience. For example, the structure and behaviour of your website will be dictated by the template. This means, there will be sections that will not be easily accessible to the visitors, and it can increase the bounce rate. Or the template has a bug and it doesn’t look well across all browsers.
These and other problems can occur even when you choose to build a custom website. However, in the latter case you will at least rest assured that your service provider will fix this for you.
HIGHER SECURITY LEVELS
It goes without saying that security is extremely important for any website that has sensitive data on it. If you are collecting people’s personal information like names or emails (which most websites do), or you have some kind of a payment system integrated into your website – you have to be EXTREMELY careful about it.
In such cases, template-based websites have one major problem – the template themes come with a bunch of plugins that help extend the functionality, and they might cause a security threat.
MORE FLEXIBLE FOR SEO
Having a website not optimized for search engines is throwing away all the best things the Internet has to offer. You can optimize a custom-made website any way you wish to. While optimizing a website for search engines, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered. Things like loading speed, user experience on mobile and tablet devices, internal linking, AMP pages or rich snippets are all a part of it. That is where many of these templates can be limited.
SCALABLE
As your business grows, your website should be able to handle the growth. And this means, your website must be scalable. A scalable website can handle the addition of a lot of new features (as your business expands) and/or can handle a large volume of users. Large websites like Airbnb, Amazon, Yelp, etc. are built using a bespoke solution. Even smaller websites fall into this category. Having a custom-made website makes sure you don’t run into major un-solvable problems in the future.
BETTER PERFORMANCE
Having good performance and fast load times is absolutely crucial for any kind of website. It doesn’t only impact your SEO game, it can also be a huge difference maker when it comes to getting leads and clients.
Did you know 75% of all users will typically bounce as page load time passes the 3-second mark? People are extremely impatient these days and no one likes to wait. That’s where a custom website design excels if done by a professional.