WordPress template vs custom website — which is right for you?.

You’re validating a brand-new idea and might pivot in three months. You need something — anything — online this week. The budget is genuinely a few hundred euro and the website is not how customers will find or judge you. In those cases, buy a decent theme or open a Squarespace account with a clear conscience. A template’s job is to exist cheaply, and it does that well.

Speed. Themes ship code for every feature every buyer might want — sliders, page builders, twelve plugins. Your visitors download all of it. Slow pages lose visitors and rankings, and template bloat is the number-one cause.

Sameness. The theme that looked great in the demo looks like a thousand other sites with different logos — because it is. Customers price you by what they see.

The change wall. “Small tweaks” fight the theme’s assumptions; plugins patch plugins; updates break things. Many businesses end up paying monthly maintenance just to keep a cheap site standing still.

Only the code your site needs, so it’s fast by construction. Design around your business, not a demo’s. SEO structure baked into the foundations rather than bolted on with plugins. An admin built for how you actually update things. And full ownership — domain, code, content — with no subscription that holds the site hostage. The trade-off is honest: more up front. The arithmetic usually favours custom the moment the website is genuinely how customers find and choose you.

Not “what does it cost?” but “what’s it for?”. If the site just needs to exist, template. If it needs to perform — rank on Google, convert visitors, take bookings or orders, carry your brand — the template’s savings evaporate into speed, sameness and maintenance, and custom wins on total cost within a couple of years.