Top 4 Reasons You Need a Custom WordPress Website, Not a Template

If you plan to build a website, the first step is choosing the right platform to go with. One of the most popular and widely used platforms is WordPress. In this blog article, we reveal the top 4 reasons you need a custom WordPress website, not a generic template or something from a builder website. 

Why choosing the right platform is crucial: custom WordPress website vs website builder templates

With the surge of web traffic due to COVID-19, your website is more important than ever before for your business. It is the face of your business in the growing digital age. Your website can be a marketing machine that works for you, but only if you choose and set it up correctly. It’s not enough to just have a website today. You need an optimised website built with your customer’s needs in mind.

Website templates and Sites that “Build” for You

Website templates are built generically for the masses. You’ll find these builds on hundreds of other websites. They’re easier to set up, but you’re often sacrificing features and designs you need to fit their prebuilt form. Also, when you use a website builder platform like Squarespace or Wix, you are locking your business into their terms, functionalities and features. Their templates and starters weren’t built to cater for your business and ideal audiences’ needs and goals. When you choose a website template, you sacrifice the opportunity to stand out from the crowd and lose your chance to express yourself.

These services are decent at getting your website up quickly, but they’re not necessarily the most effective long-term solution. Initially, their plans cost a lot less, attracting many small business owners, but the low initial prices are a trap. Their sites are more restrictive, not built to scale with your business’ growth, and have fewer functionalities and features. Another drawback is that the website builder templates won’t be as SEO-friendly as WordPress. If you can’t be found online on Google, your business has no online presence, causing more loss than what you initially saved.

Custom WordPress website

A custom WordPress website is designed uniquely for your brand’s needs. It is built after meticulous planning to focus on various factors, tailored to turn your site into an effective marketing machine. This includes designing around your business goals,  ideal audience and purpose. Considering user experience needs alongside your web design goes a long way to attracting and retaining your ideal customers. A custom WordPress website allows you to showcase your personality and tell your brand story your way. 

Custom WordPress websites are tailor-made with your business, ideal clients, products and services in mind. WordPress is a content management system platform used by more than 42.1% of all websites. Big names like Sony, Mercedes-Benz, Disney, BBC, and even the White House craft their sites using WordPress. Can you tell that these sites were built on the same platform? 

4 ways custom WordPress websites outperform templates and website builder sites

Many small business owners get talked into believing a website can be created with a cheap website builder template, and they don’t need to hire a professional. But it turns out that creating a website with a template is much more complicated than you might think. Their design templates rarely work after replacing the text, images and colours with your brand identity. When it comes time to apply design, colour, and content flow theory to your site with User Experience in mind, you’ll find their builders lacking. That’s why it is much easier to hire a professional to do this for you. You wouldn’t build your own storefront, right?

1. Custom WordPress website put your business and ideal clients first

• Think of it as building a house with a team of experts.
• Everything is tailored for your unique needs.
• Going through a Step by Step process to plan strategy, features and design helps you focus on business goals and results.
• When a site is built specifically for your business goals, it is easier to reach those results.
• Just sit back and let the professionals (like Karasu Designs) take care of everything for you.

2. Ready to scale and grow with your business

• Millions of additional functionalities are available and ready for you to deploy once needed.
• Complete control of your site with additional features easily added through the WordPress platform via themes, plugins, tools.
• Companies like the Walt Disney Company and Mercedes-Benz rely on WordPress for their website needs, so you know it can handle all levels of traffic. 
• With millions of web developers and designers using WordPress, you’ll have much better luck finding support from their massive community than standalone website builder templates.

3. Get found faster and easier in searches

• WordPress is developed with top-notch Search Engine Optimisation capabilities built-in
• The platform is loved by Google, Bing and Yahoo

4. Tailored websites are built for your intended purpose and goals

• Building your site for your target audience increases the trust, authority and impact of your business.
• Your site needs to be built around what actions you want your audience to take. Do you want them to call you, fill out a form or buy a product? Each action requires a different build. 
• When done correctly, you get a marketing machine that collects leads, not dust.

4 reasons website builder templates may not be good for your business in the long term

1. Website builder templates are generic

• Your site will look the same as other websites already live.
• You can’t use the images and supplied text, and the website doesn’t look the same when updated with your content.
• Other companies could be using the same template as yours.

2. Easy to use, hard to get results

• Changing the images, logos, colours and text seems easy, but small changes can break the formatting, leaving your site in shambles.
• Sites rarely remain as attractive as the template demo after changes.
• Template sites aren’t built for your target audience, just a generic audience, and making significant changes to your site’s usability is difficult. 

3. Trading ease of use for restrictions.

• Advanced site features, reports, etc., may not be available as add-ons.
• No choice over your hosting services provider. 
• Can’t configure your own extra security.

4. Lose SEO Benefits:

• Your SEO is controlled by the template creator, with little you can do to manage things. 
• Have a harder time getting found by Google.
• Lose out on WordPress SEO capabilities.

Yes, the template sites say they help with SEO. But what are they really doing for you? Are you able to make changes? Can you apply tools that allow you to maximise your organic reach? Usually not. The WordPress community has developed many tools and services to help improve your website’s organic results. Saving a few minutes or dollars to set up a website are lost in the end when your site isn’t performing as well as it could be for you. 

Final Takeaways: What are the real costs for your business?

The costs of a template or using a website builder template are lower at first glance. But in the end, you get what you paid for. Sure, the upfront cost appears to be lower, but the final price needs to be considered compared to its effectiveness. A custom WordPress website will cost a bit more at the start. But you aren’t just paying for the build. You’re paying for custom built services, tools, functionalities and capabilities that will bring in more business.

What costs your business more?

Would you rather save some money now but end up with an ineffective website collecting dust? Or would you rather invest in your company with a custom WordPress website that is built and tailored to drive leads for the next few years? Which one will cost your business more in the long run? It’s like choosing to build your house yourself or getting a professional team of architects, designers, developers and engineers to build it for you. Which one would you choose?

Download our Cheatsheet #1 to get started